\n\t![](\"image.jpg\")
\n\t
\n\nOr, for that same image with a border and no caption:\n\n\n\tCaption goes here.
\n\n\nYou just tack on the classes that contain the qualities you need. And because we\u2019ve kept each class so simple, we can apply these same stylings to other elements too:\n\nCaption goes here.
\n\nCaveats\n\nObviously there are some potential semantic hang-ups with these methods. While classes like pic and caption stem the tide a bit, others like left and right are tougher to justify. This is something that you have to decide for yourself; I\u2019m fine with the occasional four or left class because I think there\u2019s a good tradeoff. Just as a fully semantic solution to this problem would likely be imperfect, this solution is imperfect from the other side of the semantic fence. Additionally, IE6 doesn\u2019t understand the chain of classes within a CSS selector (like .right.inset). If you need to support IE6, you may have to write a few more CSS rules to accommodate any discrepancies.\n\nOpportunities\n\nThis is clearly a simple example, but starting with a modular foundation like this leaves the door open for opportunity. We\u2019ve created a highly flexible and human-readable system for layout manipulation. Obviously, this is something that would need to be tailored to the spacing and sizes of your site, but the systematic approach is very powerful, especially for editorial websites whose articles might have lots of images of varying sizes. It may not get us fully to the flexibility of WYSIWYG print layouts, but methods like this point us in a direction of designs that can adapt to the needs of the content.\n\n\nView the example: without grid and with grid.", "year": "2008", "author": "Jason Santa Maria", "author_slug": "jasonsantamaria", "published": "2008-12-15T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2008/making-modular-layout-systems/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 185, "title": "Make Your Mockup in Markup", "contents": "We aren\u2019t designing copies of web pages, we\u2019re designing web pages.\n\n\t Andy Clarke, via Quotes on Design\n\n\nThe old way\n\nI used to think the best place to design a website was in an image editor. I\u2019d create a pixel-perfect PSD filled with generic content, send it off to the client, go through several rounds of revisions, and eventually create the markup.\n\nDoes this process sound familiar? You\u2019re not alone. In a very scientific and official survey I conducted, close to 90% of respondents said they design in Photoshop before the browser. \n\nThat process is whack, yo!\n\nRecently, thanks in large part to the influence of design hero Dan Cederholm, I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that a website\u2019s design should begin where it\u2019s going to live: in the browser.\n\nDie Photoshop, die\n\nSome of you may be wondering, \u201cwhat\u2019s so bad about using Photoshop for the bulk of my design?\u201d Well, any seasoned designer will tell you that working in Photoshop is akin to working in a minefield: you never know when it\u2019s going to blow up in your face.\n\n The application Adobe Photoshop CS4 has unexpectedly ruined your day.\n\nPhotoshop\u2019s propensity to crash at crucial moments is a running joke in the industry, as is its barely usable interface. And don\u2019t even get me started on the hot, steaming pile of crap that is text rendering.\n\n Text rendered in Photoshop (left) versus Safari (right).\n\nCrashing and text rendering issues suck, but we\u2019ve learned to live with them. The real issue with using Photoshop for mockups is the expectations you\u2019re setting for a client. When you send the client a static image of the design, you\u2019re not giving them the whole picture \u2014 they can\u2019t see how a fluid grid would function, how the design will look in a variety of browsers, basic interactions like :hover effects, or JavaScript behaviors. For more on the disadvantages to showing clients designs as images rather than websites, check out Andy Clarke\u2019s Time to stop showing clients static design visuals.\n\nA necessary evil?\n\nIn the past we\u2019ve put up with Photoshop because it was vital to achieving our beloved rounded corners, drop shadows, outer glows, and gradients. However, with the recent adaptation of CSS3 in major browsers, and the slow, joyous death of IE6, browsers can render mockups that are just as beautiful as those created in an image editor. With the power of RGBA, text-shadow, box-shadow, border-radius, transparent PNGs, and @font-face combined, you can create a prototype that radiates shiny awesomeness right in the browser. If you can see this epic article through to the end, I\u2019ll show you step by step how to create a gorgeous mockup using mostly markup.\n\nGet started by getting naked \n\n\n\tContent precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it\u2019s decoration.\n\n\t Jeffrey Zeldman\n\n\nIn the beginning, don\u2019t even think about style. Instead, start with the foundation: the content. Lay the groundwork for your markup order, and ensure that your design will be useable with styles and images turned off. This is great for prioritizing the content, and puts you on the right path for accessibility and search engine optimization. Not a bad place to start, amirite?\n\n An example of unstyled content, in all its naked glory. View it large.\n\nFlush out the layout \n\nThe next step is to structure the content in a usable way. With CSS, making basic layout changes is as easy as switching up a float, so experiment to see what structure suits the content best.\n\n The mockup with basic layout work done.\n\nGot your grids covered\n\nThere are a variety of tools that allow you to layer a grid over your browser window. For Mac users I recommend using Slammer, and PC users can check out one of the bookmarklets that are available, such as 960 Gridder.\n\n The mockup with a grid applied using Slammer.\n\nOnce you\u2019ve found a layout that works well for the content, pass it along to the client for review. This keeps them involved in the design process, and gives them an idea of how the site will be structured when it\u2019s live.\n\nStart your styling\n\nNow for the fun part: begin applying the presentation layer. Let usability considerations drive your decisions about color and typography; use highlighted colors and contrasting typefaces on elements you wish to emphasize.\n\nRGBA? More like RGByay!\n\nIntroducing color is easy with RGBA. I like to start with the page\u2019s main color, then use white at varying opacities to empasize content sections.\n\n In the example mockup the body background is set to rgba(203,111,21), the content containers are set to rgba(255,255,255,0.7), and a few elements are highlighted with rgba(255,255,255,0.1) If you\u2019re not sure how RGBA works, check out Drew McLellan\u2019s super helpful 24ways article.\n\nLaying down type\n\nJust like with color, you can use typography to evoke a feeling and direct a user\u2019s attention. Have contrasting typefaces (like serif headlines and sans-serif body text) to group the content into meaningful sections.\n\nIn a recent A List Apart article, the Master of Web Typography\u2122 Jason Santa Maria offers excellent advice on how to choose your typefaces:\n\n\n\tWrite down a general description of the qualities of the message you are trying to convey, and then look for typefaces that embody those qualities.\n\n\nSounds pretty straightforward. I wanted to give my design a classic feel with a hint of nostalgia, so I used Georgia for the headlines, and incorporated the ornate ampersand from Baskerville into the header.\n\n A closeup on the site\u2019s header.\n\nLet\u2019s get sexy\n\nThe design doesn\u2019t look too bad as it is, but it\u2019s still pretty flat. We can do better, and after mixing in some CSS3 and a couple of PNGs, it\u2019s going to get downright steamy in here.\n\nGive it some glow\n\nObjects in the natural world reflect light, so to make your design feel tangible and organic, give it some glow. In the example design I achieved this by creating two white to transparent gradients of varying opacities. Both have a solid white border across their top, which gives edges a double border effect and makes them look sharper. Using CSS3\u2019s text-shadow on headlines and box-shadow on content modules is another quick way to add depth.\n\n A wide and closeup view of the design with gradients, text-shadow and box-shadow added. For information on how to implement text-shadow and box-shadow using RGBA, check out the article I wrote on it last week.\n\n\n37 pieces of flair\n\nOkay, maybe you don\u2019t need that much flair, but it couldn\u2019t hurt to add a little; it\u2019s the details that will set your design apart. Work in imagery and texture, using PNGs with an alpha channel so you can layer images and still tweak the color later on.\n\n The design with grungy textures, a noisy diagonal stripe pattern, and some old transportation images layered behind the text. Because the colors are rendered using RGBA, these images bleed through the content, giving the design a layered feel. Best viewed large.\n\n\nSend it off\n\nHey, look at that. You\u2019ve got a detailed, well structured mockup for the client to review. Best of all, your markup is complete too. If the client approves the design at this stage, your template is practically finished. Bust out the party hats!\n\nNot so fast, Buster!\n\nSo I don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019ve never gotten a design past the client\u2019s keen eye for criticism on the first go. Let\u2019s review some hypothetical feedback (none of which is too outlandish, in my experience), and see how we\u2019d make the requested changes in the browser. \n\nUpdating the typography\n\n\n\tMy ex-girlfriend loved Georgia, so I never want to see it again. Can we get rid of it? I want to use a font that\u2019s chunky and loud, just like my stupid ex-girlfriend.\n\n\t Fakey McClient\n\n\nYikes! Thankfully with CSS, removing Georgia is as easy as running a find and replace on the stylesheet. In my revised mockup, I used @font-face and League Gothic on the headlines to give the typography the, um, unique feel the client is looking for.\n\n The same mockup, using @font-face on the headlines. If you\u2019re unfamiliar with implementing @font-face, check out Nice Web Type\u2018s helpful article.\n\nAdding rounded corners\n\n\n\tI\u2019m not sure if I\u2019ll like it, but I want to see what it\u2019d look like with rounded corners. My cousin, a Web 2.0 marketing guru, says they\u2019re trendy right now.\n\n\t Fakey McClient\n\n\nSwitching to rounded corners is a nightmare if you\u2019re doing your mockup in Photoshop, since it means recreating most of the shapes and UI elements in the design. Thankfully, with CSS border-radius comes to our rescue! By applying this gem of a style to a handful of classes, you\u2019ll be rounded out in no time.\n\n The mockup with rounded corners, created using border-radius. If you\u2019re not sure how to implement border-radius, check out CSS3.info\u2018s quick how-to.\n\nMaking changes to the color\n\n\n\tThe design is too dark, it\u2019s depressing! They call it \u2018the blues\u2019 for a reason, dummy. Can you try using a brighter color? I want orange, like Zeldman uses.\n\n\t Fakey McClient\n\n\nMaking color changes is another groan-inducing task when working in Photoshop. Finding and updating every background layer, every drop shadow, and every link can take forever in a complex PSD. However, if you\u2019ve done your mockup in markup with RGBA and semi-transparent PNGs, making changes to your color is as easy as updating the body background and a few font colors.\n\n The mockup with an orange color scheme. Best viewed large.\n\nAhem, what about Internet Explorer?\n\nGee, thanks for reminding me, buzzkill. Several of the CSS features I\u2019ve suggested you use, such as RGBA, text-shadow and box-shadow, and border-radius, are not supported in Internet Explorer. I know, it makes me sad too. However, this doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t try these techniques out in your markup based mockups. The point here is to get your mockups done as efficiently as possible, and to keep the emphasis on markup from the very beginning.\n\nOnce the design is approved, you and the client have to decide if you can live with the design looking different in different browsers. Is it so bad if some users get to see drop shadows and some don\u2019t? Or if the rounded corners are missing for a portion of your audience? The design won\u2019t be broken for IE people, they\u2019re just missing out on a few visual treats that other users will see.\n\nThe idea of rewarding users who choose modern browsers is not a new concept; Dan covers it thoroughly in Handcrafted CSS, and it\u2019s been written about in the past by Aaron Gustafson and Andy Clarke on several occasions. I believe we shouldn\u2019t have to design for the lowest common denominator (cough, IE6 users, cough); instead we should create designs that are beautiful in modern browsers, but still degrade nicely for the other guy. However, some clients just aren\u2019t that progressive, and in that case you can always use background images for drop shadows and rounded corners, as you have in the past. \n\nClosing thoughts\n\nWith the advent of CSS3, browsers are just as capable of giving us beautiful, detailed mockups as Photoshop, and in half the time. I\u2019m not the only one to make an argument for this revised process; in his article Time to stop showing clients static design visuals, and in his presentation Walls Come Tumbling Down, Andy Clarke makes a fantastic case for creating your mockups in markup.\n\nSo I guess my challenge to you for 2010 is to get out of Photoshop and into the code. Even if the arguments for designing in the browser aren\u2019t enough to make you change your process permanently, it\u2019s worthwhile to give it a try. Look at the New Year as a time to experiment; applying constraints and evaluating old processes can do wonders for improving your efficiency and creativity.", "year": "2009", "author": "Meagan Fisher", "author_slug": "meaganfisher", "published": "2009-12-24T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2009/make-your-mockup-in-markup/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 199, "title": "Knowing the Future - Tips for a Happy Launch Day", "contents": "You\u2019ve chosen your frameworks and libraries. You\u2019ve learned how to write code which satisfies the buzzword and performance gods. Now you need to serve it to a global audience, and make things easy to preview, to test, to sign-off, and to evolve.\nBut infrastructure design is difficult and boring for most of us. We just want to get our work out into the wild.\nIf only we had tools which would let us go, \u201cOh yeah! It all deploys perfectly every time\u201d and shout, \u201cYou need another release? BAM! What\u2019s next?\u201d\nA truth that can be hard to admit is that very often, the production environment and its associated deployment processes are poorly defined until late into a project. This can be a problem.\nIt makes my palms sweaty just thinking about it.\nIf like me, you have spent time building things for clients, you\u2019ll probably have found yourself working with a variety of technical partners and customers who bring different constraints and opportunities to your projects. Knowing and proving the environments and the deployment processes is often very difficult, but can be a factor which profoundly impacts our ability to deliver what we promised. To say nothing of our ability to sleep at night or leave our fingernails un-chewed.\nLet\u2019s look at this a little, and see if we can\u2019t set you up for a good night\u2019s sleep, with dry palms and tidy fingernails.\nA familiar problem\nYou\u2019ve been here too, right? The project development was tough, but you\u2019re pleased with what you are running in your local development environments. Now you need to get the client to see and approve your build, and hopefully indicate with a cheery thumbs up that it can \u201cgo live\u201d.\n\nChances are that we have a staging environment where the client can see the build. But be honest, is this exactly the same as the production environment? It should be, but often it\u2019s not. Often the staging environment is nothing more than a visible server with none of the optimisations, security, load balancing, caching, and other vital bits of machinery that we\u2019ll need (and need to test) in \u201cprod\u201d.\nOften the production environment is still being \u201cset up\u201d and you\u2019ll have to wait and see.\nIn development, \u201cwait and see\u201d is the enemy.\nInstead of waiting to see, we need to make the provisioning of, and deployment to our different environments one of the very first jobs of our project. I\u2019ve often needed to be the unpopular voice in the room who makes a big fuss when this is delayed. I\u2019ve described it as being a \u201ccritical blocker\u201d during project meetings and suggested that everything should halt until it is fixed. \nIt is that important.\nClients don\u2019t often like hearing a wary, disruptive voice saying \u201cwhoa there Nelly!\u201d, because the development should be able to continue while the production environment gets sorted out, right? \nSure. But if it is not seen as a blocker, it is seen as something that can just happen later. And if it happens later, all the ugly surprises and unknowns surface later too. And later is when we\u2019ll need to be thinking about other things. Not the plumbing. Trust me, it pays to face up to the issue right away rather than press on optimistically. The client will thank you later.\nAttitudes and expectations\nWe should, I think, exhibit these four attitudes towards production deployment:\n\nMake it scripted\nMake it automated\nMake it real\nMake it first\n\nMake it scripted\nLet\u2019s face it, we are going to need to deploy more than once over the course of the project. We are not going to get things perfect on our first shot. Nor should we expect to. And if we are going to repeat something, we want to be able to do it identically and predictably every time without needing to rely on our memories.\nDevelopers are great at scripting things which they would otherwise need to repeat. It makes us faster and it also helps us keep track of the steps we need to take.\nI\u2019m not crazy enough to try suggest the best technology to script your builds or deployments (holy wars lie down that path). A lot will depend on your languages and your tastes. Some will like Fabric, others will prefer Gulp, you might prefer Make or NPM. It doesn\u2019t really matter as long as you can script the process of building, packaging and deploying your project.