Paul Middlege - UX, web development, web design, general geekness blog

The house analogy… or explaining what you do

Paul Middlege — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:39:32 +0000

Unless you are speaking to a fellow web geek, you’ll find explaining what you do for a living quite tricky. For those not in the know, Websites are created by pixie dust or possibly some form of dark arts.

The likely outcome is that you’ll end up saying “I build websites” rather than “I create front-end code” or “I define the sites user experience”. When these situations arise I simply compare building a website to building a house.

Everyone understands the fundamental building blocks of, well, buildings and you can compare most roles quite nicely.

Here’s how I explain things:

Architect / IA – understands what the client/user needs and defines what is built. Provides blueprints on how the building/site will “work”.
Interior designer / web designer* – bit of a tenuous one, but they both require creative flair and put the clients visual stamp on house/website. The point to convey is that a web designer isn’t simply a painter!
Builder or handy man type etc. / Front-end developer – builds the structure that holds it together and puts in the bits you interact with.
Plumber or Electrician etc. / Back-end developer – makes the house/website work… without it it would just be an shell with little purpose.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it can be used to help people understand that your job actually isn’t as simple as “building websites”.

If you leave other suggested job role comparisons I’ll add them!

* Another problem with the web industry is that job names aren’t consistent. A web design in this context is a graphic designer type and not someone who would touch code.

Online wireframing tools comparison… and what’s missing!

Paul Middlege — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:53:10 +0000

I currently use Visio (along with the excellent GUUUI Web Prototyping Tool and my own templates) to produce wireframes. I know Visio is frowned upon a bit by the UX community, but I find that its easy to ease and not fiddly to produce a wire that looks professional.

However, Visio is a bit old school and as such I’ve been looking at a number of online wireframing tools over the last month or so.

Tools I’ve looked at so far are:

Balsamiq
Gliffy
Jumpchart
iPlotz
Mockflow
Pidoco
Hot gloo
Protoshare (though very briefly as there wasn’t a free trial).

I’ve compiled a features comparison while reviewing these, which I’d thought I’d share… you can find it in the embedded Google doc below (hopefully the column headings make sense):

What’s missing?

Overall I’m a bit underwhelmed and feel they are all missing a trick… I was expecting something a bit more than just “Visio, but online”. It feels like these tools really aren’t capturing the benefit of being online.

Feature’s I’d love to see are:

Push to user testing – how about signing a deal with usertesting.com so that tests can be done at a click of a button?
Integrated with other tools – Having a tool that that produces wires is great, but how about proper sitemapping, card sorting and integration of other outputs / tools?
Client requirements / research gathering – ability to include surveys that clients / users would be great.
Client signoff / approval - once wires are produced, it would be good to have a getsignoff.com type process embedded in the app.
More output options – most export as PDFs or Jpegs. How about HTML? or Flash? or even other software like Visio?
Professional / own branded output – The output produced simply isn’t good enough to present to our clients. Having the ability to add our logo / brand colours etc. is a must.
Elegant interface – none of the interfaces feel elegant (they almost feel like clunky legacy software)
Video playback – would be nice to record journeys and play back… how awesome would that be for user testing?

What am I going to use

For the time being I’m going to stick with Visio as there isn’t enough benefit for me yet in switching, but I’ll definitly be keeping an eye on some of the tools I’ve reviewed.

Google Buzz… or “Yet another social network?!”

Paul Middlege — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:09:03 +0000

Google have just launched Google Buzz, a new feature in Gmail that allows users to “Share updates, photos, videos, and more”. In short, it’s Google’s answer to Twitter. My initial impressions are positive, though a little cynical…

What I like

It has some neat features, such as aggregating content from (a small list of) other sites and geotagging when “buzzing” from your mobile. The geotagging alone could be game changing as it’s the first “proper” attempt by one the big players to do a real mobile social network. Set-up is as quick as it gets as you automatically follow those in your contact list and it’s integrated nicely into your Inbox so you could end up using Buzz almost by accident.

The interface is of course very Google, so it’s without fuss and very familiar.

Overall it seems like it’s a better version of Twitter.

What I don’t like

The problem with it for me is two-fold:

1) It’s yet another social network
2) It’s for Gmail users.

The web is littered with social networks now and without a niche I can’t really see Buzz getting much traction. At the moment there just isn’t any reason to move from Twitter or Facebook.

Its integration with Gmail is also both a blessing and a curse – Buzz has an instant user base, but if your email is with another supplier would you really want to create a Gmail account just to access Buzz?

What I hope it will become

1) A mainstream social network aggregator
If I could quickly add stuff from ALL my social networks and then push updates to them via Buzz it would be killer.

2) Central to Googles social strategy
How you interact with people via Google services is incredibly fractured – there’s Gmail, Google Chat and messaging in other sites such as Youtube (not to mention Google “overhyped and soon to be a flop” Wave). There are widgets that let you integrate one service into another (such as chat into Gmail), but these are mainly just tagged on. Buzz could really help pull these together.

Overall I like Buzz, but until it allows me to interact with all my friends (not just those on Gmail) I don’t think I’ll be using it.

Deloreans and Tweets

Paul Middlege — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:07:23 +0000

I feel like I’m going at 88mph while sitting next to Marty Mcfly.

Why? Well, in 2007 I started microblogging after getting the Tweet bug at SxSW. Now it’s 2010 and this is my first proper blog post. It’s all a bit backwards really!

So why now? Why when “blogging” is no longer a buzz word do I feel it’s time for me to blog?

Well I’ve been designing, building and managing websites for around 13 years now and I finally feel that I’m on the top of my game… I finally feel like I have something to really say!

What will I post about? Anything that I find interesting really… mainly web design stuff, but I’m sure I’ll mention the latest gadget and movie craze now and again… hopefully you’ll keep reading and find it interesting too!