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Front-End Developers Are Information Architects Too |
The theme of this year’s World IA Day was “Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere”. This article isn’t about what you may consider an information architect to be: someone in the user-experience field, who maybe studied library science, and who talks about taxonomies. This is about a realisation I had a couple of years ago when I started to run an increasing amount of usability-testing sessions with people who have disabilities: that the structure, labelling, and connections that can be made in front-end code is information architecture. People’s ability to be successful online is unequivocally connected to the quality of the code that is written.
Places made of information
In information architecture we talk about creating places made of information. These places are made of ones and zeros, but we talk about them as physical structures. We talk about going onto a social media platform, posting in blogs, getting locked out of an environment, and building applications. In 2002, Andrew Hinton stated:
People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds.
25 Theses
We’re creating structures which people rely on for significant parts of their lives, so it’s critical that we carry out our work responsibly. This means we must use our construction materials correctly. Luckily, our most important material, HTML, has a well-documented specification which tells us how to build robust and accessible places. What is most important, I believe, is to understand the semantics of HTML.
Semantics
The word “semantic” has its origin in Greek words meaning “significant”, “signify”, and “sign”. In the physical world, a structure can have semantic qualities that tell us something about it. For example, the stunning Westminster Abbey inspires awe and signifies much about the intent and purpose of the structure. The building’s size; the quality of the stone work; the massive, detailed stained glass: these are all signs that this is a building meant for something the creators deemed important. Alternatively consider a set of large, clean, well-positioned, well-lit doors on the ground floor of an office block: they don’t need an “entrance” sign to communicate their use and to stop people trying to use a nearby fire exit to get into the building. The design of the doors signify their usage. Sometimes a more literal and less awe-inspiring approach to communicating a building’s purpose happens, but the affect is similar: the building is signifying something about its purpose.
HTML has over 115 elements, many of which have semantics to signify structure and affordance to people, browsers, and assistive technology. The HTML 5.1 specification mentions semantics, stating:
Elements, attributes, and attribute values in HTML are defined … to have certain meanings (semantics). For example, the <ol> element represents an ordered list, and the lang attribute represents the language of the content.
HTML 5.1 Semantics, structure, and APIs of HTML documents
HTML’s baked-in semantics means that developers can architect their code to signify structure, create relationships between elements, and label content so people can understand what they’re interacting with. Structuring and labelling information to make it available, usable, and understandable to people is what an information architect does. It’s also what a front-end developer does, whether they realise it or not.
A brief introduction to information architecture
We’re going to start by looking at what an information architect is. There are many definitions, and I’m going to quote Richard Saul Wurman, who is widely regarded as the father of information architecture. In 1976 he said an information architect is:
the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear; a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge; the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.
Of Patterns And Structures
To me, this clearly defines any developer who creates code that a browser, or other user agent (for example, a screen reader), uses to create a structured, navigable place for people.
Just as there are many definitions of what an information architect is, there are for information architecture itself. I’m going to use the definition from the fourth edition of Information Architecture For The World Wide Web, in which the authors define it as:
The structural design of shared information environments.
The synthesis of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within digital, physical, and cross-channel ecosystems.
The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability, findability, and understanding.
Information Architecture For The World Wide Web, 4th Edition
To me, this describes front-end development. Done properly, there is an art to creating robust, accessible, usable, and findable spaces that delight all our users. For example, at 2015’s State Of The Browser conference, Edd Sowden talked about the accessibility of <table>s. He discovered that by simply not using the semantically-correct <th> element to mark up <table> headings, in some situations browsers will decide that a <table> is being used for layout and essentially make it invisible to assistive technology. Another example of how coding practices can affect the usability and findability of content is shown by Léonie Watson in her How ARIA landmark roles help screen reader users video. By using ARIA landmark roles, people who use screen readers are quickly able to identify and jump to common parts of a web page.