\nWait. Won\u2019t we need to know everything about the build from the start in order to do this? Aren\u2019t our dependencies likely to change over time?\nYes. That would be ideal. But it\u2019s ok. Like our code, our deployment script will evolve over the life of a project. So evolve it. Start by scripting what is needed to support the first iteration of the project, and then maintain that script. It will become a valuable \u201csource of truth\u201d, providing a form of documentation of what your project needs for a successful deployment. Another bonus.\nMake it automated\nIf we have a scripted deployment which we can run by executing a single command, then we are in great shape to automate that process by triggering the build and deployment via suitable events.\nAgain, I prefer not to offer one single suggestion of when this should occur. That will depend on your approach to the project, how your development team is organised, and how your QA team operate. You can tune this to suit.\nFor one project I worked on, we chose to trigger the build and deployment to our production environment every time we used Git to tag the master branch of our version control repository. There were a few moving parts, and we needed to do some upfront work to get everything working, but that upfront effort was repaid many fold as we deployed time and time again, and exposed some issues with our environment long before we got to \u201claunch day\u201d.\nWith a scripted and automated process, we can make deployments \u201ccheap\u201d. This is our goal. When there are minimal cognitive or time overheads associated with deploying, we\u2019re likely to do it all the more often and become more confident that it will behave as expected.\nMake it real\nAlright, we have written scripts to build and deploy our projects. Anyone tagging our repo will trigger things to happen as if by magic, but where are we pushing things to? We need to target a real environment if this is to have any value.\nA useful pattern is to have all activity on our develop branch trigger deployments to our staging server. Meanwhile tagging master will deploy a version to the production environment. How we organise this will depend on our git branching approach. (I\u2019ve seen as many ways of approaching Git Flow as I have seen ways of approaching \u201cAgile\u201d).\nIt\u2019s vital though, that we ensure that we are deploying to, and testing against, our real infrastructure. We want to see real results. That\u2019s the best way to learn real lessons.\nMake it first\nBuilding our site to run in an environment not yet fully defined or available to test is like climbing without ropes \u2013 it\u2019s possible, but we put ourselves at risk. And the higher we climb the greater the risk. So it is important to do this as early as we possibly can.\nDon\u2019t have a certificate for our HTTPS yet? Fine, but let\u2019s still deploy to this evolving production environment and introduce HTTPS as soon as we can.\nBefore we know it we\u2019ll be proving that this is set up correctly and we\u2019ll not be surprised by mixed security alerts or other nasties further down the line.\n\nMailchimp perfectly capture the anxiety of sending emails to gazillions of people for a campaign. But we\u2019re lucky. Launching a site doesn\u2019t need to be like performing a mailshot. We can do things to banish that sweaty hand.\nDoing preparation work upfront means that by the time we need to launch the site into the wild, we have exercised the deployment mechanics, and tested the production environment so rigorously that this task will be boring.\n(It won\u2019t be boring. Launching should always be exciting because the world will finally get to see our beautiful, painstaking work. But nor should it be terrifying. Especially as a result of not knowing for certain if our processes and environments are going to work or burst into flames on the big day.)\nWhat tools exist?\nWell this all sounds lovely. But how should we tackle this? Where are the tools for us to use? As it happens, there are many service and tools that we can use to work this way.\nHosting\nAll of the big players like Amazon, Azure and Google offer tools which can help us here. Google for example, can host multiple deployed versions of your project in parallel and you can manage them via their App Engine console. Each build receives its own URL which you can use to access any deployed version of your site.\nHaving immutable deployments which stick around in perpetuity (or until you bin them) is a key feature which unlocks the ability to confidently direct your traffic to any version of your site. With that comes the capacity to test any version or feature in its real environment, and then promote a version, or rollback to a previous version whenever you want.\nA liberating power to have.\nContinuous integration\nIn order to create all of those different versions, we\u2019ll need somewhere to run our build and deployment scripts. Jenkins has been a popular Continuous Integration (CI) option for some time, and can be configured to perform all sorts of tasks, giving you extensive control over your deployment pipeline.\nYou need to host Jenkins yourself, but it provides some simple ways to do that.\nThe landscape for CI is getting richer and richer. With many hosted services like Circle CI providing this kind of automation up in the cloud.\nOne stop shop\nNetlify combines both hosting and continuous integration services. It monitors your git repositories and automatically runs your build in a container on its servers when it finds changes. Each branch and pull request in your git repository will result in an immutable version of your site with its own URL.\nNetlify is unlike Google Cloud, AWS or Azure in that it cannot host a dynamic server-side application for you. Instead it specialises in hosting static, or so called JAMstack sites.\nPersonally, I find that its simplicity makes it an approachable option, and a good place to learn and adopt some of these valuable habits.\nFull disclosure: I\u2019m a Netlify employee. But before I was, I was an avid customer, and it was through using Netlify that I first encountered some of these principles in practice.\nConclusion. It\u2019s all about the approach\nNo matter what tools or services you use (and there are many which can support these practices), the most important thing is to adopt an approach which lets you prove your environments as quickly as possible.\nFront-loading this effort will cast light onto the issues that you\u2019ll need to address early and often, leaving no infrastructure surprises to spoil things for you on launch day.\nAutomating the process will mean that when you do find things that you need to fix or to improve later (and you will), issuing another release will be trivial. It is a lovely feeling when you have confidence that releasing v1.0.0 will be no more stressful v0.0.1. In fact it should actually be less stressful, as you\u2019ll have been down this road many times by then. Fixing the potholes and smoothing the way as you went.\nFrom here, it should be a smooth ride.", "year": "2017", "author": "Phil Hawksworth", "author_slug": "philhawksworth", "published": "2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2017/knowing-the-future/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 45, "title": "Is Agile Harder for Agencies?", "contents": "I once sat in a pitch meeting and watched a new business exec tell a potential client that his agency followed an agile workflow process at all times. The potential client nodded wisely, and they both agreed that agile was indeed the way to go.\n\nThe meeting progressed and they signed off on a contract for a massive project, to be delivered in a standard waterfall fashion, with all manner of phases and key deliverables.\n\nOf course both of them left the meeting perfectly happy, because neither of them knew nor cared what an agile workflow process might be.\n\nThat was about five years ago. As 2015 heaves into view I think it\u2019s fair to say that attitudes have changed. Perhaps the same number of people claim to do Agile\u2122 now as in 2010, but I think more of them are telling the truth.\n\nAs a developer in an agency that works primarily with larger organisations, this year I have started to see a shift from agencies pushing agile methodologies with their clients, to clients requesting and even demanding agile practices from their agencies. Only a couple of years ago this would have been unusual behaviour.\n\nSo what\u2019s the problem?\n\nWe should be happy then, no? Those of us in agencies will get to spend more time delivering great products, and less time arguing over out-of-date functional specs or battling through an adversarial change management procedure because somebody had a good idea during development rather than planning. We get to be a little bit more like our brothers and sisters in vaunted teams like the Government Digital Service, which is using agile approaches to great effect on projects that have a real benefit to their users.\n\nAlmost. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that adhering to an agile framework such as scrum is more difficult within an agency/client structure than it is for an in-house development team.\n\nThis is no surprise. The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 by a group of software developers for their own use. Many of the underlying principles of a framework like Scrum assume the existence of an in-house team, working on a highly technical project, and working for the business that employs them. The agency/client model must to some extent be retrofitted into agile frameworks. It can be done though, and there are plenty of agencies out there doing it well.\n\nThis article isn\u2019t meant to be another introduction to agile techniques \u2013 there are too many of those online already. This article is for people just dipping their toes into this way of working. I\u2019ve laid out a few of the key reasons why adopting a more fully agile approach seems difficult, at least initially, for those of us working in agencies.\n\n1. Agile asks more of your clients\n\nWhen a team adopts Scrum everyone has to get used to a number of unfamiliar roles and rituals. Few team members have a steeper learning curve than the person designated as the product owner.\n\nThe product owner carries a lot of weight on their shoulders. They have to uphold the overall vision for the project. They are also meant to be the primary author of the project\u2019s user stories (short atomic descriptions of project features which are testable and relate to a real business need). They should own this list of stories (called a backlog) and should be able to prioritise the order in which the stories are developed, to ensure that the project is delivering real value to the business early and often.\n\nWhen a burst of work is completed (bursts of work in Scrum are called sprints), the product owner leads a review or show-and-tell session with the wider project stakeholders. The product owner needs to understand the work that has been completed, and must champion it to the business. Finally, and most importantly, the product owner is responsible for managing the feedback and requests from stakeholders in such a way that they don\u2019t derail the project team\u2019s agreed workload for any given sprint, without upsetting or offending any of the stakeholders \u2013 some of whom may outrank the product owner.\n\nIf you follow that spec, this is a job for a superhuman in any organisational context. And within the agency/client structure this superhuman needs to be client-side for the process to be at its most effective.\n\nSo your client, who in the past might have briefed a project to an agency team and then had the work presented back to them every few weeks, is now asked to be involved with the team on a daily basis; to fight on behalf of the team when new or difficult requests come in from senior figures within their organisation; and to present the agency\u2019s work to their own colleagues after each sprint. It\u2019s a big change if all that gets dropped into someone\u2019s lap without warning.\n\nThere are several ways agencies can mitigate this issue. The ScrumAlliance suggests some alternative ways to structure the product owner role. The approach I have taken in the past is simply to start slow, and gradually move more of the product owner role over to the client side as and when they feel comfortable with it. If you\u2019re working together long-term on a project, and you both see tangible improvements in the quality of the work after adopting an agile process, then your client is more likely to be open to further changes as the partnership progresses.\n\n2. My client wants fixed costs, fixed deadlines and a fixed scope\n\nI know. Mine too. Of course they do \u2013 it is the way that agencies and clients have agreed to work in digital and other creative service industries for a very long time. On both sides of the fence we\u2019re used to thinking about projects in this way.\n\nOf the three, fixing scope is the one that agile purists would rail hardest against. The more time we spend working on digital projects, the less sense it makes. James Archer, CEO of UI/UX design agency Forty puts it like this:\n\n\n\tFor me, the Agile approach is really about acknowledging that disturbing truth that every project manager knows, but has trouble admitting. The truth that the project plan is wrong. Scope creep. Change orders. Shifting priorities. New directions. We act shocked and appalled when those things happen during our carefully planned project, even though they happen on every project ever.\n\n\nSuccessful relationships require trust and honesty, and we shouldn\u2019t be afraid of discussing this aspect of project management. If you do move away from a fixed scope of work, then the other two items (costs and timings) can be fixed \u2013 more or less. If you can get your clients to buy into this from a standing start then you are doing well. In fact you probably deserve a promotion. For most of us this is a continual discussion.\n\nAnyway, as soon as you\u2019ve made headway on the argument that it makes little or no sense to try and fix the scope of a digital project, you usually run into a related concern, which we\u2019ll look at next.\n\n3. Fear of uncontrolled costs\n\nWe all know that a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. At this time of year perhaps we should reiterate to everyone that digital products and services also need support and love once we have taken the decision to bring them into the world.\n\nMore organisations are realising that their investment in digital platforms should be viewed as an operational expenditure rather than a capital expenditure. But from time to time we will find ourselves working on projects for people who have a finite amount of money to invest in a product at a given point in time. When agencies start talking about these projects as rolling investments those responsible can understandably worry about their costs running out of control.\n\nThere\u2019s another factor at play here. Agile, on the whole, prefers to derive a cost for services from the hours a team spends working on a project. In other industries this is referred to as charging for time and materials, and there seems to be an ingrained distrust in this approach among people in general. See, for example, the Citizens Advice Bureau\u2019s \u201cTop tips for employing a builder\u201d:\n\n\n\t\u201cBear in mind that if you pay a daily rate, this makes it easier for a builder to string the work out and get more money so agree what you will do if the job takes longer than expected.\u201d\n\n\nIt\u2019s hard not to feel stung if you are in the builder\u2019s shoes here, as we are when we\u2019re talking about our role as an agency. But if you\u2019ve ever haggled with a builder over time and materials, and also moaned about your clients misunderstanding agile methods, take a moment to reflect on the similarities from your client\u2019s point of view.\n\nAgain, there are some things we can do to mitigate this issue. Some agencies put in place a service level agreement around their team\u2019s velocity (an agile-related term related to how much work a team delivers in any given sprint) and this can help.\n\nAs the industry moves further towards a long-term approach to investment in digital I hope this fear will subside. But that shift in approach leads to the final concern I want to address.\n\n4. Agency structures need shaking up\n\nIf you work for a company that has spent many years developing a business model around the waterfall process, you may have to break through many layers of entrenched thinking in order to establish new practices and effect organisational change.\n\nThere are consultancies that exist specifically to help agencies through their own agile transformation. One of these companies, AgencyAgile, provides a helpful list of common pitfalls. They emphasise the need to look at your whole agency\u2019s structure, rather than simply encouraging project teams to adopt new workflows.\n\n\n\tEven awesomely run Agile projects can have a limited impact on the overall organization.\n\n\nIf you\u2019re serious about changing the way your company approaches projects then try talking to people who sit outside the usual project delivery team. Speak to the finance department if you have one, and try to convince your senior management team if they\u2019re not already on board. And definitely speak to your new business people, who go out there and win the projects you get to work on.\n\nIt\u2019s these people who need to understand the potential business benefits of working in a new way, and also which of their existing habits and behaviours they might need to change to accommodate a new approach.\n\nOtherwise you\u2019ll find yourself with a team of designers, developers and project managers who are ready and waiting to deliver work in an iterative and collaborative way, but by the time they get hold of the project a cost has already been agreed, a deadline has been imposed, and a functional requirements document has been painstakingly put together. Nobody wins in this situation.\n\nConclusion\n\nSo where should we go from here? I certainly don\u2019t have hard and fast answers \u2013 I\u2019m not sure that they exist in a one-size-fits-all approach for agencies.\n\nThere are plenty of smart people thinking about this problem. It\u2019s a hot topic right now. Earlier in the year a London-based meetup was established called Agile for Agencies. If you\u2019re in the capital and want to discuss these issues with your peers it\u2019s a great opportunity to do so.