Ideas, insights and inspirations.

In 2013, we started making our wireframes responsive, instead of drawing them in Omni Graffle as we had for the previous ten years. And it’s great, but one of the challenges we immediately ran into was figuring out how to convey page notes in the responsive context. To solve this problem, we created a tool we’re calling “Metaframe,” and today we’re releasing it under the Creative Commons Attributions Sharealike 3.0 Unported license for use, modification, and redistribution. Metaframe creates a responsive presentation layer for responsive wireframes (or mockups or design comps – any HTML page). It’s a very lightweight package, and it’s dead-simple to use. How simple? To install, you simply reference two files alongside your other Javascript and CSS. To add a note, you add the class “notation” to the HTML element you want to annotate, then write your note as the value of the custom attribute, “note”. (The Elliance GitHub page has precise directions and example code.) Metaframe … Continue reading

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Because we live in the future, I wasted very little time trading in my two-year-old iPhone 4 for a shiny new iPhone 5 when it was released in September. There was nothing wrong with my old phone, but as a designer of software and websites destined to be used on the new device, I have a reasonable excuse to perform a ritual upgrade every two years. As of today, I’ve been using the new phone for one month. In almost every way, it’s a beautiful device. It’s thin, light, fast, and handsome, yes. More importantly, the iPhone 5 preserves the vast majority of behaviors and elements of “feel” of its predecessors. As a thing like this evolves, it’s actually critical that it strike the right balance between retaining familiarity and introducing new patterns. Favor familiarity too heavily, the thing feels stale. Zoom too fast to the new, users get impatient with being required to relearn new ways of doing things … Continue reading

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It’s not a typo. The last few years have been marked by repetitive, breathless cries from the web design community: “Should designers know how to develop?” Making a website is different than making a printed item. Designers – the myth goes – trace their collective lineage back to print design. But websites are coded, and if you’re going to produce code, well, that’s a developer’s job. There’s a gulf between the two aspects of website creation, if not between the aptitudes required to perform those aspects, and the greatest minds of our industry apparently grind away hour after hour arguing that web designers – definitionally – must know code. Now, I don’t have a problem with this assertion, and I’ve seen collaboration go more smoothly as a result of designers’ code-savviness. But I can’t stop thinking about how obtuse it seems for my profession not to be equally curious (or demanding, if you want to match tone) about whether developers should … Continue reading

Coming to the US as an international student is a big decision. It’s a decision that foreign students rarely make on their own; the decision typically involves parents, grandparents, extended families, teachers and school counselors. Instead of asking what website features should be built to facilitate this important decision, let’s try to answer the underlying questions about the school being asked by the entire group: 1. Is the college reputable and committed to excellence? Money is hard to earn everywhere, but specially in emerging markets the exchange rate raises the importance of this question. A college that elevates its reputation hallmarks to the surface will find ready acceptance specially with parents, grandparents and family networks. 2. Does the college offer innovative and interesting programs? Why would international students travel overseas if they can find the programs in their local markets. Indian and Chinese students tend to value innovative science, engineering and technology programs. Koreans tend to gravitate towards the innovative … Continue reading

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Here we go again. Today, a link was being shared around our office and in my Twitter stream. It was a link to an article .Net Magazine ran Wednesday, featuring expert opinions on the content of another opinion piece it had run back in May. The upshot of the first piece is that social buttons on websites are dumb and should be done away with forthwith. The upshot of Wednesday’s piece is that some people agree with the first piece, whereas some other people do not agree with the first piece. Here, I took a screen shot of the title and byline so I could share it with you: I especially like the positioning of the social media buttons directly beneath the title, although I’m not personally a fan of treating comments so differently than social media buttons, and I furthermore find myself wanting to know how many people have tweeted, liked, plus-oned, inlinked (come on, it should be a … Continue reading

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I just returned from a vacation where I was reminded that my mobile apps are only as good as my cell provider’s data coverage. Before heading out on vacation, I downloaded a very popular trails app because it had great location information: a compass plus your latitude and longitude, weather, wind, sunrise and set, and best of all, elevation. The only problem with the app was that I tried to find my elevation on a mountain trail that had no coverage, and the app requires location services to work. And naturally, location services depend on having coverage. I was essentially offline at the very moment I wanted to use the app. I’m sure that there are millions of trails all over the world with strong voice and data coverage, but I suspect there are just as many without. If I were the app designer, what could I have done differently to make using the offline app more meaningful? Would I … Continue reading

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This morning I was reading a post on the Travel 2.0 Blog that hit home. Troy Thompson wrote: “Recently, I was asked to critique changes to an advertising campaign from a well-known tourism destination. While the creative was fine…amazingly not touting anything and everything…the call to action seemed, cluttered. Perhaps that was because it featured not only the traditional website address and phone number, but also icons for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a blog (disguised as an RSS icon that few will understand) plus a QR code.” Seven calls to action in one print piece! Thompson points out that watering down a strong call to action with six “extras” doesn’t provide more choice, it muddies the water for the user and scrambles your metrics. This lesson isn’t just for print. On websites, there’s a tendency to offer everything to everyone at all times. Take the typical higher education website, for example. There’s usually semi-permanent placement of calls to action for applying, … Continue reading

Luke Wroblewski’s most recent Data Monday post compiled astounding iPad stats. In two years, Apple has sold 67 million iPads, and is by far the leading tablet device. So leading, in fact, that its closest sales competitor is itself—the number 2 tablet is an older iPad, currently on sale at a lower price. With this in mind, I took a quick unscientific survey of a few of our client’s web analytics across higher education, non-profit, manufacturing and banking. This past month, 32% of mobile device visits were from the iPad. With new iPad users coming online every day, and nearly 1/3 of our client’s mobile visits coming from the iPad, it’s a good time to think about how people use these devices, and how they differ from mobile smartphone experiences. Standard websites work fairly well on iPads. On smartphones with touch interfaces, delivering a “desktop” site generally means the user has to pinch and zoom (or squint) to find information. Except … Continue reading

In typically self-effacing manner, Ethan Marcotte deflected the gobs of praise and gratitude being offered to him today, on the two-year-anniversary of his seminal A List Apart article in which he first described what’s come to be known as Responsive Web Design. I think this deserves one tiny footnote, and that’s that Ethan didn’t simply write an article. That’s misleadingly humble. Ethan got tenaciously interested in solving a particular problem related to how a proliferating variety of devices and browsers displayed websites. Yes, the author community caught the fever, spreading and advancing the technique, but before Ethan’s article delivered Responsive Design to ALA readers, he noticed something, got intensely curious about it, and put in a lot of dedicated effort to satisfy his curiosity. That’s the part I’m thankful for, and it’s why congratulations are most certainly in order.

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It’s getting hard to remember life before social media – much more so since mobile devices enabled its wholesale invasion of every corner of our lives. One of the conundrums I’ve observed people encountering is that of how heavily committed one should be to keeping up with the goings-on of his or her social set. If I’m following 1000 people on Twitter, do I need to read all of their updates? If someone engages me constructively online, is there an obligation to reciprocate? Is it okay to go on hiatus for days or weeks and, if so, is there some etiquette I should follow? For my personal life, I chose a policy of obligation-free, occasional engagement. I am very unselfconscious about the regularity with which I read or post to social websites. A month away from Facebook is of equal value to me as flooding Twitter with nonsense, and I take and leave them interchangeably. But I’m an individual, I’m … Continue reading

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