Our definitions of information architects and information architecture mention patterns, rules, organisation, labelling, structure, and relationships. There are numerous different models for how these elements get boiled down to their fundamentals. In his Understanding Context book, Andrew Hinton calls them Labels, Relationships, and Rules; Jorge Arango calls them Links, Nodes, And Order; and Dan Klyn uses Ontology, Taxonomy, and Choreography, which is the one we’re going to use. Dan defines these terms as:
Ontology
The definition and articulation of the rules and patterns that govern the meaning of what we intend to communicate.
What we mean when we say what we say.
Taxonomy
The arrangements of the parts. Developing systems and structures for what everything’s called, where everything’s sorted, and the relationships between labels and categories
Choreography
Rules for interaction among the parts. The structures it creates foster specific types of movement and interaction; anticipating the way users and information want to flow and making affordance for change over time.
We now have definitions of an information architect, information architecture, and a model of the elements of information architecture. But is writing HTML really creating information or is it just wrangling data and metadata? When does data turn into information? In his book Managing For The Future Peter Drucker states:
… data is not information. Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose.
Managing For The Future
If we use the correct semantic element to mark up content then we’re developing with purpose and creating relevance. For example, if we follow the advice of the HTML 5.1 specification and mark up headings using heading rank instead of the outline algorithm, we’re creating a structure where the depth of one heading is relevant to the previous one. Architected correctly, an <h2> element should be relevant to its parent, which should be the <h1>. By following the HTML specification we can create a structured, searchable, labeled document that will hopefully be relevant to what our users need to be successful. If you’ve never used a screen reader, you might be wondering how the headings on a page are searchable. Screen readers give users the ability to interact with headings in a couple of ways:
by creating a list of headings so users can quickly scan the page for information
by using a keyboard command to cycle through one heading at a time
If we had a document for Christmas Day TV we might structure it something like this:
<h1>Christmas Day TV schedule</h1>
<h2>BBC1</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
<h2>BBC2</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
<h2>ITV</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
<h2>Channel 4</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
If I use VoiceOver to generate a list of headings, I get this:
Once I have that list I can use keyboard commands to filter the list based on the heading level. For example, I can press 2 to hear just the <h2>s:
If we hadn’t used headings, of if we’d nested them incorrectly, our users would be frustrated.
Putting this together
Let’s put this together with an example of a button that, when pressed, toggles the appearance of a panel of links. There are numerous ways we could create a button on a web page, but the best way is to just use a <button>. Every browser understands what a <button> is, how it works, and what keyboard shortcuts should be used with them. The HTML specification for the <button> element says:
The <button> element represents a button labeled by its contents.
The contents that a <button> can have include the type attribute, any relevant ARIA attributes, and the actual text label that the user sees. This information is more important than the visual design: it doesn’t matter how beautiful or obtuse the design is, if the underlying code is non-semantic and poorly labelled, people are going to struggle to use it. Here are three buttons, each created with the same HTML but with different designs:
Regardless of what they look like, because we’ve used semantic HTML instead of a bunch of meaningless <div>s or <span>s, people who use assistive technology are going to benefit. Out of the box, without any extra development effort, a <button> is accessible and usable with a keyboard. We don’t have to write event handlers to listen for people pressing the Enter key or the space bar, which we would have to do if we’d faked a button with non-semantic elements. Our <button> can also be quickly findable: for example, in the same way it’s possible to create a list of headings with a screen reader, I can also create a list of form elements and then quickly jump to the one I want.
Now we have our <button>, let’s add the panel we’re toggling the appearance of. Here’s our code:
<button aria-controls="panel" aria-expanded="false" class="settings" id="settings" type="button">Settings</button>
<div class="panel hidden" id="panel">
<ul aria-labelledby="settings">
<li><a href="…">Account</a></li>
<li><a href="…">Privacy</a></li>
<li><a href="…">Security</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
There’s quite a bit going on here. We’re using the:
aria-controls attribute to architect a connection between the <button> element and the panel whose appearance it controls. When some assistive technology, for example the JAWS screen reader, encounters an element with aria-controls it audibly tells a user about the controlled expanded element and gives them the ability to move focus to it.
aria-expanded attribute to denote whether the panel is visible or not. We toggle this value using JavaScript to true when the panel is visible and false when it’s not. This important attribute tells people who use screen readers about the state of the elements they’re interacting with. For example, VoiceOver announces Settings expanded button when the panel is visible and Settings collapsed button when it’s hidden.
aria-labelledby attribute to give the list a title of “Settings”. This can benefit some users of assistive technology. For example, screen readers can cycle through all the lists on a page, so being able to title them can improve findability. Being able to hear list Settings three items is, I’d argue, more useful than list three items. By doing this we’re supporting usability and findability.
