Experience design includes, primarily, the following competencies:

Information Architecture

In an information age, content is the most valuable commodity. Designing the Information Architecture ensures that content is properly labeled and organized, allowing for both findability and usability. Understanding the needs of the target audience and the patterns of human research assist in designing logically organized content structures.

Usability

The primary notion of usability is that an application or site designed with a generalized users’ psychology and physiology in mind will be more efficient to use, taking less time to accomplish a particular task, easier to learn, and more satisfying to use. Through testing, research, and a knowledge base of human behavior, our usability experts can provide insight and design considerations that enhance the user’s experience and ensure a usable product.

Interaction Design

Closely identified with usability, Interaction Design involves both a high-level and very detailed plan of how a user will interact with a website or application. At times, the path of interaction is arbitrary, and defined by the user’s needs, and at other times it is planned to lead the user through a series of tasks to accomplish a desired goal. Interaction Design is often overlooked in application development, however I take special care in planning for a positive, profitable experience.

Accessibility

In computer interface terms, this is the ability to access information and services, primarily for the disabled user. In many countries this has led to initiatives, laws and regulations that aim toward providing universal access to the internet, programs and applications. Designing for accessibility is an area of expertise that comes with a deep level understanding of user needs and regulatory guidelines. It involves the visual considerations of the interface as well as the code used to program them.

Visual Design

Successful design is more than just pleasing color palettes and proper font choices. It is understanding the personality of the brand, the needs of the user, the constraints of the delivery medium, current trends and user behaviors. It is making visual considerations in interface graphics, typography and layout that will best aid the success of the product. While visual designers are plentiful, having the talent, competency and disciplines to provide exceptional design that wins is critical. I have become adept at bringing the client vision into reality through a systematic approach:

• Understand
• Ideate
• Design
• Deliver
• Evaluate

This approach allows us to gain a full understanding of our client’s needs and to arrive at, and deliver, the best visual solution.

HTML development and style

Standards-based programming for the User Interface is a necessary portion of web-delivered media that involves well designed code and file structure. This helps to provide longevity of product, as well as ease of maintenance.

Multimedia

Ranging from the design of audio and video to interactive presentation, multimedia provides a rich experience to the user.

As a case in point, I went to the mall last night with my wife, daughter and two 4-month old twins to do some light shopping. We parked our car and carried the two babies a long distance inside, knowing that this mall rents strollers. After an unfruitful attempt at locating one, and well over a mile already on our feet, I had my wife sit down and keep an eye on the twins while I go further ahead to search. After another half-mile of walking, I found an information desk that had exactly two employees, thirteen strollers, and one stiff “policy”.

We left.

Whether you’re a business, a website, a church, or any other entity that services people, you’ll find that your “visitors” will come to you through many different avenues, with many different needs. If you’re serious about making the sale or providing the service, you’ll learn when your policies matter and when they can be relaxed in order to keep the customer alive.

I’m quite interested in seeing how this plays out over the next few years, and whether the US makes a similar agreement to ensure accessibility to all Americans through the promotion of web-standards. The United States already requires government websites to be accessible to the disabled, and I think it is just a matter of time before regulations are imposed on all public entities to comply as well.

And when the time comes, it will mean a lucrative opportunity for many a standards-aficionado… and will cause a boon in things like standards instruction, books and site content.

Let’s cross our fingers.

Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touch down.

Starting a business? taking a new direction in life? Learning a new hobby or trade? Beginning a new relationship? I believe it’s all attainable. Just don’t give up.

Sometime last year, a bubble began to emerge in the Internet world in the shape of “Web 2.o“, which is effectively nothing more than more streamlined web-based applications. The coolness factor, however, and the onset of various technologies that foster rapid development of these applications, has sparked a new revenue stream for developers.

Another area that looks like it may be poised to take the forefront in web developers’ and site owners’ minds alike is that of Accessibility. For quite some time, places of public entrance around the world have been bound by various governing laws, and effectively forced to provide easy access to all persons… with or without disabilities. The punishment for not complying? Stiff fines.

But since the onset of the Internet, few governments have enacted or enforced rules governing accessibility on websites and their owners. In the United States, for example, only government sites are expected to comply with ADA guidelines for accessiblity. But the current climate may be changing this.

