All talk no action

[Neil]

Hi,

There is a so much talk on tools, terminology and opinions but not
much on actually work done.

Anyone keen to list web,desktop,mobile applications that they have
been involved in ?

Neil Henegan
http://www.twitter.com/neilhenegan

[Luke Hardiman]

I agree, make with the work examples. The web is already awash with
academic debates and best practice theorising.
Thank you Neil, that comment has been a long time coming haha

Luke Hardiman
lu...@newrelease.co.za

Studio: +27 21 788 9804
Mobile: +27 76 1922 653
Fax: +27 86 5547 176



2009/11/24 Neil <neilh...@gmail.com>:

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[AJK]

Neil and Luke, the challenge with sharing research is Non Disclosure
Agreements.
Some time ago one of the UX designers on IxDA asked what he can tell
his prospective employee, when all his work is hidden with NDA's. You
can't say I work for company X and we did this amazing work and found
that... and I pioneered it.

Secondly, the forum was created, if I am not mistaken, to spread the
word of UX in South Africa. Being a new field it is only natural that
a lot of theory will pass through, after all very few people in SA
actually have a lot of experience in the UX field. And if they do, we
go back to point 1 (NDA) or it might just be that they just too busy
to be frequent posters on this forum; and why should they give their
time and effort if 95% are just lurking and not contributing.

[Shaun O'Connell]

OK, I'll bite.

I'm currently pinned down by a NDA for my work on a contract involving some Ethnographic Research, User Surveying, Interaction Design.  Would love to divulge more, but I've probably said too much already.

I joined the forum to connect with UX-minded folks, as it's a discipline I'd love to get more involved in.
Some URLs I've worked on:

http://www.groundglass.co.za (Web Development, PSD2HTML, jQuery)
http://www.moneywebmarket.co.za (Contract, Overhaul HTML/CSS and Views while retaining current design)
http://demo.italent.co.za (Everything UI here except the Graphic Design.  It's changed quite a bit in the year since I left this project but my HTML and CSS frameworks are still being used)
https://active.mtn.co.za/mtnsc/ (HTML/CSS and Views. One of my first experiences with large-scale web applications, still running!)

Hope that caters to your voyeuristic pursuits.  Now it's your turn to be 'All Action, No Talk'! ;)
--Shaun

[Luke Hardiman]

Ok, fair enough, here are a few recent url's from the past 18 months in no particular order..

http://www.africanbudgetsafaris.com/ All art direction, design and dev, runs on Expression Engine
http://www.vwcommercial.co.za/ (@ Ogilvy Interactive) : UX, art direction, xhtml / css, runs on Cake PHP
http://antonia.co.za/ : All design and dev, site runs on Wordpress
http://www.discoverafrica.com/ : Design, xhtml / css, some of the javascript
http://wild-wings-safaris.com/ : Did everything on this one bar the content, runs on Expression Engine
http://birdonawire.co.za : Did everything except the content creation, the site runs on Wordpress

UX is a component of what I do so these are not necessarily shining examples thereof.. feel free to slate them if you like :)

2009/11/24 Shaun O'Connell <ndo...@gmail.com>

[Luke Hardiman]

True AJ, NDA's are limiting, but once the project is done and in the wild it would be nice to see the links posted

2009/11/24 AJK <ajk...@gmail.com>

[Lynnsey]

I largely agree with AJK. Confidentiality, time constraints, and all
that.

Furthermore, the kind of work I'm doing (and I'm sure many other
people too) can't really be evaluated without an understanding of the
context - the technology, business imperatives, legacy systems,
customer base, legislation, regulatory environment, corporate dynamics
(read: politics), branding issues, 3rd-party agreements, etc, which
all have a significant impact on the end result. And much of which is
either confidential or very complicated. For example, if you don't
understand the issues around delivering banking applications on USSD,
you'd have great difficulty in understanding the design decisions made
within that framework, so how would it benefit either you or me if I
shared this kind of work with the forum?

I'm far more interested in the kind of conversations that we've been
having to date (although more active contributors would be good). That
said, if you want to post your stuff for comment and feedback, please
do, I'm sure you will get plenty of help and constructive criticism.
There are some very experienced and helpful people on the forum.

[Neil]

I belong to a similar forum founded to discuss and generate interest
in Ruby on Rails locally.
Many of the topics discussed on that forum have been discussed ad
nauseum on the web.

"Which text editor is better..."
"What plugin do you use..."
"Is tool x better than y..."

At one meet up everyone got into a discussion on linux vs windows (I
kid you not)

I see small teams of only developer/designers producing amazing
products abroad.
Where's the local stuff that can hold its own internationally?

Lynnsey the context you mention (regulatory environment, corporate
dynamics, 3rd-party agreements)
should be incentive enough for guys to be branching out and creating
their own great products.

Where are the world dominating, trend setting, top quality products in
terms of usability and user experience?

Sorry I only rant because you designers are the other half to us
developers. We can't do much without you.

Luke your stuff is awesome.