<ul> element to contain our list of links in our panel.
Let’s look at the choice of <ul> to contain our settings choices. Firstly, our settings are related items, so they belong in a structure that semantically groups things. This is something that a list can do that other elements or patterns can’t. This pattern, for example, isn’t semantic and has no structure:
<div><a href="…">Account</a></div>
<div><a href="…">Privacy</a></div>
<div><a href="…">Security</a></div>
All we have there is three elements next to each other on the screen and in the DOM. That is not robust code that signifies anything.
Why are we using an unordered list as opposed to an ordered list or a definition list? A quick look at the HTML specification tells us why:
The <ul> element represents a list of items, where the order of the items is not important — that is, where changing the order would not materially change the meaning of the document.
The HTML 5.1 specification’s description of the element
Will the meaning of our document materially change if we moved the order of our links around? Nope. Therefore, I’d argue, we’ve used the correct element to structure our content.
These coding decisions are information architecture
I believe that what we’ve done here is pure information architecture. Going back to Dan Klyn’s model, we’ve practiced ontology by looking at the meaning of what we’re intending to communicate:
we want to communicate there is an interactive element that toggles the appearance of an element on a page so we’ve used one, a <button>, with those semantics.
programmatically we’ve used the type='button' attribute to signify that the button isn’t a menu, reset, or submit element.
visually we’ve designed our <button> look like something that can be interacted with and, importantly, we haven’t removed the focus ring.
we’ve labelled the <button> with the word “Settings” so that our users will hopefully understand what the button is for.
we’ve used an <ul> element to structure and communicate our list of related items.
We’ve also practiced taxonomy by developing systems and structures and creating relationships between our elements:
by connecting the <button> to the panel using the aria-controls attribute we’ve programmatically created a relationship between two elements.
we’ve developed a structure in our elements by labelling our <ul> with the same name as the <button> that controls its appearance.
And finally we’ve practiced choreography by creating elements that foster movement and interaction. We’ve anticipated the way users and information want to flow:
we’ve used a <button> element that is interactive and accessible out of the box.
our aria-controls attribute can help some people who use screen readers move easily from the <button> to the panel it controls.
by toggling the value of the aria-expanded attribute we’ve developed a system that tells assistive technology about the status of the relationship between our elements: the panel is visible or the panel is hidden.
we’ve made sure our information is more usable and findable no matter how our users want or need to interact with it. Regardless of how someone “sees” our work they’re going to be able to use it because we’ve architected multiple ways to access our information.
Information architecture, robust code, and accessibility
The United Nations estimates that around 10% of the world’s population has some form of disability which, at the time of writing, is around 740,000,000 people. That’s a lot of people who rely on well-architected semantic code that can be interpreted by whatever assistive technology they may need to use.
If everyone involved in the creation of our places made of information practiced information architecture it would make satisfying the WCAG 2.0 POUR principles so much easier. Our digital construction practices directly affect the quality of life of millions of people, and we have a responsibility to make technology available to them. In her book How To Make Sense Of Any Mess, Abby Covert states:
If we’re going to be successful in this new world, we need to see information as a workable material and learn to architect it in a way that gets us to our goals.
How To Make Sense Of Any Mess
I believe that the world will be a better place if we start treating front-end development as information architecture. |
2016 |
Francis Storr |
francisstorr |
2016-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/front-end-developers-are-information-architects-too/ |
code |
| 290 |
Creating a Weekly Research Cadence |
Working on a product team, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on building features and lose sight of your users and their daily challenges. User research can be time-consuming to set up, so it often becomes ad-hoc and irregular, only performed in response to a particular question or concern. But without frequent touch points and opportunities for discovery, your product will stagnate and become less and less relevant. Setting up an efficient cadence of weekly research conversations will re-focus your team on user problems and provide a steady stream of insights for product development.