News.com reports that a blind student is now suing Target, claiming that its inaccessible site violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and various U.S. state laws. This story comes after recent reports that Target was facing pressure from various advocacy groups to fix their site’s barriers to the blind. While Target reacted swiftly to fix some of their site issues, it’s still not over. They’re far from being accessible to those who must navigate their site with a screen-reader. Now, the possibility arises for an actual precedent-setting legal case to mandate that public companies take down the barriers from their sites on the web.

This interests me for more than one reason. First of all, I think everyone should have the ability to access the same information… even if it’s delivery comes in different shapes and sizes. So, it’s good to see equal opportunity coming about in more of a mass-medium.

The other great interest I have in this outcome is what it means to developers and companies who have the knowledge and ability to develop accessible websites. In my mind, it presents a great opportunity to take the lead on an issue that many companies are going to be concerned about very quickly. Getting your expertise promoted now, while this giant is only beginning to awake, will help educate people on who to turn to when the government comes breathing down their neck.

I have a feeling it will only take one lawsuit to turn in the favor of a blind “victim” of website inaccessibility for this behemoth to take shape and a flurry of lawsuits to follow. What will follow then will be a frantic flurry of companies trying to find someone to safeguard their site from their own nice little litigation nightmare.

So, could this be the next big Bubble in the web? We’ll see!

Here are links to fonts for various platform/OS combinations that can be used in your websites.

Mac

• Mac OS X fonts
• Mac OS 9 fonts
• Microsoft IE core fonts

Windows

• Windows 98 fonts
• Windows XP fonts
• Six new Windows fonts in 2006 (not widely available for some time, but they provide some new options to anticipate.)

Two things are implied here in Mark’s quote: 1) an apology for taking up more of someone’s time than he would have preferred, and 2) brief and succinct communication, while more difficult to compile, is preferable to a deluge of unnecessary words.

For some reason, a one-sentence thought always turns into a novel when I sit down to write. I need to work on that.

In the post Ashley talks about using Photoshop, a rather large program, to do a tiny, menial task like picking a hex color from a photo. She seems to lament the fact that Photoshop is overkill for this task, and asks if there are any simple applications out there that do the job better.

At 37 Signals, it seems the mentality is that everything should be stripped down to a basic task and made into an application. The thought being that a single application that does one thing extremely well is better than a massive program that does tons of things you’ll never need.

I understand this on the surface, especially when most people may never use the advanced features of a larger program. But here is my issue: I would rather have one good, larger application (ie. Photoshop) that does everything I need within a specific taxonomy (ie. Raster manipulation) than a ton of tiny programs that each do one thing very well.

37 Signals’ viewpoint seems to assert that a large program cannot do all things well, and that somehow “small” translates into “more focused and refined”. But could it be that a program can actually have a large set of tasks and functions, and do them all well? I think so.

The advent of Web 2.0, as cool as it is, has really begun to irritate me with all these “tiny little apps” that all “do one thing very well”. Each of these apps comes with its own URL, it’s own login, it’s own password, own interface, own learning curve, etc. In this case, is it easier or harder to get things done?

I’m not at all against small apps. I’m not against entrepreneurialship, or options and choices either. In fact, I believe there are times when less really is more. But in many cases, could it be that the less we’re looking for is not less features and less size, but rather less apps and clutter to deal with?

There are several updates to the browser that I’m glad they made, but I don’t think they went far enough to provide backward compatibility for extensions.

Over at LifeHacker, you can find instructions on how to enable Firefox 1.0 extensions for 1.5, which I did, but a few of my extensions still caused 1.5 some grief and I had to disable them again.

So, for now, I’m not upgrading my work computer’s browser… I guess I’ll have to wait for either Firefox to work better with it’s community’s extensions, or for the extension developers to update their extensions.

From the “Riding the Clutch” website…

I’ve been working on an extension for Dreamweaver that adds file support and code coloring for Ruby and Rails files. I posted a question about it on the Macromedia form and have had a couple people asking for a copy, so I’ve decided to make it official! I hearby release the Rubyweaver 1.0.0 extension for Dreamweaver MX 2004 and up:

The new version has basic Code Hinting, Syntax Highlighting, and Code Coloring for both Ruby and Rails files.

Click here to download the “Rubyweaver” extension.