\n\nI\u2019ve mentioned James Archer and Forty already. Both James and Paul Boag have written in the last twelve months on this subject. They both come out on the side of the argument that suggests you adopt agile principles, but don\u2019t have to worry about the rituals if they don\u2019t fit in with your practices.\n\nPersonally, I think the rituals and the discipline mandated by an agile framework like Scrum can provide a great deal of value to your team, even it if is hard to implement within an agency culture that has traditionally structured its work and its services in another way.\n\nIn whatever way you figure out the details, when your teams collaborate with your clients rather than work for them at arm\u2019s length, and when everyone prioritises frequent delivery, reflection and iteration over exhaustive scoping and planning, I believe you\u2019ll see a tangible difference in the quality of the work that you create.", "year": "2014", "author": "Charlie Perrins", "author_slug": "charlieperrins", "published": "2014-12-12T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2014/is-agile-harder-for-agencies/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 10, "title": "Home Kanban for Domestic Bliss", "contents": "My wife is an architect. I\u2019m a leader of big technical teams these days, but for many years after I was a dev I was a project/program manager. Our friends and family used to watch Grand Designs and think that we would make the ideal team \u2014 she could design, I could manage the project of building or converting whatever dream home we wanted.\n\nThen we bought a house.\n\nA Victorian terrace in the north-east of England that needed, well, a fair bit of work. The big decisions were actually pretty easy: yes, we should knock through a double doorway from the dining room to the lounge; yes, we should strip out everything from the utility room and redo it; yes, we should roll back the hideous carpet in the bedrooms upstairs and see if we could restore the original wood flooring.\n\nThose could be managed like a project.\n\nWhat couldn\u2019t be was all the other stuff. Incremental improvements are harder to schedule, and in a house that\u2019s over a hundred years old you never know what you\u2019re going to find when you clear away some tiles, or pull up the carpets, or even just spring-clean the kitchen (\u201cErm, hon? The paint seems to be coming off. Actually, so does the plaster\u2026\u201d). A bit like going in to fix bugs in code or upgrade a machine \u2014 sometimes you end up quite far down the rabbit hole.\n\nAnd so, as we tried to fit in those improvements in our evenings and weekends, we found ourselves disagreeing. Arguing, even. We were both trying to do the right thing (make the house better) but since we were fitting it in where we could, we often didn\u2019t get to talk and agree in detail what was needed (exactly how to make the house better). And it\u2019s really frustrating when you stay up late doing something, just to find that your other half didn\u2019t mean that they meant this instead, and so your effort was wasted.\n\nThen I saw this tweet from my friend and colleague Jamie Arnold, who was using the same kanban board approach at home as we had instituted at the UK Government Digital Service to manage our portfolio.\n\nMrs Arnold embraces Kanban wall at home. Disagreements about work in progress and priority significantly reduced.. ;) pic.twitter.com/407brMCH\u2014 Jamie Arnold (@itsallgonewrong) October 27, 2012\n\nAnd despite Jamie\u2019s questionable taste in fancy dress outfits (look closely at that board), he is a proper genius when it comes to processes and particularly agile ones. So I followed his example and instituted a home kanban board.\n\nWhat is this kanban of which you speak?\n\nKanban boards are an artefact from lean manufacturing \u2014 basically a visualisation of a production process. They are used to show you where your bottlenecks are, or where one part of the process is producing components faster than another part of the process can cope. Identifying the bottlenecks leads you to set work in progress (WIP) limits, so that you get an overall more efficient system.\n\nIncreasingly kanban is used as an agile software development approach, too, especially where support work (like fixing bugs) needs to be balanced with incremental enhancement (like adding new features).\n\nI\u2019m a big advocate of kanban when you have a system that needs to be maintained and improved by the same team at the same time. Rather than the sprint-based approach of scrum (where the next sprint\u2019s stories or features to be delivered are agreed up front), kanban lets individuals deal with incidents or problems that need investigation and bug fixing when urgent and important. Then, when someone has capacity, they can just go to the board and pull down the next feature to develop or test.\n\nSo, how did we use it?\n\nOne of the key tenets of kanban is that you visualise your workflow, so we put together a whiteboard with columns: Icebox; To Do Next; In Process; Done; and also a section called Blocked. Then, for each thing that needed to happen in the house, we put it on a Post-it note and initially chucked them all in the Icebox \u2014 a collection with no priority assigned yet.\n\nEach week we looked at the Icebox and pulled out a set of things that we felt should be done next. This was pulled into the To Do Next column, and then each time either of us had some time, we could just pull a new thing over into the In Process column. We agreed to review at the end of each week and move things to Done together, and to talk about whether this kanban approach was working for us or not.\n\nWe quickly learned for ourselves why kanban has WIP limits as a key tenet \u2014 it\u2019s tempting to pull everything into the To Do Next column, but that\u2019s unrealistic. And trying to do more than one or two things each at a given time isn\u2019t terribly productive owing to the cost of task switching. So we tend to limit our To Do Next to about seven items, and our In Process to about four (a max of two each, basically).\n\nWe use the Blocked column when something can\u2019t be completed \u2014 perhaps we can\u2019t fix something because we discovered we don\u2019t have the required tools or supplies, or if we\u2019re waiting for a call back from a plumber. But it\u2019s nice to put it to one side, knowing that it won\u2019t be forgotten.\n\nWhat helped the most?\n\nIt wasn\u2019t so much the visualisation that helped us to see what we needed to do, but the conversation that happened when we were agreeing priorities, moving them to In Process and then on to Done made the biggest difference. Getting clear on the order of importance really is invaluable \u2014 as is getting clear on what Done really means!\n\nThe Blocked column is also great, as it helps us keep track of things we need to do outside the house to make sure we can make progress. We also found it really helpful to examine the process itself and figure out whether it was working for us. For instance, one thing we realised is it\u2019s worth tracking some regular tasks that need time invested in them (like taking recycling that isn\u2019t picked up to the recycling centre) and these used to cycle around and around. So they were moved to Done as part of our weekly review, but then immediately put back in the Icebox to float back to the top again at a relevant time.\n\nBut the best thing of all? That moment where we get to mark something as done! It\u2019s immensely satisfying to review at the end of the week and have a physical marker of the progress you\u2019ve made.\n\nAll in all, a home kanban board turned out to be a very effective way to pull tasks through stages rather than always trying to plan them out in advance, and definitely made collaboration on our home tasks significantly smoother. Give it a try!", "year": "2013", "author": "Meri Williams", "author_slug": "meriwilliams", "published": "2013-12-14T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2013/home-kanban-for-domestic-bliss/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 225, "title": "Good Ideas Grow on Paper", "contents": "Great designers have one thing in common: their design process is centred on ideas; ideas that are more often than not developed on paper. Though it\u2019s often tempting to take the path of least resistance, turning to the computer in the headlong rush to complete a project (often in the face of formidable client pressure), resist the urge and \u2013 for a truly great idea \u2013 start first on paper.\n\nThe path of least resistance is often characterised by clich\u00e9 and overused techniques \u2013 one per cent noise, border-radius, text-shadow \u2013 the usual suspects \u2013 techniques that are ten-a-penny at the gallery sites. Whilst all are useful, and technique and craft are important, great design isn\u2019t about technique alone \u2013 it\u2019s about technique in the service of good ideas.\n\nBut how do we generate those ideas?\n\nInspiration can certainly come to you out of the blue. When working as a designer in a role which often consists of incubating good ideas, however, idly waiting for the time-honoured lightbulb to appear above your head just isn\u2019t good enough. We need to establish an environment where we tip the odds of getting good ideas in our favour.\n\nSo, when faced with the blank canvas, what do we do to unlock the proverbial tidal wave of creativity? Fear not. We\u2019re about to share with you a couple of stalwart techniques that will stand you in good stead when you need that good idea, in the face of the pressure of yet another looming deadline.\n\nGet the process right\n\nWhere do ideas come from? In many cases they come from anywhere but the screen. Hence, our first commandment is to close the lid of your computer and, for a change, work on paper. It might seem strange, it might also seem like a distraction, but \u2013 trust us \u2013 the time invested here will more than pay off.\n\nIdea generation should be a process of rapid iteration, sketching and thinking aloud, all processes best undertaken in more fast paced, analogue media. Our tool of choice is the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo\u00a9, intentionally low resolution to encourage lo-fi idea generation. In short, your tools should be designed not to be precious, but to quickly process your thoughts. Ideas can be expressed with a thick line marker or by drawing with a stick in the sand; it\u2019s the ideas that matter, not the medium.\n\nInput\u2009>\u2009Synthesise\u2009>\u2009Output\n\nIdeas don\u2019t materialise in a vacuum. Without constant input, the outputs will inevitably remain the same. As such, it\u2019s essential to maintain an inquisitive mind, ensuring a steady flow of new triggers and stimuli that enable your thinking to evolve.\n\nWhat every designer brings to the table is their prior experience and unique knowledge. It should come as no surprise to discover that a tried and tested method of increasing that knowledge is, believe it or not, to read \u2013 often and widely. The best and most nuanced ideas come after many years of priming the brain with an array of diverse material, a point made recently in Jessica Hische\u2019s aptly named Why You Should Know Your Shit.\n\nOne of the best ways of synthesising the knowledge you accumulate is to write. The act of writing facilitates your thinking and stores the pieces of the jigsaw you\u2019ll one day return to. You don\u2019t have to write a book or a well-articulated article; a scribbled note in the margin will suffice in facilitating the process of digestion.\n\nAs with writing, we implore you to make sketching an essential part of your digestion process. More immediate than writing, sketching has the power to put yet unformed ideas down on paper, giving you an insight into the fantastic conceptions you\u2019re more often than not still incubating.\n\nOur second commandment is a practical one: always carry a sketchbook and a pen. Although it seems that the very best ideas are scribbled on the back of a beer mat or a wine-stained napkin, always carrying your \u2018thinking utensils\u2019 should be as natural as not leaving the house without your phone, wallet, keys or pants.\n\nFurther, the more you use your sketchbook, the less precious you\u2019ll find yourself becoming. Sketching isn\u2019t about being an excellent draughtsman, it\u2019s about synthesising and processing your thoughts and ideas, as Jason Santa Maria summarises nicely in his article Pretty Sketchy:\n\n\n\tSketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they\u2019re about being a good thinker.\n\n\tJason Santa Maria\n\n\nThe sketchbook and pen should become your trusted tools in your task to constantly survey the world around you. As Paul Smith says, You Can Find Inspiration in Anything; close the lid, look beyond the computer; there\u2019s a whole world of inspiration out there.\n\nLearn to love old dusty buildings\n\nSo, how do you learn? How do you push beyond the predictable world pre-filtered by Mr Google? The answer lies in establishing a habit of exploring the wonderful worlds of museums and libraries, dusty old buildings that repay repeated visits.\n\nOnce the primary repositories of thought and endless sources of inspiration, these institutions are now often passed over for the quick fix of a Google search or Wikipedia by you, the designer, chained to a desk and manacled to a MacBook. Whilst others might frown, we urge you to get away from your desk and take an eye-opening stroll through the knowledge-filled corridors of yore (and don\u2019t forget to bring your sketchbook).\n\nHere you\u2019ll find ideas aplenty, ideas that will set you apart from your peers, who remain ever-reliant on the same old digital sources.\n\nThe idea generation toolbox\n\nNow that we\u2019ve established the importance of getting the process and the context right, it\u2019s time to meet the idea generation toolbox: a series of tools and techniques that can be applied singularly or in combination to solve the perennial problem of the blank canvas.\n\nThe clean sheet of paper, numbing in its emptiness, can prove an insurmountable barrier to many a project, but the route beyond it involves just a few, well-considered steps. The route to a good idea lies in widening your pool of inspiration at the project outset. Let go and generate ideas quickly; it\u2019s critical to diverge before you converge \u2013 but how do we do this and what exactly do we mean by this?\n\nThe temptation is to pull something out of your well-worn box of tricks, something that you know from experience will do the job. We urge you, however, not to fall prey to this desire. You can do better; better still, a few of you putting your minds together can do a lot better. By avoiding the path of least resistance, you can create something extraordinary.\n\nCulturally, we value logical, linear thinking. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, critical thinking, deduction and the pursuit of truth have been rewarded. To generate creative ideas, however, we need to start thinking sideways, making connections that don\u2019t necessarily follow logically. Lateral thinking, a phrase coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, aptly describes this very process:\n\n\n\tWith logic you start out with certain ingredients, just as in playing chess you start out with given pieces \u2013 lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces.\n\n\tEdward de Bono\n\n\nOne of the easiest ways to start thinking laterally is to start with a mind map, a perfect tool for widening the scope of a project beyond the predictable and an ideal one for getting the context right for discovery.\n\nMaking connections\n\nMind maps can be used to generate, visualise and structure ideas. Arranged intuitively and classified around groupings, mind maps allow chance connections to be drawn across related groups of information, and are perfect for exposing alogical associations and unexpected relationships.\n\nGet a number of people together in a room, equipped with the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo\u00a9. Give yourself a limited amount of time \u2013 half an hour should prove more than enough \u2013 and you\u2019ll be surprised at the results a few well-chosen people can generate in a very short space of time. The key is to work fast, diverge and not inhibit thinking. \n\nWe\u2019ve been embracing Tony Buzan\u2019s methods in our teaching for over a decade. His ideas on the power of radiant thinking and how this can be applied to mind maps, uncover the real power which lies in the human brain\u2019s ability to spot connections across a mapped out body of diverse knowledge.\n\nFrank Chimero wrote about this recently in How to Have an Idea, which beautifully illustrates Mr Buzan\u2019s theories, articulating the importance of the brain\u2019s ability to make abstract connections, finding unexpected pairings when a concept is mapped out on paper.\n\nOnce a topic is surveyed and a rich set of stimuli articulated, the next stage is to draw connections, pulling from opposite sides of the mind map. It\u2019s at this point, when defining alogical connections, that the truly interesting and unexpected ideas are often uncovered.\n\nThe curve ball\n\nIf you\u2019ve followed our instructions so far, all being well, you should have a number of ideas. Good news: we have one last technique to throw into the mix. We like to call it \u2018the curve ball\u2019, that last minute \u2018something\u2019 that forces you to rethink and encourages you to address a problem from a different direction.\n\nThere are a number of ways of throwing in a curve ball \u2013 a short, sharp, unexpected impetus \u2013 but we have a firm favourite we think you\u2019ll appreciate. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt\u2019s Oblique Strategies \u2013 subtitled \u2018Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas\u2019 \u2013 are the perfect creative tool for throwing in a spot of unpredictability. As Eno and Schmidt put it:\n\n\n\tThe Oblique Strategies can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.\n\n\tBrian Eno and Peter Schmidt\n\n\nSimply pick a card and apply the strategy to the problem at hand. The key here, as with de Bono\u2019s techniques, is to embrace randomness and provocation to inspire lateral creative approaches.\n\nTo assist this process, you might wish to consult one of the many virtual decks of Oblique Strategies online.\n\nWrapping up\n\nTo summarise, it\u2019s tempting to see the route to the fastest satisfactory conclusion in a computer when, in reality, that\u2019s the last place you should start. The tools we\u2019ve introduced, far from time-consuming, are hyper-efficient, always at hand and, if you factor them into your workflow, the key to unlocking the ideas that set the great designers apart.