As my team transitioned into a Lean process earlier this year, we needed a way to get more feedback from users in a short amount of time. Our users are internet marketers—always busy and often difficult to reach. Scheduling research took days of emailing back and forth to find mutually agreeable times, and juggling one-off conversations made it difficult to connect with more than one or two people per week. The slow pace of research was allowing additional risk to creep into our product development.
I wanted to find a way for our team to test ideas and validate assumptions sooner and more often—but without increasing the administrative burden of scheduling. The solution: creating a regular cadence of research and testing that required a minimum of effort to coordinate.
Setting up a weekly user research cadence accelerated our learning and built momentum behind strategic experiments. By dedicating time every week to talk to a few users, we made ongoing research a painless part of every weekly sprint. But increasing the frequency of our research had other benefits as well. With only five working days between sessions, a weekly cadence forced us to keep our work small and iterative. Committing to testing something every week meant showing work earlier and more often than we might have preferred—pushing us out of your comfort zone into a process of more rapid experimentation.
Best of all, frequent conversations with users helped us become more customer-focused. After just a few weeks in a consistent research cadence, I noticed user feedback weaving itself through our planning and strategy sessions. Comments like “Remember what Jenna said last week, about not being able to customize her lists?” would pop up as frequent reference points to guide our decisions. As discussions become less about subjective opinions and more about responding to user needs, we saw immediate improvement in the quality of our solutions.
Establishing an efficient recruitment process
The key to creating a regular cadence of ongoing user research is an efficient recruitment and scheduling process—along with a commitment to prioritize the time needed for research conversations. This is an invaluable tool for product teams (whether or not they follow a Lean process), but could easily be adapted for content strategy teams, agency teams, a UX team of one, or any other project that would benefit from short, frequent conversations with users.
The process I use requires a few hours of setup time at the beginning, but pays off in better learning and better releases over the long run. Almost any team could use this as a starting point and adapt it to their own needs.
Pick a dedicated time each week for research
In order to make research a priority, we started by choosing a time each week when everyone on the product team was available. Between stand-ups, grooming sessions, and roadmap reviews, it wasn’t easy to do! Nevertheless, it’s important to include as many people as possible in conversations with your users. Getting a second-hand summary of research results doesn’t have the same impact as hearing someone describe their frustrations and concerns first-hand. The more people in the room to hear those concerns, the more likely they are to become priorities for your team.
I blocked off 2 hours for research conversations every Thursday afternoon. We make this time sacred, and never schedule other meetings or work across those hours.
Divide your time into several research slots
After my weekly cadence was set, I divided the time into four 20-minute time slots. Twenty minutes is long enough for us to ask several open-ended questions or get feedback on a prototype, without being a burden on our users’ busy schedules. Depending on your work, you may need schedule longer sessions—but beware the urge to create blocks that last an hour or more. A weekly research cadence is designed to facilitate rapid, ongoing feedback and testing; it should force you to talk to users often and to keep your work small and iterative. Projects that require longer, more in-depth testing will probably need a dedicated research project of their own.
I used the scheduling software Calendly to create interview appointments on a calendar that I can share with users, and customized the confirmation and reminder emails with information about how to access our video conferencing software. (Most of our research is done remotely, but this could be set up with details for in-person meetings as well.) Automating these emails and reminders took a little bit of time to set up, but was worth it for how much faster it made the process overall.
Invite users to sign up for a time that’s convenient for them
With a calendar set up and follow-up emails automated, it becomes incredibly easy to schedule research conversations. Each week, I send a short email out to a small group of users inviting them to participate, explaining that this is a chance to provide feedback that will improve our product or occasionally promoting the opportunity to get a sneak peek at new features we’re working on. The email includes a link to the Calendly appointments, allowing users who are interested to opt in to a time that fits their schedule.