[Luke Hardiman]

As someone who started out as a member of the Barclays Bank web team (in the UK) and has worked on inhouse teams elsewhere, I think Neil has a point here:

the context you mention (regulatory environment, corporate
dynamics, 3rd-party agreements)
should be incentive enough for guys to be branching out and creating
their own great products.

At a meeting discussing online banking usability I was once told a text change on the Barclays iBank site had a minimum 6 week turnaround. Encouraging stuff. At the same time I do recognise that improving systems that operate at scale is a noble cause that benefits the majority of SA users.

Neil, I love that you are producing local web apps that aim to solve real problems in the nascent SA marketplace.. I had no idea there was anyone out there doing this kind of stuff locally and Frulo looks interesting (particularly as I'm currently building a subscription based site - we've gone with aMember for managing that side of things). Would be cool if there were more payment gateways on board.. maybe some common use-case scenarios on the site would help break the product down?

Cheers

 

2009/11/24 Neil <neilh...@gmail.com>

[Lynnsey]

"Lynnsey the context you mention (regulatory environment, corporate
dynamics, 3rd-party agreements) should be incentive enough for guys to
be branching out and creating their own great products."

Neil, sorry to be dof. Can you elaborate on what you mean?

[Luke Hardiman]

I think he means it sucks to work for the man when you have the skills to do your own thing.

2009/11/25 Lynnsey <lynnsey...@gmail.com>

[Lynnsey]

I thought so too.. the thing is that whether the corporate behemoth is
your employer or your client, you still have a lot of the same issues
to deal with. And most people aren't in the position of choosing to
only work on fun projects for cool clients :-)

[Luke Hardiman]

Definitely, whether you're an agency servicing the big guys or in-house you have to deal with similar issues. At the moment I'm trying to mostly work on my own projects or projects where I have equity. I still have a few clients on retainers so I'm able to source a steady income from them.

The South African web is still a dog's breakfast on most fronts. If you know how to build sites, and have good UX skills as far as I can see there is little reason not to pick a business model (personally I'm drawn to the more established markets rather than the trendy social media angle, at least at this stage) and start fixing up the mess.

2009/11/25 Lynnsey <lynnsey...@gmail.com>

[Phil]

Here's a blog post about a project I've been working on
http://fronttoback.org/2009/07/03/completed-ux-project-desktop-design-tool-for-antenna-engineers/

I'm also working on Adora (a gigantic silver app for relationship
marketing automation) which gets a basic description here.
http://www.globalvision.co.za/adora.html
(Site design nothing to do with me.)


--phil--

[Neil]

Lynnsey, good point in being faced with similar issues but I do feel
that if the talent went solo or got together things could be changed.

I love this blog post by one of the founders of github.com who turned
down a job at Microsoft to work on his project.
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k.html

It doesn't seem likely that something like that would happen here...
why is that?

Phil: “Awesomeness” was one of the project goals. <- I'm using that ;)

[Lynnsey]

Hi Luke, Neil:

Thanks for making some valid points. It's too easy sometimes to stick
with the known.

[John]

As a newbie to all things UX, I joined this forum more for core ideas
and concepts about UX than which tool is better that another. I think
all tools have a use, just some are more useful in a particular
situation than others. Right now I'm just trying to work out what all
the tools are and try to get a basic working understanding of where
each is more useful.

@ Neil: I love the link! It takes balls, but I think it is worth it
if you want to fly free, although I don't see anything wrong with
wanting to work for someone instead. I'm quite happy being free in
one sense, but there is always someone that you have to answer to :)

@ Phil: That is the first sort of real "case study" of sorts that I
have read on an agile development case. I found it pretty
informative. I didn't see on the site how long it took to develop
though. Would you mind letting us know?

@ Luke and Shaun: Some nice designs there... Good ideas to steal some
aspects of :)

~John

[Phil]

> @ Phil: That is the first sort of real "case study" of sorts that I
> have read on an agile development case.  I found it pretty
> informative.  I didn't see on the site how long it took to develop
> though.  Would you mind letting us know?

Well it's a piece of software, not a website. And the actual C# dev
time was around a year. Two developers plus someone doing the XAML
for the front end. The XAML took about 4-5 months, I think.

I've done several other agile+UCD projects and am still working on
some.

One was emssixus.com (done using Trolltech Qt, rather than XAML).
That also took a year, but they had about 4 developers on that one.

Two of them were actually web-apps in silverlight. For heavily
interactive, complex software, agile is an absolute godsend. I don't
think it would really be possible to design good user experiences
without having working code to play with after a few sprints.

That said, sometimes, you do need to make mockups still, sometimes,
rather than doing everything in code. When exploring concepts for a
big new feature, it's much better to make protoypes in visio/
powerpoint/sketchflow/etc. Developers will often say "wait until we've
written the code, then test it with users" But for big concepts, you
might have to wait 8 sprints before the concept is in a fit state to
show to a user. And that's just too risky. (I consider the paper
prototypes to be "spikes". They are just design spikes, rather than
code spikes)

--phil--