\n\nWe wish you well on your quest in search of the perfect idea, now armed with the knowledge that the quest begins on paper.", "year": "2010", "author": "The Standardistas", "author_slug": "thestandardistas", "published": "2010-12-13T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2010/good-ideas-grow-on-paper/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 282, "title": "Front-end Style Guides", "contents": "We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don\u2019t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn\u2019t leave behind any documentation, we can\u2019t really blame them for messing up our hard work.\n\nTo counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide provides details such as how much white space should surround a logo, which typefaces and colours a brand uses, along with when and where it is appropriate to use them.\n\nDesign guidelines\n\nSome design guidelines focus on visual branding and identity. The UK National Health Service (NHS) refer to theirs as \u201cbrand guidelines\u201d. They help any designer create something such as a trustworthy leaflet for an NHS doctor\u2019s surgery. Similarly, Transport for London\u2019s \u201cdesign standards\u201d ensure the correct logos and typefaces are used in communications, and that they comply with the Disability Discrimination Act.\n\nSome guidelines go further, encompassing a whole experience, from the visual branding to the messaging, and the icon sets used. The BBC calls its guidelines a \u201cGlobal Experience Language\u201d or GEL. It\u2019s essential for maintaining coherence across multiple sites under the same BBC brand.\n\n\nThe BBC\u2019s Global Experience Language.\n\nDesign guidelines may be brief and loose to promote creativity, like Mozilla\u2019s \u201cbrand toolkit\u201d, or be precise and run to many pages to encourage greater conformity, such as Apple\u2019s \u201cHuman Interface Guidelines\u201d.\n\nWhatever name or form they\u2019re given, documenting reusable styles is invaluable when maintaining a brand identity over time, particularly when more than one person (who may not be a designer) is producing material.\n\nCode standards documents\n\nWe can make a similar argument for code. For example, in open source projects, where hundreds of developers are submitting code, it makes sense to set some standards. Drupal and Wordpress have written standards that make editing code less confusing for users, and more maintainable for contributors.\n\nEach community has nuances: Drupal requests that developers indent with two spaces, while Wordpress stipulates a tab. Whatever the rules, good code standards documents also explain why they make their recommendations.\n\nThe front-end developer\u2019s style guide\n\nDesign style guides and code standards documents have been a successful way of ensuring brand and code consistency, but in between the code and the design examples, web-based style guides are emerging. These are maintained by front-end developers, and are more dynamic than visual design guidelines, documenting every component and its code on the site in one place.\n\nHere are a few examples I\u2019ve seen in the wild:\n\nNatalie Downe\u2019s pattern portfolio\n\nNatalie created the pattern portfolio system while working at Clearleft. The phrase describes a single HTML page containing all the site\u2019s components and styles that can act as a deliverable.\n\n\nPattern portfolio by Natalie Downe for St Paul\u2019s School, kept up to date when new components are added. The entire page is about four times the length shown.\n\nEach different item within a pattern portfolio is a building block or module. The components are decoupled from the layout, and linearized so they can slot into anywhere on a page.\n\n\n\tThe pattern portfolio expresses every component and layout structure in the smallest number of documents. It sets out how the markup and CSS should be, and is used to illustrate the project\u2019s shared vocabulary.\n\n\tNatalie Downe\n\n\nBy developing a system, rather than individual pages, the result is flexible when the client wants to add more pages later on.\n\nPaul Lloyd\u2019s style guide\n\nPaul Lloyd has written an extremely comprehensive style guide for his site. Not only does it feature every plausible element, but it also explains in detail when it\u2019s appropriate to use each one.\n\n\nPaul\u2019s style guide is also great educational material for people learning to write code.\n\nOli Studholme\u2019s style guide\n\nEven though Oli\u2019s style guide is specific to his site, he\u2019s written it as though it\u2019s for someone else. It\u2019s exhaustive and gives justifications for all his decisions. In some places, he links to browser bug tickets and makes recommendations for cross-browser compatibility.\n\n\nOli has released his style guide under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, and encourages others to create their own versions.\n\nJeremy Keith\u2019s pattern primer\n\nFront-end style guides may have comments written in the code, annotations that appear on the page, or they may list components alongside their code, like Jeremy\u2019s pattern primer.\n\n\nYou can watch or fork Jeremy\u2019s pattern primer on Github.\n\n\n\nLinearizing components like this resembles a kind of mobile first approach to development, which Jeremy talks about on the 5by5 podcast: The Web Ahead 3.\n\nThe benefits of maintaining a front-end style guide\n\nIf you still need convincing that producing documentation like this for every project is worth the effort, here are a few nice side-effects to working this way:\n\nEasier to test\n\nA unified style guide makes it easier to spot where your design breaks. It\u2019s simple to check how components adapt to different screen widths, test for browser bugs and develop print style sheets when everything is on the same page. When I worked with Natalie, she\u2019d resize the browser window and bump the text size up and down during development to see if anything would break.\n\nBetter workflow\n\nThe approach also forces you to think how something works in relation to the whole site, rather than just a specific page, making it easier to add more pages later on. Starting development by creating a style guide makes a lot more sense than developing on a page-by-page basis.\n\nShared vocabulary\n\nNatalie\u2019s pattern portfolio in particular creates a shared vocabulary of names for components (teaser, global navigation, carousel\u2026), so a team can refer to different regions of the site and have a shared understanding of its meaning.\n\nUseful reference\n\nA combined style guide also helps designers and writers to see the elements that will be incorporated in the site and, therefore, which need to be designed or populated. A boilerplate list of components for every project can act as a reminder of things that may get missed in the design, such as button states or error messages. \n\nCreating your front-end style guide\n\nAs you\u2019ve seen, there are plenty of variations on the web style guide. Which method is best depends on your project and workflow. Let\u2019s say you want to show your content team how blockquotes and asides look, when it\u2019s appropriate to use them, and how to create them within the CMS. In this case, a combination of Jeremy\u2019s pattern primer and Paul\u2019s descriptive style guide \u2013 with the styled component alongside a code snippet and a description of when to use it \u2013 may be ideal. \n\nStart work on your style guide as soon as you can, preferably during the design stage:\n\n\n\tSimply presenting flat image comps is by no means enough\u2009-\u2009it\u2019s only the start\u2026 As layouts become more adaptable, flexible and context-specific, so individual components will become the focus of our design. It is therefore essential to get the foundational aspects of our designs right, and style guides allow us to do that.\n\n\tPaul Lloyd on Style guides for the Web \n\n\n\n\tPrint out the designs and label the unique elements and components you\u2019ll need to add to your style guide. Make a note of the purpose of each component. While you\u2019re doing this, identify the main colours used for things like links, headings and buttons.\nI draw over the print-outs on to tracing paper so I can make more annotations. Here, I\u2019ve started annotating the widths from the designer\u2019s mockup so I can translate these into percentages.\n\tStart developing your style guide with base styles that target core elements: headings, links, tables, blockquotes, ordered lists, unordered lists and forms. For these elements, you could maintain a standard document to reuse for every project.\n\tNext, add the components that override the base styles, like search boxes, breadcrumbs, feedback messages and blog comments. Include interaction styles, such as hover, focus and visited state on links, and hover, focus and active states on buttons.\n\tNow start adding layout and begin slotting the components into place. You may want to present each layout as a separate document, or you could have them all on the same page stacked beneath one another.\n\n\nDocument code practices\n\nCode can look messy when people use different conventions, so note down a standard approach alongside your style guide. For example, Paul Stanton has documented how he writes CSS.\n\nThe gift wrapping\n\nPresenting this documentation to your client may be a little overwhelming so, to be really helpful, create a simple page that links together all your files and explains what each of them do.\n\n\nThis is an example of a contents page that Clearleft produce for their clients. They\u2019ve added date stamps, subversion revision numbers and written notes for each file.\n\nEncourage participation\n\nThere\u2019s always a risk that the person you\u2019re writing the style guide for will ignore it completely, so make your documentation as user-friendly as possible. Justify why you do things a certain way to make it more approachable and encourage similar behaviour.\n\nAs always, good communication helps. Working with the designer to put together this document will improve the site. It\u2019s often not practical for designers to provide a style for everything, so drafting a web style guide and asking for feedback gives designers a chance to make sure any default styles fit in.\n\nIf you work in a team with other developers, documenting your code and development decisions will not only be useful as a deliverable, but will also force you to think about why you do things a certain way.\n\nFuture-friendly\n\nThe roles of designer and developer are increasingly blurred, yet all too often we work in isolation. Working side-by-side with designers on web style guides can vastly improve the quality of our work, and the collaborative approach can spark discussions like \u201chow would this work on a smaller screen?\u201d\n\nSometimes we can be so focused on getting the site ready and live, that we lose sight of what happens after it\u2019s launched, and how it\u2019s going to be maintained. A simple web style guide can make all the difference.\n\nIf you make your own style guide, I\u2019d love to add it to my stash of examples so please share a link to it in the comments.", "year": "2011", "author": "Anna Debenham", "author_slug": "annadebenham", "published": "2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2011/front-end-style-guides/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 302, "title": "Flexible Project Management in Inflexible Environments", "contents": "Handling unforeseen circumstances is an inevitable part of any project. It\u2019s also often the most uncomfortable, and there is no amount of skill or planning that will fully eradicate the need to adapt to change. The ability to be flexible, responsive, and unafraid of facing not only problems, but also potentially positive scope changes and new ideas, isn\u2019t an easy one to master. I am by no means saying that I have, but what I have learned is that there is often the temptation to shut out anything that might derail your plan, even sometimes at the cost of the quality you\u2019re committed to.\nThe reality is that as someone leading a project you know there will be challenges, but, in general, it\u2019s a hassle to try keep the landscape open. Problems are bridges we should cross when we come to them, but intentional changes to the plan, and adapting for the sake of improving your first idea, is harder. There are tight schedules, resource is planned miles ahead, and you\u2019re already juggling twenty other things. If you\u2019re passionate about the quality of work you deliver and are working somewhere that considers itself expert within the field of digital, then having an attitude of flexibility is extremely important. It\u2019s important when you\u2019re overcoming a challenge or problem, but it\u2019s also important for allowing ideas to evolve and be refined as much as they can be throughout the course of a project.\nWhere theory falls short\nThe premise of any Agile methodology, Scrum for example, is based around being able to work efficiently, react quickly and deliver relevant chunks of a product in manageable increments. It\u2019s often hailed as king of flexible management and it can work really well, especially for in-house software products developed over a long or even an indefinite period of time. It holds off defining scope too far ahead and lets teams focus on smaller amounts of work, and allows them to regularly reprioritise. Unfortunately though, not all environments lend themselves as easily to a fully Agile setup. Even the ones that do may be restrained from putting it fully into practice for an array of other internal reasons.\nDelivering digital services to clients\u2014within an agency setting or as a freelancer\u2014often demands a more rigid structure. You need clear sign-off points, there\u2019s a lot less flexibility in defining features, or working within budgets and timeframes. To start with, for a project to warrant a fully Agile team working on it, and especially for agencies, you need clients big enough and rich enough to justify the resource. You also need a lot of client trust to propose defining features and scope as you go. Although this is achievable\u2014and there are agencies that operate an agile setup\u2014it takes a long journey to reach that scale in the full sense of the word. Building a reputation that commands unconditional trust and reaching the point where your projects are consistently of a certain size often requires backing by long journey of success and excellence.\nSo there is a lot of room left for understanding how we can best strive to still deliver excellent projects within more constrained structures. We know that rigid waterfall planning, more often than not, falls over as soon as a project gets anything past a basic brochure site. There are many critiques of the system, but one of the main ones tends to be that nobody considers each other\u2019s work properly, which can result in very expensive and inefficient development.\nEqually, for reasons we\u2019ve already touched upon, running fully agile teams often isn\u2019t the right answer. So many companies, individuals, and organisations look for a middle-ground that balances being flexible and adaptive, but also provides enough upfront commitment to agree budgets, get client/stakeholder sign off, and effectively coordinate internal resource across multiple parallel projects.\nAlthough I don\u2019t have a perfect formula\u2014and can very much assert there is no one perfect way of managing a project because every project is different to the next\u2014I\u2019ve identified a few different ways you can approach flexibility that have really helped me in running projects more smoothly within more realistic constraints.\nPlanned Flexibility\nDrawing on some of the traditional methodologies such as PRINCE2, a good starting point for aspiring to be flexible is by planning for it from the start.\nPlanning flexibility comes in a few forms. For one, you can regularly identify and log potential risks as a generally good, on-going habit over the course of the project. This essentially just involves scanning the horizon for potential blips on a regular basis (for example weekly) by consulting with your team and documenting it somewhere. It means you have a checkpoint when you sit down and make sure you\u2019re minimising what will or may catch you by surprise. A good time to do this is in a weekly catch up meeting. It\u2019s not going to fix all your problems, but it will make sure you have a head start on the ones you can see coming.\nOn the subject of team meetings, setting up recurring project events, including a weekly call, a weekly team meeting and (depending on the size of the project) I like to try also do a stand-up as often as possible. Keeping everyone involved and bought in to a project is going to help you infinitely when you need to spot a problem or manage changes to the plan. It will be the difference between your designer spotting an issue and making a mental note to \u2018tell you later\u2019, and them actually coming over to tell you directly and immediately. Despite the overhead of meetings, and looping people into stages that they aren\u2019t directly responsible for, the business benefits are chances for success are drastically increased. Planning in, and being aware of how important your team is, will help you be flexible.\nBuilding contingency (formally know as slack) into your project plan from the word go is another well-known and essential way of planning to be flexible. Your project plan will change a lot over the course of a project, but there are still the days that you estimate a job will take, and the days you should actually plan in. Most sensible management teams understand that budgets need to be agreed with this slack in mind or you will not be able to deliver a quality service. I believe that commercial awareness is one of the most valuable skills a project manager can have, but penny pinching will ruin client and team relationships, destroy buy-in and creativity, and often end you up with a much more expensive, hacky, and resented product.\nIt\u2019s not a justification to let budgets spiral out of control, but a way of thinking about the bigger picture and wider plan of the company itself. It\u2019s unlikely you want high staff turnover because everyone fell out while you were screaming money at them and they didn\u2019t feel like they could do a good job. It\u2019s also unlikely that you will be able to deliver quality products, which will win you a strong reputation and subsequently bigger and better projects. Evaluating risk factors and building in the right amount of slack from the start will give you more wriggle room when you need to adapt and react. On the flip side, also keeping an overview of the wider workload (that you\u2019re not necessarily responsible for), and knowing who to talk if resource is becoming free or needs filling, is another handy way of being able to react quickly and ensuring your management system is respected. You want pockets of backup time planned in, but you also want everyone being as productive as they can most of the time. Never run at 100% capacity: as soon as something does need to change, you\u2019re left with nowhere to move.