Setting up appointments the first go around involved a bit of educated guessing. How many invitations would it take to fill all four of my weekly slots? How far in advance did I need to recruit users? But after a few weeks of trial and error, I found that sending 12-16 invitations usually allows me to fill all four interview slots. Our users often have meetings pop up at short notice, so we get the best results when I send the recruiting email on Tuesday, two days before my research block.
It may take a bit of experimentation to fine tune your process, but it’s worth the effort to get it right. (The worst thing that’s happened since I began recruiting this way was receiving emails from users complaining that there were no open slots available!) I can now fill most of an afternoon with back-to-back user research sessions just by sending just one or two emails each week, increasing our research pace while leaving plenty time to focus on discovery and design.
Getting the most out of your research sessions
As you get comfortable with the rhythm of talking to users each week, you’ll find more and more ways to get value out of your conversations. At first, you may prefer to just show work in progress—such as mockups or a simple prototype—and ask open-ended questions to measure user reaction. When you begin new projects, you may want to use this time to research behavior on existing features—either watching participants as they use part of your product or asking them to give an account of a recent experience in your app. You may even want to run more abstracted Lean experiments, if that’s the best way to validate the assumptions your team is working from.
Whatever you do, plan some time a day or two later to come back together and review what you’ve learned each week. Synthesizing research outcomes as a group will help keep your team in alignment and allow each person to highlight what they took away from each conversation.
Over time, you may find that the pace of weekly user research becomes more exhausting than energizing, especially if the responsibility for scheduling and planning falls on just one person. Don’t allow yourself to get burned out; a healthy research cadence should also include time to rest and reflect if the pace becomes too rapid to sustain. Take breaks as needed, then pick up the pace again as soon as you’re ready. |
2016 |
Wren Lanier |
wrenlanier |
2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/creating-a-weekly-research-cadence/ |
ux |
| 291 |
Information Literacy Is a Design Problem |
Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.”
Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of information” have only grown wilder, thornier, and more constant. We call the internet a firehose, yet we’re loathe to turn it off (or even down). The amount of information we consume daily is staggering—and yet our ability to fully understand it all remains frustratingly insufficient.
This should hit a very particular chord for those of us working on the web. We may be developers, designers, or strategists—we may not always be responsible for the words themselves—but we all know that communication is much more than just words. From fonts to form fields, every design decision that we make changes the way information is perceived—for better or for worse.
What’s more, the design decisions that we make feed into larger patterns. They don’t just affect the perception of a single piece of information on a single site; they start to shape reader expectations of information anywhere. Users develop cumulative mental models of how websites should be: where to find a search bar, where to look at contact information, how to filter a product list.
And yet: our models fail us. Fundamentally, we’re not good at parsing information, and that’s troubling. Our experience of an “information society” may have evolved, but the skills Dr. Kuhlthau spoke of are even more critical now: our lives depend on information literacy.
Patterns from words
Let’s start at the beginning: with the words. Our choice of words can drastically alter a message, from its emotional resonance to its context to its literal meaning. Sometimes we can use word choice for good, to reinvigorate old, forgotten, or unfairly besmirched ideas.
One time at a wedding bbq we labeled the coleslaw BRASSICA MIXTA so people wouldn’t skip it based on false hatred.— Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) November 27, 2016
We can also use clever word choice to build euphemisms, to name sensitive or intimate concepts without conjuring their full details. This trick gifts us with language like “the beast with two backs” (thanks, Shakespeare!) and “surfing the crimson wave” (thanks, Cher Horowitz!).
But when we grapple with more serious concepts—war, death, human rights—this habit of declawing our language gets dangerous. Using more discrete wording serves to nullify the concepts themselves, euphemizing them out of sight and out of mind.
The result? Politicians never lie, they just “misspeak.” Nobody’s racist, but plenty of people are “economically anxious.” Nazis have rebranded as “alt-right.”
I’m not an asshole, I’m just alt-nice.— Andi Zeisler (@andizeisler) November 22, 2016
The problem with euphemisms like these is that they quickly infect everyday language. We use the words we hear around us. The more often we see “alt-right” instead of “Nazi,” the more likely we are to use that phrase ourselves—normalizing the term as well as the terrible ideas behind it.
Patterns from sentences
That process of normalization gets a boost from the media, our main vector of information about the world outside ourselves. Headlines control how we interpret the news that follows—even if the story contradicts it in the end. We hear the framing more clearly than the content itself, coloring our interpretation of the news over time.
Even worse, headlines are often written to encourage clicks, not to convey critical information. When headline-writing is driven by sensationalism, it’s much, much easier to build a pattern of misinformation. Take this CBS News headline: “Donald Trump: ‘Millions’ voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.” The headline makes no indication that this an objectively false statement; instead, this word choice subtly suggestions that millions did, in fact, illegally vote for Hillary Clinton.
Headlines like this are what make lying a worthwhile political strategy. https://t.co/DRjGeYVKmW— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) November 27, 2016
This is a deeply dangerous choice of words when headlines are the primary way that news is conveyed—especially on social media, where it’s much faster to share than to actually read the article. In fact, according to a study from the Media Insight Project, “roughly six in 10 people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week.”
If a powerful person asserts X there are 2 responsible ways to cover:1. “X is true”2. “Person incorrectly thinks X”Never “Person says X”— Helen Rosner (@hels) November 27, 2016
Even if we do, in fact, read the whole article, there’s no guarantee that we’re thinking critically about it. A study conducted by Stanford found that “82 percent of students could not distinguish between a sponsored post and an actual news article on the same website. Nearly 70 percent of middle schoolers thought they had no reason to distrust a sponsored finance article written by the CEO of a bank, and many students evaluate the trustworthiness of tweets based on their level of detail and the size of attached photos.”
Friends: our information literacy is not very good. Luckily, we—workers of the web—are in a position to improve it.
Sentences into design
Consider the presentation of those all-important headlines in social media cards, as on Facebook. The display is a combination of both the card’s design and the article’s source code, and looks something like this:
A large image, a large headline; perhaps a brief description; and, at the bottom, in pale gray, a source and an author’s name.
Those choices convey certain values: specifically, they suggest that the headline and the picture are the entire point. The source is so deemphasized that it’s easy to see how fake news gains a foothold: daily exposure to this kind of hierarchy has taught us that sources aren’t important.
And that’s the message from the best-case scenario. Not every article shows every piece of data. Take this headline from the BBC: “Wisconsin receives request for vote recount.”
With no image, no description, and no author, there’s little opportunity to signal trust or provide nuance. There’s also no date—ever—which presents potentially misleading complications, especially in the context of “breaking news.”
And lest you think dates don’t matter in the light-speed era of social media, take the headline, “Maryland sidesteps electoral college.” Shared into my feed two days after the US presidential election, that’s some serious news with major historical implications. But since there’s no date on this card, there’s no way for readers to know that the “Tuesday” it refers to was in 2007. Again, a design choice has made misinformation far too contagious.
More recently, I posted my personal reaction to the death of Fidel Castro via a series of twenty tweets. Wanting to share my thoughts with friends and family who don’t use Twitter, I then posted the first tweet to Facebook. The card it generated was less than ideal:
The information hierarchy created by this approach prioritizes the name of the Twitter user (not even the handle), along with the avatar. Not only does that create an awkward “headline” (at least when you include a full stop in your name), but it also minimizes the content of the tweet itself—which was the whole point.
The arbitrary elevation of some pieces of content over others—like huge headlines juxtaposed with minimized sources—teaches readers that these values are inherent to the content itself: that the headline is the news, that the source is irrelevant. We train readers to stop looking for the information we don’t put in front of them.
These aren’t life-or-death scenarios; they are just cases where design decisions noticeably dictate the perception of information. Not every design decision makes so obvious an impact, but the impact is there. Every single action adds to the pattern.