\nTransparency\nHaving a client or stakeholder that trusts you is a really powerful aid in any regard, but especially so when you need to communicate an issue or new suggestion. Positioning yourself and your team as experts and taking the time to delve into the wider picture\u2014and the goals surrounding your client\u2019s reasons to commission the project in the first place\u2014will make you more valuable to them. Clients and stakeholders will always be different, and sometimes you will get people who are just plain difficult, but more often than not people will listen if you\u2019re willing to talk and explain things.\nAs I\u2019m sure all of us have realised at one point or another, a lot of people think they know what they want, and it\u2019s usually the wrong thing. Managing key stakeholders in your project is arguably your biggest challenge, if they are on the your side and feel like the team is genuinely working to give them something of quality and value, then they will make your job easier. It\u2019s often down to you to educate them, and to help them recognise and understand the work involved and you and your team\u2019s reasoning behind your decisions.\nBeing overly submissive or overly secretive will foster a dynamic in which they feel expected to steer the project. In this situation they may not respect the team\u2019s suggestions or may come up with some unreasonable and counterproductive ideas that are likely to hinder progress and lower morale. Getting the stakeholder on board and making them feel a part of the wider picture will make things easier. Pushing back and challenging ideas or working hard to justify something they don\u2019t quite understand will often work in your favour and protects your team. On quite a basic level it also shows you care and are invested; on another, it shows you feel confident in your expertise within your field and that is ultimately the reason they hired you.\nTaking the time to think about and be aware of this relationship, will make it easier to be flexible and handle new ideas or suggestions that pop up as the project goes along. Change doesn\u2019t need to be \u2018scope creep\u2019 if it\u2019s raised in a practical, value-orientated, and level headed discussion. There is usually a way forward for new ideas, as long as they\u2019re valuable and support the wider goals. Maybe the deadline gets pushed back, maybe you get more budget, maybe the client is happy to forgo something else. As long as there\u2019s value and reason, it shows integrity to the project and respect for its success. You can\u2019t expect for this to go smoothly without having invested in the client relationship, so it\u2019s a large point in paving the way to handling change well.\nReactive Flexibility\nFinally, if you\u2019ve been doing this for a while, you\u2019ll know by now that you can\u2019t anticipate everything. Sometimes you will have to react and change the plan under circumstances that aren\u2019t easy. When an unexpected problem first rears its head\u2014a client\u2019s casual afterthought that\u2019s threatening the scope of the project, an internal resource conflict, a junior member of staff that\u2019s not grasping the ropes quite as quickly as you\u2019d hoped\u2014you have to react quickly.\nIn his book, \u2018Pitch Anything\u2019, Oren Klaff talks about people\u2019s first reactions being processed by their \u2018crocodile brain\u2019 before they\u2019ve had a chance to refine and digest the information more intelligibly. As project managers, product owners, or scrum masters, it\u2019s natural for our immediate reactions to an unexpected problem to cause a pang of stress. But after that initial jolt you need to turn to practical solutions and start racking your brain for different ways forward. It\u2019s here you need to remember to not let your imagination get the better of you, especially if you\u2019ve been putting in the legwork with your team and your client. There is always a way forward and moments like this can be a good opportunity to develop your negotiation and diplomacy skills. Don\u2019t let your immediate reaction be shutting the problem down; instead, take a second to think about it before you decide on the best direction. In a stressful situation, your first idea probably won\u2019t be your best one.\nFrom an internal point of view, it\u2019s very important that whatever went wrong doesn\u2019t turn into a finger pointing exercise and you don\u2019t lose your cool. Getting caught up in a blame game or a witch hunt is never productive. Relationship cultivating can sometimes be the pillar that gets you through a stressful blip. Biggest tip for staying flexible when you\u2019re reacting to a problem\u2014apart form obviously thinking of ways forward\u2014is to communicate. Don\u2019t go quiet until you feel like you have a plan, you\u2019ll often need to put everyone else at ease before you can move things forward. Problem solving is part of the job and will need to happen in even the most flexible of product delivery systems.\nIn conclusion, being flexible is never simple but there are things you can do to make your life easier. Owning a position of expertise, putting together a team that\u2019s involved in each other\u2019s work and cultivating a client/stakeholder relationship that\u2019s as transparent and respectful as possible will get you a long way. In times of crisis, believe in your skills and be open to adapting over getting frustrated.", "year": "2016", "author": "Gillian Sibthorpe", "author_slug": "gilliansibthorpe", "published": "2016-12-04T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2016/flexible-project-management/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 304, "title": "Five Lessons From My First 18 Months as a Dev", "contents": "I recently moved from Sydney to London to start a dream job with Twitter as a software engineer. A software engineer! Who would have thought.\nHaving started my career as a journalist, the title \u2018engineer\u2019 is very strange to me. The notion of writing in first person is also very strange. Journalists are taught to be objective, invisible, to keep yourself out of the story. And here I am writing about myself on a public platform. Cringe.\nSince I started learning to code I\u2019ve often felt compelled to write about my experience. I want to share my excitement and struggles with the world! But as a junior I\u2019ve been held back by thoughts like \u2018whatever you have to say won\u2019t be technical enough\u2019, \u2018any time spent writing a blog would be better spent writing code\u2019, \u2018blogging is narcissistic\u2019, etc.\u00a0\nWell, I\u2019ve been told that your thirties are the years where you stop caring so much about what other people think. And I\u2019m almost 30. So here goes!\nThese are five key lessons from my first year and a half in tech:\nDeployments should delight, not dread \n\nLesson #1: Making your deployment process as simple as possible is worth the investment.\n\nIn my first dev job, I dreaded deployments. We would deploy every Sunday night at 8pm. Preparation would begin the Friday before. A nominated deployment manager would spend half a day tagging master, generating scripts, writing documentation and raising JIRAs. The only fun part was choosing a train gif to post in HipChat: \u2018All aboard! The deployment train leaves in 3, 2, 1\u2026\u201d\n\nWhen Sunday night came around, at least one person from every squad would need to be online to conduct smoke tests. Most times, the deployments would succeed. Other times they would fail. Regardless, deployments ate into people\u2019s weekend time\u200a\u2014\u200aand they were intense. Devs would rush to have their code approved before the Friday cutoff. Deployment managers who were new to the process would fear making a mistake.\u00a0\nThe team knew deployments were a problem. They were constantly striving to improve them. And what I\u2019ve learnt from Twitter is that when they do, their lives will be bliss.\nTweetDeck\u2019s deployment process fills me with joy and delight. It\u2019s quick, easy and stress free. In fact, it\u2019s so easy I deployed code on my first day in the job! Anyone can deploy, at any time of day, with a single command. Rollbacks are just as simple. There\u2019s no rush to make the deployment train. No manual preparation. No fuss. Value\u200a\u2014\u200awhether in the form of big new features, simple UI improvements or even production bug fixes\u200a\u2014\u200acan be shipped in an instant. The team assures me the process wasn\u2019t always like this. They invested lots of time in making their deployments better. And it\u2019s clearly paid off.\nCode reviews need love, time and acceptance \n\nLesson #2: Code reviews are a three-way gift. Every time I review someone else\u2019s code, I help them, the team and myself.\n\nCode reviews were another pain point in my previous job. And to be honest, I was part of the problem. I would raise code reviews that were far too big. They would take days, sometimes weeks, to get merged. One of my reviews had 96 comments! I would rarely review other people\u2019s code because I felt too junior, like my review didn\u2019t carry any weight.\u00a0\nThe review process itself was also tiring, and was often raised in retrospectives as being slow. In order for code to be merged it needed to have ticks of approval from two developers and a third tick from a peer tester. It was the responsibility of the author to assign the reviewers and tester. It was felt that if it was left to team members to assign themselves to reviews, the \u201csomeone else will do it\u201d mentality would kick in, and nothing would get done.\nAt TweetDeck, no-one is specifically assigned to reviews. Instead, when a review is raised, the entire team is notified. Without fail, someone will jump on it. Reviews are seen as blocking. They\u2019re seen to be equally, if not more important, than your own work. I haven\u2019t seen a review sit for longer than a few hours without comments.\u00a0\nWe also don\u2019t work on branches. We push single commits for review, which are then merged to master. This forces the team to work in small, incremental changes. If a review is too big, or if it\u2019s going to take up more than an hour of someone\u2019s time, it will be sent back.\nWhat I\u2019ve learnt so far at Twitter is that code reviews must be small. They must take priority. And they must be a team effort. Being a new starter is no \u201cget out of jail free card\u201d. In fact, it\u2019s even more of a reason to be reviewing code. Reviews are a great way to learn, get across the product and see different programming styles. If you\u2019re like me, and find code reviews daunting, ask to pair with a senior until you feel more confident. I recently paired with my mentor at Twitter and found it really helpful.\nGet friendly with feature flagging \n\nLesson #3: Feature flagging gives you complete control over how you build and release a project.\n\nSay you\u2019re implementing a new feature. It\u2019s going to take a few weeks to complete. You\u2019ll complete the feature in small, incremental changes. At what point do these changes get merged to master? At what point do they get deployed? Do you start at the back end and finish with the UI, so the user won\u2019t see the changes until they\u2019re ready? With feature flagging\u200a\u2014\u200ait doesn\u2019t matter. In fact, with feature flagging, by the time you are ready to release your feature, it\u2019s already deployed, sitting happily in master with the rest of your codebase.\u00a0\nA feature flag is a boolean value that gets wrapped around the code relating to the thing you\u2019re working on. The code will only be executed if the value is true.\nif (TD.decider.get(\u2018new_feature\u2019)) {\n //code for new feature goes here\n}\nIn my first dev job, I deployed a navigation link to the feature I\u2019d been working on, making it visible in the product, even though the feature wasn\u2019t ready. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you use a feature flag?\u201d a senior dev asked me. An honest response would have been: \u201cBecause they\u2019re confusing to implement and I don\u2019t understand the benefits of using them.\u201d The fix had to wait until the next deployment.\nThe best thing about feature flagging at TweetDeck is that there is no need to deploy to turn on or off a feature. We set the status of the feature via an interface called Deckcider, and the code makes regular API requests to get the status.\u00a0\nAt TweetDeck we are also able to roll our features out progressively. The first rollout might be to a staging environment. Then to employees only. Then to 10 per cent of users, 20 per cent, 30 per cent, and so on. A gradual rollout allows you to monitor for bugs and unexpected behaviour, before releasing the feature to the entire user base.\nSometimes a piece of work requires changes to existing business logic. So the code might look more like this:\nif (TD.decider.get(\u2018change_to_existing_feature\u2019)) {\n //new logic goes here\n} else {\n //old logic goes here\n}\nThis seems messy, right? Riddling your code with if else statements to determine which path of logic should be executed, or which version of the UI should be displayed. But at Twitter, this is embraced. You can always clean up the code once a feature is turned on. This isn\u2019t essential, though. At least not in the early days. When a cheeky bug is discovered, having the flag in place allows the feature to be very quickly turned off again. \nLet data and experimentation drive development \n\nLesson #4: Use data to determine the direction of your product and measure its success.\n\nThe first company I worked for placed a huge amount of emphasis on data-driven decision making. If we had an idea, or if we wanted to make a change, we were encouraged to \u201cbring data\u201d to show why it was necessary. \u201cWithout data, you\u2019re just another person with an opinion,\u201d the chief data scientist would say. This attitude helped to ensure we were building the right things for our customers. Instead of just plucking a new feature out of thin air, it was chosen based on data that reflected its need.\nBut how do you design that feature? How do you know that the design you choose will have the desired impact? That\u2019s where experiments come into play.\u00a0\nAt TweetDeck we make UI changes that we hope will delight our users. But the assumptions we make about our users are often wrong. Our front-end team recently sat in a room and tried to guess which UIs from A/B tests had produced better results. Half the room guessed incorrectly every time.\nWe can\u2019t assume a change we want to make will have the impact we expect. So we run an experiment. Here\u2019s how it works. Users are placed into buckets. One bucket of users will have access to the new feature, the other won\u2019t. We hypothesise that the bucket exposed to the new feature will have better results. The beauty of running an experiment is that we\u2019ll know for sure. Instead of blindly releasing the feature to all users without knowing its impact, once the experiment has run its course, we\u2019ll have the data to make decisions accordingly.\nHire the developer, not the degree\n\nLesson #5: Testing candidates on real world problems will allow applicants from all backgrounds to shine.\n\nSurely, a company like Twitter would give their applicants insanely difficult code tests, and the toughest technical questions, that only the cleverest CS graduates could pass, I told myself when applying for the job. Lucky for me, this wasn\u2019t the case. The process was insanely difficult\u2014don\u2019t get me wrong\u2014but the team at TweetDeck gave me real world problems to solve.\nThe first code test involved bug fixes, performance and testing. The second involved DOM traversal and manipulation. Instead of being put on the spot in a room with a whiteboard and pen I was given a task, access to the internet, and time to work on it. Similarly, in my technical interviews, I was asked to pair program on real world problems that I was likely to face on the job.\nIn one of my phone screenings I was told Twitter wanted to increase diversity in its teams. Not just gender diversity, but also diversity of experience and background. Six months later, with a bunch of new hires, team lead Tom Ashworth says TweetDeck has the most diverse team it\u2019s ever had. \u201cWe designed an interview process that gave us a way to simulate the actual job,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about testing whether you learnt an algorithm in school.\u201d\nIs this lowering the bar? No. The bar is whether a candidate has the ability to solve problems they are likely to face on the job. I recently spoke to a longstanding Atlassian engineer who said they hadn\u2019t seen an algorithm in their seven years at the company.\nThese days, only about 50 per cent of developers have computer science degrees. The majority of developers are self taught, learn on the job or via online courses. If you want to increase diversity in your engineering team, ensure your interview process isn\u2019t excluding these people.", "year": "2016", "author": "Amy Simmons", "author_slug": "amysimmons", "published": "2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2016/my-first-18-months-as-a-dev/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 130, "title": "Faster Development with CSS Constants", "contents": "Anyone even slightly familiar with a programming language will have come across the concept of constants \u2013 a fixed value that can be used through your code. For example, in a PHP script I might have a constant which is the email address that all emails generated by my application get sent to. \n\n$adminEmail = 'info@example.com';\n\nI could then use $adminEmail in my script whenever I wanted an email to go to that address. The benefit of this is that when the client decides they want the email to go to a different address, I only need change it in one place \u2013 the place where I initially set the constant. I could also quite easily make this value user defined and enable the administrator to update the email address.