Design with intention
We can’t necessarily teach people to read critically or vet their sources or stop believing conspiracy theories (or start believing facts). Our reach is limited to our roles: we make websites and products for companies and colleges and startups.
But we have more reach there than we might realize. Every decision we make influences how information is presented in the world. Every presentation adds to the pattern. No matter how innocuous our organization, how lowly our title, how small our user base—every single one of us contributes, a little bit, to the way information is perceived.
Are we changing it for the better?
While it’s always been crucial to act ethically in the building of the web, our cultural climate now requires dedicated, individual conscientiousness. It’s not enough to think ourselves neutral, to dismiss our work as meaningless or apolitical. Everything is political. Every action, and every inaction, has an impact.
As Chappell Ellison put it much more eloquently than I can:
Every single action and decision a designer commits is a political act. The question is, are you a conscious actor?— Chappell Ellison🤔 (@ChappellTracker) November 28, 2016
As shapers of information, we have a responsibility: to create clarity, to further understanding, to advance truth. Every single one of us must choose to treat information—and the society it builds—with integrity. |
2016 |
Lisa Maria Martin |
lisamariamartin |
2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/information-literacy-is-a-design-problem/ |
content |
| 292 |
Watch Your Language! |
I’m bilingual. My first language is French. I learned English in my early 20s. Learning a new language later in life meant that I was able to observe my thought processes changing over time. It made me realize that some concepts can’t be expressed in some languages, while other languages express these concepts with ease.
It also helped me understand the way we label languages. English: business. French: romance. Here’s an example of how words, or the absence thereof, can affect the way we think:
In French we love everything. There’s no straightforward way to say we like something, so we just end up loving everything. I love my sisters, I love broccoli, I love programming, I love my partner, I love doing laundry (this is a lie), I love my mom (this is not a lie). I love, I love, I love. It’s no wonder French is considered romantic. When I first learned English I used the word love rather than like because I hadn’t grasped the difference. Needless to say, I’ve scared away plenty of first dates!
Learning another language made me realize the limitations of my native language and revealed concepts I didn’t know existed. Without the nuances a given language provides, we fail to express what we really think. The absence of words in our vocabulary gets in the way of effectively communicating and considering ideas.
When I lived in Montréal, most people in my circle spoke both French and English. I could switch between them when I could more easily express an idea in one language or the other. I liked (or should I say loved?) those conversations. They were meaningful. They were efficient.
I’m quadrilingual. I code in Ruby, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python. In the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to write code in these languages at a massive scale. In learning Ruby, much like learning English, I discovered the strengths and limitations of not only the languages I knew but the language I was learning. It taught me to choose the right tool for the job.
When I started working at Shopify, making a change to a view involved copy/pasting HTML and ERB from one view to another. The CSS was roughly structured into modules, but those modules were not responsive to different screen sizes. Our HTML was complete mayhem, and we didn’t consider accessibility. All this made editing views a laborious process.
Grep. Replace all. Test. Ship it. Repeat.
This wasn’t sustainable at Shopify’s scale, so the newly-formed front end team was given two missions:
Make the app responsive (AKA Let’s Make This Thing Responsive ASAP)
Make the view layer scalable and maintainable (AKA Let’s Build a Pattern Library… in Ruby)
Let’s make this thing responsive ASAP
The year was 2015. The Shopify admin wasn’t mobile friendly. Our browser support was set to IE10. We had the wind in our sails. We wanted to achieve complete responsiveness in the shortest amount of time. Our answer: container queries.
It seemed like the obvious decision at the time. We would be able to set rules for each component in isolation and the component would know how to lay itself out on the page regardless of where it was rendered. It would save us a ton of development time since we wouldn’t need to change our markup, it would scale well, and we would achieve complete component autonomy by not having to worry about page layout. By siloing our components, we were going to unlock the ultimate goal of componentization, cutting the tie to external dependencies. We were cool.
Writing the JavaScript handling container queries was my first contribution to Shopify. It was a satisfying project to work on. We could drop our components in anywhere and they would magically look good. It took us less than a couple weeks to push this to production and make our app mostly responsive.