\n\nUnfortunately CSS doesn\u2019t support constants. It would be really useful to be able to define certain values initially and then use them throughout a CSS file, so in this article I\u2019m going to take a look at some of the methods we do have available and provide pointers to more in depth commentary on each. If you have a different method, or tip to share please add it to the comments.\n\nSo what options do we have?\n\nOne way to get round the lack of constants is to create some definitions at the top of your CSS file in comments, to define \u2018constants\u2019. A common use for this is to create a \u2018color glossary\u2019. This means that you have a quick reference to the colors used in the site to avoid using alternates by mistake and, if you need to change the colors, you have a quick list to go down and do a search and replace. \n\nIn the below example, if I decide I want to change the mid grey to #999999, all I need to do is search and replace #666666 with #999999 \u2013 assuming I\u2019ve remember to always use that value for things which are mid grey.\n\n/*\nDark grey (text): #333333\nDark Blue (headings, links) #000066\nMid Blue (header) #333399\nLight blue (top navigation) #CCCCFF\nMid grey: #666666\n*/\n\nThis is a fairly low-tech method, but if used throughout the development of the CSS files can make changes far simpler and help to ensure consistency in your color scheme.\n\nI\u2019ve seen this method used by many designers however Garrett Dimon documents the method, with more ideas in the comments.\n\nGoing server-side\n\nTo truly achieve constants you will need to use something other than CSS to process the file before it is sent to the browser. You can use any scripting language \u2013 PHP, ASP, ColdFusion etc. to parse a CSS file in which you have entered constants. So that in a constants section of the CSS file you would have:\n\n$darkgrey = '#333333';\n$darkblue = '#000066';\n\nThe rest of the CSS file is as normal except that when you come to use the constant value you would use the constant name instead of adding the color:\n\np {\n\tcolor: $darkgrey;\n}\n\nYour server-side script could then parse the CSS file, replace the constant names with the constant values and serve a valid CSS file to the browser. Christian Heilmann has done just this for PHP however this could be adapted for any language you might have available on your server.\n\nShaun Inman came up with another way \n of doing this that removes the need to link to a PHP script and also enables the adding of constants using the syntax of at-rules . This method is again using PHP and will require you to edit an .htaccess file. \n\nA further method is to generate static CSS files either using a script locally \u2013 if the constants are just to enable speed of development \u2013 or as part of the web application itself. Storing a template stylesheet with constant names in place of the values you will want to update means that your script can simply open the template, replace the variables and save the result as a new stylesheet file.\n\nWhile CSS constants are a real help to developers, they can also be used to add new functionality to your applications. As with the email address example that I used at the beginning of this article, using a combination of CSS and server-side scripting you could enable a site administrator to select the colours for a new theme to be used on a page of a content managed site. By using constants you need only give them the option to change certain parts of the CSS and not upload a whole different CSS file, which could lead to some interesting results!\n\nAs we are unlikely to find real CSS constants under the tree this Christmas the above methods are some possibilities for better management of your stylesheets. However if you have better methods, CSS Constant horror stories or any other suggestions, add your comments below.", "year": "2006", "author": "Rachel Andrew", "author_slug": "rachelandrew", "published": "2006-12-02T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2006/faster-development-with-css-constants/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 123, "title": "Fast and Simple Usability Testing", "contents": "Everyone knows by now that they should test the usability of their applications, but still hardly anybody actually does it. In this article I\u2019ll share some tips I\u2019ve picked up for doing usability tests quickly and effectively.\n\nRelatively recent tools like Django and Ruby on Rails allow us to develop projects faster and to make significant changes later in the project timeline. Usability testing methods should now be adapted to fit this modern approach to development.\n\nWhen to test\n\nIn an ideal world usability tests would be carried out frequently from an early stage of the project. Time and budget constraints lead this to be impractical; usability is often the first thing to get dropped from the project plan.\n\nIf you can only test at one stage in the project, whatever the size, the most valuable time is before your first public beta \u2014 leaving long enough to fix issues and not so late that you can\u2019t rethink your scope.\n\nThere are three main categories of usability test:\n\n\n\tTesting design mockups\n\tTesting a new working application\n\tTesting established applications\n\n\nEach category requires a slightly different approach. For small modern web projects you are most likely to be testing a new working application. You will of course have already done functional tests so you won\u2019t be worried about the user breaking things. The main differences between the categories apply in how you word The Script.\n\nTesting an established application is the most fun in my opinion. Humans are remarkably adaptable and rapidly develop coping strategies to work around usability issues in software they are forced to use. Uncovering these strategies may lead you to understand previously unspoken needs of your users. Often small changes to the application will have a dramatic affect on their everyday lives.\n\nWho to test\n\nWhen you have built a project to scratch your own itch, your intended audience will be people just like you. Test subjects in this case should be easy to find \u2013 friends, co-workers etc.\n\nThis is not always the case; your users may not be like you at all. When they are not, it\u2019s all the more important to run usability tests. Testing on friends, family and co-workers is better than not doing usability tests at all, but it can\u2019t be compared to testing on actual samples of your intended audience. People who would use the system will provide more genuine feedback and deeper insight.\n\nNever let your test subjects put themselves in the shoes of your \u2018actual\u2019 users. For example, you should discourage comments like \u201cWell, I would do this BUT if I was a bus driver I\u2019d do that\u201d. Users are not qualified to put themselves in the position of others. Inaccurate data is often worse than no data.\n\nAim for five or six test subjects: any more and you probably won\u2019t learn anything new; any less and you\u2019re likely to be overwhelmed by issues stemming from people\u2019s individual personalities.\n\nThe Script\n\nThe Script is a single side of A4 (or letter) paper, consisting of questions for your testers and reminders for yourself. Have a balance of task-based questions and expectation analysis. This helps maintain consistency across tests. Expectation analysis is more important for testing designs and new applications: \u201cWhere would you find X?\u201d, \u201cWhat would you expect to happen if you clicked on Y?\u201d. In an established system users will probably know where these things are though it can still be illuminating to ask these questions though phrased slightly differently.\n\nTask-based questions involve providing a task for the user to complete. If you are testing an established system it is a good idea to ask users to bring in tasks that they would normally perform. This is because the user will be more invested in the outcome of the task and will behave in a more realistic fashion. When designing tasks for new systems and designs ensure you only provide loose task details for the same reason. Don\u2019t tell testers to enter \u201cChantelle\u201d; have them use their own name instead. Avoid introducing bias with the way questions are phrased.\n\nIt\u2019s a good idea to ask for users\u2019 first impressions at the beginning of the test, especially when testing design mockups. \u201cWhat are the main elements on the page?\u201d or \u201cWhat strikes you first?\u201d.\n\nYou script should run for a maximum of 45 minutes. 30-35 minutes is better; after this you are likely to lose their attention. Tests on established systems can take longer as there is more to learn from them. When scheduling the test you will need to leave yourself 5 minutes between each one to collate your notes and prepare for the next. Be sure to run through the script beforehand.\n\nYour script should be flexible. It is possible that during the test a trend will come to light that opens up whole new avenues of possible questioning. For example, during one initial test of an established system I noticed that the test subject had been printing off items from the application and placing them in a folder in date order (the system ordered alphabetically). I changed the script to ask future participants in that run, if they ever used external tools to help them with tasks within the system. This revealed a number of interesting issues that otherwise would not have been found.\n\nRunning the tests\n\nTreat your test subjects like hedgehogs. Depending on your target audience they probably feel a little nervous and perhaps even scared of you. So make them a little nest out of straw, stroke their prickles and give them some cat food. Alternatively, reassure them that you are testing the system and that they can\u2019t give a wrong answer. Reward them with a doughnut or jam tart at the end. Try to ensure the test environment is relaxed and quiet, but also as close as possible to the situation where they would actually use the system.\n\nHave your subjects talk out loud is very important as you can\u2019t read their minds, but it is a very unnatural process. To loosen up your subjects and get them talking in the way you want them to, try the Stapler Trick. Give them a stapler or similar item and ask them to open it, take the staples out, replace them, shut the stapler and staple some paper \u2013 talking all the time about what they see, what they expect to happen, what actually happens and how that matches up. Make them laugh at you.\n\nSay how long the test will take up front, and tell your subject why you are doing it. After the test has been completed, conclude by thanking them for their time and assuring them that they were very useful. Then give them the sugary treat.\n\nWhat to look for\n\nPrimarily, you should look out for incidents where the user stops concentrating on her tasks and starts thinking about the tool and how she is going to use it. For example, when you are hammering in a nail you don\u2019t think about how to use a hammer; good software should be the same. Words like \u2018it\u2019 and \u2018the system\u2019 and are good indications that the test subject has stopped thinking about the task in hand. Note questioning words, especially where testers question their own judgement, \u201cwhy can\u2019t I find \u2026\u201d, \u201cI expected to see \u2026\u201d etc. as this indicates that the work flow for the task may have broken down.\n\nAlso keep an eye on occasions where the user completely fails to do a task. They may need some prompting to unstick them, but you should be careful not to bias the test. These should be the highest priority issues for you to fix. If users recover from getting stuck, make a note of how they recovered. Prolonged periods of silence from the test subject may also require prompting as they should be talking all the time. Ask them what they are thinking or looking for but avoid words like \u2018try\u2019 (e.g. \u2018what are you trying to do?\u2019) as this implies that they are currently failing.\n\nBe wary of users\u2019 opinions on aesthetics and be prepared to bring them back to the script if they get side-tracked.\n\nWriting it up\n\nEven if you are the only developer it\u2019s important to summarise the key issues that emerged during testing: your notes won\u2019t make much sense to you a week or so after the test.\n\nIf you are writing for other people, include a summary no longer than two pages; this can consist of a list or table of the issues including recommendations and their priorities. Remember to anonymise the users in the report. In team situations, you may be surprised at how many people are interested in the results of the usability test even if it doesn\u2019t relate directly to something that they can fix.\n\nTo conclude\u2026\n\nSome usability testing is better than none at all, even for small projects or those with strict deadlines. Make the most of the time and resources available. Choose your users carefully, make them comfortable, summarise your report and don\u2019t forget to leave a doughnut for yourself!", "year": "2006", "author": "Natalie Downe", "author_slug": "nataliedowne", "published": "2006-12-16T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2006/fast-and-simple-usability-testing/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 236, "title": "Extreme Design", "contents": "Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort\u2019s mission: to think up, build and finish something \u2013 without readily available internet access.\n\n Alderney runway, photo by Chris Govias\n\n\n\nWait, no internet?\n\nWell, pretty much. As the creators of /dev/fort James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis put it: \u201cImagine a place with no distractions \u2013 no IM, no Twitter\u201d. But also no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you\u2019ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set.\n\nWe got to work the first night discussing ideas for what we wanted to build. By the time breakfast was cleared up the next morning, we\u2019d settled on Russ\u2019s idea to make the Apollo 13 (PDF) transcript accessible. Days two and three were spent collaboratively planning (KJ style) what features we wanted to build, and unravelling the larger UX challenges of the project. The next five days were spent building it. Within 36 hours of touchdown at Southampton Airport, we launched our creation: spacelog.org\n\nThe weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process. Some of this was driven by James\u2019s and Norm\u2019s experience running these things, but a lot of it materialised while we were there \u2013 especially for our three-strong design team (myself, Gavin O\u2019 Carroll and Chris Govias) who, though we knew each other, had never worked together as a group in this kind of scenario before.\n\nThe outcome was a pretty spectacular process, with a some key takeaways useful for any small group trying to build something quickly.\n\nWhat it\u2019s like inside the fort\n\n/dev/fort has the pressure and pace of a hack day without being a hack day \u2013 primarily, no workshops or interruptions\u201a but also a different mentality. While hack days are typically developer-driven with a \u2018hack first, design later (if at all)\u2019 attitude, James was quick to tell the team to hold off from writing any code until we had a plan. This put a healthy pressure on the design and product folks to slash through the UX problems before we started building.\n\nWhile the fort had definitely more of a hack day feel, all of us were familiar with Agile methods, so we borrowed a few useful techniques such as morning stand-ups and an emphasis on teamwork. We cut some really good features to make our launch date, and chunked the work based on user goals, iterating as we went.\n\nWhat made this design process work?\n\nA golden ratio of teams\n\nMy personal experience both professionally and in free-form situations like this, is a tendency to get/hire a designer. Leaders of businesses, founders of start-ups, organisers of events: one designer is not enough! Finding one ace-blooded designer who can \u2018do everything\u2019 will always result in bottleneck and burnout. Like the nuances between different development languages, design is a multifaceted discipline, and very few can claim to be equally strong in every aspect. Overlap in skill set will result in a stronger, more robust interface.\n\nMore importantly, however, having lots of designers to go around meant that we all had the opportunity to pair with developers, polishing the details that don\u2019t usually get polished. As soon as we launched, the public reception of the design and UX was overwhelmingly positive (proof!). But also, a lot of people asked us who the designer was, attributing it to one person.\n\nWhile it\u2019s important to note that everyone in our team was multitalented (and could easily shift between roles, helping us all stay unblocked), the golden ratio James and Norm devised was two product/developer folks, three interaction designers and eight developers.\n\n photo by Ben Firshman\n\nEquality inside the fortress walls\n\nSomething magical about the fort is how everyone leaves the outside world on the drawbridge. Job titles, professional status, Twitter followers, and so on. Like scout camp, a mutual respect and trust is expected of all the participants. Like extreme programming, extreme design requires us all to be equal partners in a collaborative team. I think this is especially worth noting for designers; our past is filled with the clear hierarchy of the traditional studio system which, however important for taste and style, seems less compatible with modern web/software development methods.\n\nBeing equal doesn\u2019t mean being the same, however. We established clear roles and teams for ourselves on the second day, deferring to that person when a decision needed to be made. As the interface coalesced, the designers and developers took ownership over certain parts to ensure the details got looked after, while staying open to ideas and revisions from the rest of the cohort.\n\nCreate a space where everyone who enters is equal, but be sure to establish clear roles. Even if it\u2019s just for a short while, the environment will be beneficial.\n\n photo by Ben Firshman\n\nHang your heraldry from the rafters\n\nForts and castles are full of lore: coats of arms; paintings of battles; suits of armour. It\u2019s impossible not to be surrounded by these stories, words and ways of thinking. Like the whiteboards on the walls, putting organisational lore in your physical surroundings makes it impossible not to see.\n\nRyan Alexander brought some of those static-cling whiteboard sheets which were quickly filled with use cases; IA; team roles; and, most importantly, a glossary. As soon as we started working on the project, we realised we needed to get clear on what certain words meant: what was a logline, a range, a phase, a key moment? Were the back-end people using these words in the same way design and product was? Quickly writing up a glossary of terms meant everyone was instantly speaking the same language. There was no \u201cAh, I misunderstood because in the data structure x means y\u201d or, even worse, accidental seepage of technical language into the user interface copy.\n\nPut a glossary of your internal terminology somewhere big and fat on the wall. Stand around it and argue until you agree on what it says. Leave it up; don\u2019t underestimate the power of ambient communication and physical reference.\n\nPlan more, download less\n\nWhile internet is forbidden inside the fort, we did go on downloading expeditions: NASA photography; code documentation; and so on. The project wouldn\u2019t have been possible without a few trips to the web. We had two lists on the wall: groceries and supplies; internets \u2013 \u201cloo roll; Tom Stafford photo\u201c.\n\nThis changed our usual design process, forcing us to plan carefully and think of what we needed ahead of time. Getting to the internet was a thirty-minute hike up a snow covered cliff to the town airport, so you really had to need it, too. \n\n The path to the internet\n\nFor the visual design, especially, this resulted in more focus up front, and communication between the designers on what assets we required. It made us make decisions earlier and stick with them, creating less distraction and churn later in the process. \n\nTry it at home: unplug once you\u2019ve got the things you need. As an artist, it\u2019s easier to let your inner voice shine through if you\u2019re not looking at other people\u2019s work while creating.\n\nSocial design\n\nFinally, our design team experimented with a collaborative approach to wireframing. Once we had collectively nailed down use cases, IA, user journeys and other critical artefacts, we tried a pairing approach. One person drew in Illustrator in real time as the other two articulated what to draw. (This would work equally well with two people, but with three it meant that one of us could jump up and consult the lore on the walls or clarify a technical detail.) The result: we ended up considering more alternatives and quickly rallying around one solution, and resolved difficult problems more quickly.\n\nAt a certain stage we discovered it was more efficient for one person to take over \u2013 this happened around the time when the basic wireframes existed in Illustrator and we\u2019d collectively run through the use cases, making sure that everything was accounted for in a broad sense. At this point, take a break, go have a beer, and give yourself a pat on the back.\n\nPut the files somewhere accessible so everyone can use them as their base, and divide up the more detailed UI problems, screens or journeys. At this level of detail it\u2019s better to have your personal headspace.\n\nGavin called this \u2018social design\u2019. Chatting and drawing in real time turned what was normally a rather solitary act into a very social process, with some really promising results. I\u2019d tried something like this before with product or developer folks, and it can work \u2013 but there\u2019s something really beautiful about switching places and everyone involved being equally quick at drawing. That\u2019s not something you get with non-designers, and frequent swapping of the \u2018driver\u2019 and \u2018observer\u2019 roles is a key aspect to pairing.\n\nTackle the forest collectively and the trees individually \u2013 it will make your framework more robust and your details more polished. Win/win. \n\nThe return home\n\nGrateful to see a 3G signal on our phones again, our flight off the island was delayed, allowing for a flurry of domain name look-ups, Twitter catch-up, and e-mails to loved ones. A week in an isolated fort really made me appreciate continuous connectivity, but also just how unique some of these processes might be. \n\nYou just never know what crazy place you might be designing from next.", "year": "2010", "author": "Hannah Donovan", "author_slug": "hannahdonovan", "published": "2010-12-09T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2010/extreme-design/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 101, "title": "Easing The Path from Design to Development", "contents": "As a web developer, I have the pleasure of working with a lot of different designers. There has been a lot of industry discussion of late about designers and developers, focusing on how different we sometimes are and how the interface between our respective phases of a project (that is to say moving from a design phase into production) can sometimes become a battleground.\n\nI don\u2019t believe it has to be a battleground. It\u2019s actually more like being a dance partner \u2013 our steps are different, but as long as we know our own part and have a little knowledge of our partner\u2019s steps, it all goes together to form a cohesive dance. Albeit with less spandex and fewer sequins (although that may depend on the project in question).\n\nAs the process usually flows from design towards development, it\u2019s most important that designers have a little knowledge of how the site is going to be built. At the specialist web development agency I\u2019m part of, we find that designs that have been well considered from a technical perspective help to keep the project on track and on budget.\n\nBased on that experience, I\u2019ve put together my checklist of things that designers should consider before handing their work over to a developer to build.\n\nLayout\n\nOne rookie mistake made by traditionally trained designers transferring to the web is to forget a web browser is not a fixed medium. Unlike designing a magazine layout or a piece of packaging, there are lots of available options to consider. Should the layout be fluid and resize with the window, or should it be set to a fixed width? If it\u2019s fluid, which parts expand and which not? If it\u2019s fixed, should it sit in the middle of the window or to one side?\n\nIf any part of the layout is going to be flexible (get wider and narrower as required), consider how any graphics are affected. Images don\u2019t usually look good if displayed at anything other that their original size, so should they behave? If a column is going to get wider than it\u2019s shown in the Photoshop comp, it may be necessary to provide separate wider versions of any background images.\n\nText size and content volume\n\nA related issue is considering how the layout behaves with both different sizes of text and different volumes of content. Whilst text zooming rather than text resizing is becoming more commonplace as the default behaviour in browsers, it\u2019s still a fundamentally important principal of web design that we are suggesting and not dictating how something should look. Designs must allow for a little give and take in the text size, and how this affects the design needs to be taken into consideration.\n\nKeep in mind that the same font can display differently in different places and platforms. Something as simple as Times will display wider on a Mac than on Windows. However, the main impact of text resizing is the change in how much vertical space copy takes up. This is particularly important where space is limited by the design (making text bigger causes many more problems than making text smaller). Each element from headings to box-outs to navigation items and buttons needs to be able to expand at least vertically, if not horizontally as well. This may require some thought about how elements on the page may wrap onto new lines, as well as again making sure to provide extended versions of any graphical elements.\n\nSimilarly, it\u2019s rare theses days to know exactly what content you\u2019re working with when a site is designed. Many, if not most sites are designed as a series of templates for some kind of content management system, and so designs cannot be tweaked around any specific item of content. Designs must be able to cope with both much greater and much lesser volumes of content that might be thrown in at the lorem ipsum phase.\n\nParticular things to watch out for are things like headings (how do they wrap onto multiple lines) and any user-generated items like usernames. It can be very easy to forget that whilst you might expect something like a username to be 8-12 characters, if the systems powering your site allow for 255 characters they\u2019ll always be someone who\u2019ll go there. Expect them to do so.\n\nAgain, if your site is content managed or not, consider the possibility that the structure might be expanded in the future. Consider how additional items might be added to each level of navigation. Whilst it\u2019s rarely desirable to make significant changes without revisiting the site\u2019s information architecture more thoroughly, it\u2019s an inevitable fact of life that the structure needs a little bit of flexibility to change over time.\n\nInteractions with and without JavaScript\n\nA great number of sites now make good use of JavaScript to streamline the user interface and make everything just that touch more usable. Remember, though, that any developer worth their salt will start by building the interface without JavaScript, get it all working, and then layer that JavaScript on top. This is to allow for users viewing the site without JavaScript available or enabled in their browser.\n\nDesigners need to consider both states of any feature they\u2019re designing \u2013 how it looks and functions with and without JavaScript. If the feature does something fancy with Ajax, consider how the same can be achieved with basic HTML forms, links and intermediary pages. These all need to be designed, because this is how some of your users will interact with the site.\n\nLogged in and logged out states\n\nWhen designing any type of web application or site that has a membership system \u2013 that is to say users can create an account and log into the site \u2013 the design will need to consider how any element is presented in both logged in and logged out states. For some items there\u2019ll be no difference, whereas for others there may be considerable differences.\n\nShould an item be hidden completely not logged out users? Should it look different in some way? Perhaps it should look the same, but prompt the user to log in when they interact with it. If so, what form should that prompt take on and how does the user progress through the authentication process to arrive back at the task they were originally trying to complete?\n\nCouple logged in and logged out states with the possible absence of JavaScript, and every feature needs to be designed in four different states:\n\n\n\tLogged out with JavaScript available\n\tLogged in with JavaScript available\n\tLogged out without JavaScript available\n\tLogged in without JavaScript available\n\n\nFonts\n\nThere are three main causes of war in this world; religions, politics and fonts. I\u2019ve said publicly before that I believe the responsibility for this falls squarely at the feet of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop, like a mistress at a brothel, parades a vast array of ropey, yet strangely enticing typefaces past the eyes of weak, lily-livered designers, who can\u2019t help but crumble to their curvy charms.\n\nYet, on the web, we have to be a little more restrained in our choice of typefaces. The purest solution is always to make the best use of the available fonts, but this isn\u2019t always the most desirable solution from a design point of view. There are several technical solutions such as techniques that utilise Flash (like sIFR), dynamically generated images and even canvas in newer browsers. Discuss the best approach with your developer, as every different technique has different trade-offs, and this may impact the design in other ways.\n\nMessaging\n\nAny site that has interactive elements, from a simple contact form through to fully featured online software application, involves some kind of user messaging. By this I mean the error messages when something goes wrong and the success and thank-you messages when something goes right. These typically appear as the result of an interaction, so are easy to forget and miss off a Photoshop comp.\n\nFor every form, consider what gets displayed to the user if they make a mistake or miss something out, and also what gets displayed back when the interaction is successful. What do they see and where do the go next?\n\nWith Ajax interactions, the user doesn\u2019t get any visual feedback of the site waiting for a response from the server unless you design it that way. Consider using a \u2018waiting\u2019 or \u2018in progress\u2019 spinner to give the user some visual feedback of any background processes. How should these look? How do they animate?\n\nSimilarly, also consider the big error pages like a 404. With luck, these won\u2019t often be seen, but it\u2019s at the point that they are when careful design matters the most.\n\nForm fields\n\nDepending on the visual style of your site, the look of a browser\u2019s default form fields and buttons can sometimes jar. It\u2019s understandable that many a designer wants to change the way they look. Depending on the browser in question, various things can be done to style form fields and their buttons (although it\u2019s not as flexible as most would like).\n\nA common request is to replace the default buttons with a graphical button. This is usually achievable in most cases, although it\u2019s not easy to get a consistent result across all browsers \u2013 particularly when it comes to vertical positioning and the space surrounding the button. If the layout is very precise, or if space is at a premium, it\u2019s always best to try and live with the browser\u2019s default form controls.\n\nWhichever way you go, it\u2019s important to remember that in general, each form field should have a label, and each form should have a submit button. If you find that your form breaks either of those rules, you should double check.\n\nPractical tips for handing files over\n\nThere are a couple of basic steps that a design can carry out to make sure that the developer has the best chance of implementing the design exactly as envisioned.\n\nIf working with Photoshop of Fireworks or similar comping tool, it helps to group and label layers to make it easy for a developer to see which need to be turned on and off to get to isolate parts of the page and different states of the design. Also, if you don\u2019t work in the same office as your developer (and so they can\u2019t quickly check with you), provide a PDF of each page and state so that your developer can see how each page should look aside from any confusion with quick layers are switched on or off. These also act as a handy quick reference that can be used without firing up Photoshop (which can kill both productivity and your machine).\n\nFinally, provide a colour reference showing the RGB values of all the key colours used throughout the design. Without this, the developer will end up colour-picking from the comps, and could potentially end up with different colours to those you intended. Remember, for a lot of developers, working in a tool like Photoshop is like presenting a designer with an SSH terminal into a web server. It\u2019s unfamiliar ground and easy to get things wrong. Be the expert of your own domain and help your colleagues out when they\u2019re out of their comfort zone. That goes both ways.\n\nIn conclusion\n\nWhen asked the question of how to smooth hand-over between design and development, almost everyone who has experienced this situation could come up with their own list. This one is mine, based on some of the more common experiences we have at edgeofmyseat.com. So in bullet point form, here\u2019s my checklist for handing a design over.\n\n\n\tIs the layout fixed, or fluid?\n\tDoes each element cope with expanding for larger text and more content?\n\tAre all the graphics large enough to cope with an area expanding?\n\tDoes each interactive element have a state for with and without JavaScript?\n\tDoes each element have a state for logged in and logged out users?\n\tHow are any custom fonts being displayed? (and does the developer have the font to use?)\n\tDoes each interactive element have error and success messages designed?\n\tDo all form fields have a label and each form a submit button?\n\tIs your Photoshop comp document well organised?\n\tHave you provided flat PDFs of each state?\n\tHave you provided a colour reference?\n\tAre we having fun yet?", "year": "2008", "author": "Drew McLellan", "author_slug": "drewmclellan", "published": "2008-12-01T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2008/easing-the-path-from-design-to-development/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 120, "title": "Easier Page States for Wireframes", "contents": "When designing wireframes for web sites and web apps, it is often overlooked that the same \u2018page\u2019 can look wildly different depending on its context. A logged-in page will look different from a logged-out page; an administrator\u2019s view may have different buttons than a regular user\u2019s view; a power user\u2019s profile will be more extensive than a new user\u2019s.\n\nThese different page states need designing at some point, especially if the wireframes are to form a useful communication medium between designer and developer. Documenting the different permutations can be a time consuming exercise involving either multiple pages in one\u2019s preferred box-and-arrow software, or a fully fledged drawing containing all the possible combinations annotated accordingly.\n\nEnter interactive wireframes and Polypage\n\nInteractive wireframes built in HTML are a great design and communication tool. They provide a clickable prototype, running in the browser as would the final site. As such they give a great feel for how the site will be to use. Once you add in the possibilities of JavaScript and a library such as jQuery, they become even more flexible and powerful.\n\nPolypage is a jQuery plugin which makes it really easy to design multiple page states in HTML wireframes. There\u2019s no JavaScript knowledge required (other than cutting and pasting in a few lines). The page views are created by simply writing all the alternatives into your HTML page and adding special class names to apply state and conditional view logic to the various options. \n\nWhen the page is loaded Polypage automatically detects the page states defined by the class names and creates a control bar enabling the user to toggle page states with the click of a mouse or the clack of a keyboard.\n\n\n\nUsing cookies by way of the jQuery cookie plugin, Polypage retains the view state throughout your prototype. This means you could navigate through your wireframes as if you were logged out; as if you were logged in as an administrator; with notes on or off; or with any other view or state you might require. The possibilities are entirely up to you.\n\nHow does it work?\n\nFirstly you need to link to jQuery, the jQuery cookie plugin and to Polypage. Something like this:\n\n\n\n\n\nThen you need to initialise Polypage on page load using something along these lines:\n\n\n\nNext you need to define the areas of your wireframe which are particular to a given state or view. Do this by applying classes beginning with pp_. Polypage will ignore all other classes in the document.\n\nThe pp_ prefix should be followed by a state name. This can be any text string you like, bearing in mind it will appear in the control bar. Typical page states might include \u2018logged_in\u2019, \u2018administrator\u2019 or \u2018group_owner\u2019. A complete class name would therefore look something like pp_logged_in.\n\nExamples\n\nIf a user is logged in, you might want to specify an option for him or her to sign out. Using Polypage, this could be put in the wireframe as follows:\n\n Sign out \n\nPolypage will identify the pp_logged_in class on the link and hide it (as the \u2018Sign out\u2019 link should only be shown when the page is in the \u2018logged in\u2019 view). Polypage will then automatically write a \u2018logged in\u2019 toggle to the control bar, enabling you to show or hide the \u2018Sign out\u2019 link by toggling the \u2018logged in\u2019 view. The same will apply to all content marked with a pp_logged_in class.\n\nStates can also be negated by adding a not keyword to the class name. For example you might want to provide a log in link for users who are not signed in. Using Polypage, you would insert the not keyword after the pp prefix as follows:\n\n Login \n\nAgain Polypage identifies the pp prefix but this time sees that the \u2018Login\u2019 link should not be shown when the \u2018logged in\u2019 state is selected.\n\nStates can also be joined together to add some basic logic to pages. The syntax follows natural language and uses the or and and keywords in addition to the afore-mentioned not. Some examples would be pp_logged_in_and_admin, pp_admin_or_group_owner and pp_logged_in_and_not_admin.\n\nFinally, you can set default states for a page by passing an array to the polypage.init() function like this:\n\n$.polypage.init(['logged_in', 'admin']);\n\nYou can see a fully fledged example in this fictional social network group page. The example page defaults to a logged in state. You can see the logged out state by toggling \u2018logged in\u2019 off in the Polypage control bar. There are also views specified for a group member, a group admin, a new group and notes. \n\nWhere can I get hold of it?\n\nYou can download the current version from GitHub.\n\nPolypage was originally developed by Clearleft and New Bamboo, with particular contributions from Andy Kent and Natalie Downe. It has been used in numerous real projects, but it is still an early release so there is bound to be room for improvement. We\u2019re pleased to say that Polypage is now an open source project so any feedback, particularly by way of actual improvements, is extremely welcome.", "year": "2008", "author": "Richard Rutter", "author_slug": "richardrutter", "published": "2008-12-11T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2008/easier-page-states-for-wireframes/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 226, "title": "Documentation-Driven Design for APIs", "contents": "Documentation is like gift wrapping. It seems like superfluous fluff, but your family tends to be rather disappointed when their presents arrive in supermarket carrier bags, so you have to feign some sort of attempt at making your gift look enticing. Documentation doesn\u2019t have to be all hard work and sellotaping yourself to a table \u2013 you can make it useful and relevant.\n\nDocumentation gets a pretty rough deal. It tends to get left until the end of a project, when some poor developer is assigned the \u2018document project\u2019 ticket and wades through each feature of Whizzy New API 3.0 and needs to recall exactly what each method is meant to do. That\u2019s assuming any time is left for documentation at all. The more common outcome resembles last minute homework scribbled on a post-it note, where just the bare bones of what\u2019s available are put out for your users, and you hope that you\u2019ll spot the inconsistencies and mistakes before they do.\n\nWouldn\u2019t it be nicer for everyone if you could make documentation not only outstanding for your users, but also a valuable tool for your development team \u2013 so much so that you couldn\u2019t imagine writing a line of code before you\u2019d documented it?\n\nDocumentation needs to have three main features:\n\n\n\tIt should have total coverage and document all the features of your project. Private methods should be documented for your developers, and public features need to be available to your users.\n\tIt should be consistent \u2013 a user should know what to expect from your documentation, and terminology should be accurate to your language.\n\tIt should be current \u2013 and that means staying accurate as new versions of your code base are released.\n\n\nBut you can also get these bonuses:\n\n\n\tAct as a suggested specification \u2013 a guide that will aid a developer in making something consistent and usable.\n\tIt can test your API quality.\n\tIt can enhance the communication skills within your development team.\n\n\nSo how do we get our documentation to be rich and full of features, instead of a little worn out like Boxing Day leftovers?\n\nWrite your documentation first\n\nWhen I say first, I mean first. Not after you\u2019ve started writing the code. Not even after you\u2019ve started writing your unit tests. First. You may or may not have been provided with a decent specification, but the first job should be to turn your requirements for a feature into documentation. \n\nIt works best when it takes the form of in-code comments. It works even better when your in-code comments take a standard documentation format that you can later use to generate published documentation for your users. This has the benefit of immediately making your docs as version controlled as your code-base, and it saves having to rewrite, copy or otherwise harass your docs into something legible later on. \n\nAlmost all languages have a self-documentation format these days. My choice of format for JavaScript is JSDocToolkit, and the sort of things I look for are the ability to specify private and public methods, full options object statements (opts as Opts only is a no-no), and the ability to include good examples.\n\nSo, our example for today will be a new festive feature for a JavaScript API. We\u2019ve been asked to specify a sled for Santa to get around the world to give out toys:\n\n\n\tSanta needs to be able to travel around the world in one night to deliver toys to children, and he\u2019ll need some reindeer to pull his sled.\n\n\nAs documentation, it would look like:\n\n/**\n@name Sled\n@extends Vehicle\n@constructor\n@description Create a new sled to send Santa around the world to deliver toys to good kids.\n\t@param {Object} [opts] Options\n\t@param {number} [opts.capacity='50'] Set the capacity of the sled\n\t@param {string} [opts.pilot='santa'] The pilot of the sled.\n@example\n\t// Create a sled and specify some reindeer.\n\tnew Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Prancer', 'Vixen', 'Comet', 'Cupid']);\n*/\n\nBy breaking it down as documentation, you can, for example, hand this over to another developer without the need to explain the feature in much depth, and they\u2019ll develop something that has to match this piece of documentation. It specifies everything that is important to this feature \u2013 its default values and types, and where it inherits other features from. \n\nWe know that we need to specify some way of setting reindeer to pull the sled and also some toys to give, and so we can quickly specify extra methods for the sled:\n\n/*\n@name vehicle.Sled#reindeer\n@function\n@description Set the reindeer that will pull Santa's sled.\n\t@param {string[]} reindeer A list of the reindeer.\n@example\n\t// specifying some reindeer\n\tSled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Rudolph', 'Vixen']);\n*/\n/*\n@name vehicle.Sled#toys\n@function\n@description Add a list of toys and recipients to the Sled.\n\t@param {Object[]} toys A list of toys and who will receive them.\n@example\n\t// Adding toys to the sled\n\tSled().toys([\n\t\t{name:'Brian', toy:'Fire Engine'},\n\t\t{name:'Drew', toy:'Roller-skates'},\n\t\t{name:'Anna', toy:'Play-doh'},\n\t\t...\n\t\t]);\n*/\n\nJob done! You\u2019ve got a specification to share with your team and something useful for your users in the form of full examples, and you didn\u2019t even have to open another text editor.\n\nUse your documentation to share knowledge\n\nDocumentation isn\u2019t just for users. It\u2019s also used by internal developers to explain what they\u2019ve written and how it works. This is especially valuable where the team is large or the code-base sprawling.\n\nSo, returning to our example, the next step would be to share with the rest of the team (or at least a selection of the team if yours is large) what the documentation looks like. This is useful for two main reasons:\n\n\n\tThey can see if they understand what the documentation says the feature will do. It\u2019s best if they haven\u2019t seen the requirement before. If your fellow developers can\u2019t work out what \u2018MagicMethodX\u2019 is going to return from the docs, neither can your users.\n\tThey can check that the feature accomplishes everything that they expect to, and that it\u2019s consistent with the rest of the functionality.\n\n\nOn previous projects, we\u2019ve taken to referring to this stage of the development process as the \u2018bun fight\u2019. It\u2019s a chance for everyone to have an honest say and throw a few pies without actually causing anyone to have to rewrite any code. If you can identify at this stage that a feature is over-complicated, lacking or just plain useless, you\u2019ll all be much happier to throw out a few lines of documentation than you may have been to throw out a partial, or even complete, piece of functionality.\n\nDocumentation has your back\n\nThe final benefit to working in this way is that your documentation not only remains accurate, it\u2019s always as accurate as your latest release. It can\u2019t fall behind. You can increase the likelihood that your docs will remain up to date by unit testing your examples.\n\nReturning to the previous example, we can add a QUnit unit test to the expected output with ease during the build process \u2013 we know exactly how the code will look and, with the @example tag, we can identify easily where to find the bits that need testing. If it\u2019s tested it\u2019ll definitely work as you expect it to when a user copy and pastes it. You\u2019re ensuring quality from idea to implementation.\n\nAs an extra bauble, the best thing about a system like JSDocToolkit is that it\u2019ll take your inline comments and turn them into beautiful sites, as good systems will allow for customised output templates. You\u2019ll be producing full-featured sites for your projects and plugins with almost no extra effort, but all the benefits.", "year": "2010", "author": "Frances Berriman", "author_slug": "francesberriman", "published": "2010-12-11T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2010/documentation-driven-design-for-apis/", "topic": "process"} {"rowid": 154, "title": "Diagnostic Styling", "contents": "We\u2019re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there\u2019s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. \n\nNote: the techniques discussed here mostly work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. I\u2019ll explain why that\u2019s not really a problem near the end of the article \u2014 and no, the reason is not \u201ceveryone should just ignore IE anyway\u201d.\n\nBasic Diagnostics\n\nTo pick a simple example, suppose you want to call out all holdover font and center elements in a site. Simple: you just add the following to your styles.\n\nfont, center {outline: 5px solid red;}\n\nYou could take it further and add in a nice lime background or some such, but big thick red outlines should suffice. Now you\u2019ll be able to see the offenders wherever as you move through the site. (Of course, if you do this on your public server, everyone else will see the outlines too. So this is probably best done on a development server or local copy of the site.)\n\nNot everyone may be familiar with outlines, which were introduced in CSS2, so a word on those before we move on. Outlines are much like borders, except outlines don\u2019t affect layout. Eh? Here\u2019s a comparison.\n\n\n\nOn the left, you have a border. On the right, an outline. The border takes up layout space, pushing other content around and generally being a nuisance. The outline, on the other hand, just draws into quietly into place. In most current browsers, it will overdraw any content already onscreen, and will be overdrawn by any content placed later \u2014 which is why it overlaps the images above it, and is overlapped by those below it.\n\nOkay, so we can outline deprecated elements like font and center. Is that all? Oh no.\n\nAttribution\n\nLet\u2019s suppose you also want to find any instances of inline style \u2014 that is, use of the style attribute on elements in the markup. This is generally discouraged (outside of HTML e-mails, which I\u2019m not going to get anywhere near), as it\u2019s just another side of the same coin of using font: baking the presentation into the document structure instead of putting it somewhere more manageable. So:\n\n*[style], font, center {outline: 5px solid red;}\n\nAdding that attribute selector to the rule\u2019s grouped selector means that we\u2019ll now be outlining any element with a style attribute.\n\nThere\u2019s a lot more that attribute selectors will let use diagnose. For example, we can highlight any images that have empty alt or title text.\n\nimg[alt=\"\"] {border: 3px dotted red;}\nimg[title=\"\"] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;}\n\nNow, you may wonder why one of these rules calls for a border, and the other for an outline. That\u2019s because I want them to \u201cadd together\u201d \u2014 that is, if I have an image which possesses both alt and title, and the values of both are empty, then I want it to be doubly marked.\n\n\n\nSee how the middle image there has both red and fuchsia dots running around it? (And am I the only one who sorely misses the actual circular dots drawn by IE5/Mac?) That\u2019s due to its markup, which we can see here in a fragment showing the whole table row.\n\n![](\"comic.gif\" "\\"\\"")
The Pun of the Day
Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!
\");\n\nThe call to document.write() injects the string passed into the document where it is called. So to display the widget on your page, simply add an external script tag where you want it to appear:\n\n\n \n \n
\n\nThis approach is incredibly easy for both provider and consumer. But there are implications\u2026\n\ndocument.write()\u2026 or wrong?\n\nAs in the example above, scripts may perform a document.write() to inject HTML. Page rendering halts while a script is processed so any output can be inlined into the document. Therefore, page rendering speed depends on how fast the script returns the data. If an external JavaScript widget hangs, so does the page content that follows. It was this scenario that briefly stalled partner sites of The Deck last summer.\n\nThe elegant solution\n\nTo make our web widget more robust, calls to document.write() should be avoided. This can be achieved with a technique called JSONP (AKA JSON with padding). In our example, instead of writing inline with document.write(), a JSONP script passes content to a callback function:\n\npublishPun(\"Pun of the Day
Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!
\");\n\nThen, it\u2019s up to the widget consumer to implement a callback function responsible for displaying the content. Here\u2019s a simple example where our callback uses jQuery to write the content into a target:\n\n\n\n\n\u2026\n\n\n
\nfunction publishPun(content) {\n $(‘.punoftheday’).html(content); // Writes content display location
\n}
\n\n\n\n\nView Example 1\n\nEven if the widget content appears at the top of the page, our script can be included at the bottom so it\u2019s non-blocking: a slow response leaves page rendering unaffected. It simply invokes the callback which, in turn, writes the widget content to its display destination.\n\nThe hack\n\nBut what to do if your provider doesn\u2019t support JSONP? This was our case with The Deck. Returning to our example, I\u2019m reminded of computer scientist David Wheeler\u2019s statement, \u201cAll problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection\u2026 Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.\u201d\n\nIn our case, the indirection is to move the widget content into position after writing it to the page. This allows us to place the widget \n
\n\nThe \u2018loading-dock\u2019 \nfunction publishPun(content) {\n $(‘.punoftheday’).html(content); // Writes content display location
\n}
\n\n\n\n\nView Example 1\n\nEven if the widget content appears at the top of the page, our script can be included at the bottom so it\u2019s non-blocking: a slow response leaves page rendering unaffected. It simply invokes the callback which, in turn, writes the widget content to its display destination.\n\nThe hack\n\nBut what to do if your provider doesn\u2019t support JSONP? This was our case with The Deck. Returning to our example, I\u2019m reminded of computer scientist David Wheeler\u2019s statement, \u201cAll problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection\u2026 Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.\u201d\n\nIn our case, the indirection is to move the widget content into position after writing it to the page. This allows us to place the widget \n
Pun of the Day
\nWhere do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!
\n now includes the widget content, albeit hidden from view (if we\u2019ve styled the \u2018hidden\u2019 class with display: none). There\u2019s just one more step: move the content to its display destination. This line of jQuery (from above) does the trick:\n\n$('.punoftheday').append($('.loading-dock').children(':gt(0)'));\n\nThis selects all child elements in the \u2018loading-doc\u2019
except the first \u2013 the widget