But with time, it became increasingly obvious that this was not as performant as we had hoped. It wasn’t performant at all. Components would jarringly jump around the page before settling in on first paint.
It was only when we started using the flex-wrap: wrap CSS property to build new components that we realized we were not using the right language for the job. So we swapped out JavaScript container queries for CSS flex-wrapping. Even though flex wasn’t yet as powerful as we wanted it to be, it was still a good compromise. Our components stayed independent of the window size but took much less time to render. Best of all: they used CSS instead of relying on JavaScript for layout.
In other words: we were using the wrong language to express our layout to the browser, when another language could do it much more simply and elegantly.
Let’s build a pattern library… in Ruby
In order to make our view layer maintainable, we chose to build a comprehensive library of helpers. This library would generate our markup from a single source of truth, allowing us to make changes system-wide, in one place. No. More. Grepping.
When I joined Shopify it was a Rails shop freshly wounded by a JavaScript framework (See: Batman.js). JavaScript was like Voldemort, the language that could not be named. Because of this baggage, the only way for us to build a pattern library that would get buyin from our developers was to use Rails view helpers. And for many reasons using Ruby was the right choice for us. The time spent ramping developers up on the new UI Components would be negligible since the Ruby API felt familiar. The transition would be simple since we didn’t have to introduce any new technology to the stack. The components would be fast since they would be rendered on the server. We had a plan.
We put in place a set of Rails tools to make it easy to build components, then wrote a bunch of sweet, sweet components using our shiny new tools. To document our design, content and front end patterns we put together an interactive styleguide to demonstrate how every component works. Our research and development department loved it (and still do)! We continue to roll out new components, and generally the project has been successful, though it has had its drawbacks.
Since the Shopify admin is mostly made up of a huge number of forms, most of the content is static. For this reason, using server-rendered components didn’t seem like a problem at the time. With new app features increasing the amount of DOM manipulation needed on the client side, our early design decisions mean making requests to the server for each re-paint. This isn’t going to cut it.
I don’t know the end of this story, because we haven’t written it yet. We’ve been exploring alternatives to our current system to facilitate the rendering of our components on the client, including React, Vue.js, and Web Components, but we haven’t determined the winner yet. Only time (and data gathering) will tell.
Ruby is great but it doesn’t speak the browser’s language efficiently. It was not the right language for the job.
Learning a new spoken language has had an impact on how I write code. It has taught me that you don’t know what you don’t know until you have the language to express it. Understanding the strengths and limitations of any programming language is fundamental to making good design decisions. At the end of the day, you make the best choices with the information you have. But if you still feel like you’re unable to express your thoughts to the fullest with what you know, it might be time to learn a new language. |
2016 |
Annie-Claude Côté |
annieclaudecote |
2016-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/watch-your-language/ |
code |
| 293 |
A Favor for Your Future Self |
We tend to think about the future when we build things. What might we want to be able to add later? How can we refactor this down the road? Will this be easy to maintain in six months, a year, two years? As best we can, we try to think about the what-ifs, and build our websites, systems, and applications with this lens.
We comment our code to explain what we knew at the time and how that impacted how we built something. We add to-dos to the things we want to change. These are all great things! Whether or not we come back to those to-dos, refactor that one thing, or add new features, we put in a bit of effort up front just in case to give us a bit of safety later.
I want to talk about a situation that Past Alicia and Team couldn’t even foresee or plan for. Recently, the startup I was a part of had to remove large sections of our website. Not just content, but entire pages and functionality. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience, not only for the reason why we had to remove so much of what we had built, but also because it’s the ultimate “I really hope this doesn’t break something else” situation. It was a stressful and tedious effort of triple checking that the things we were removing weren’t dependencies elsewhere. To be honest, we wouldn’t have been able to do this with any amount of success or confidence without our test suite.
Writing tests for code is one of those things that developers really, really don’t want to do. It’s one of the easiest things to cut in the development process, and there’s often a struggle to have developers start writing tests in the first place. One of the best lessons the web has taught us is that we can’t, in good faith, trust the happy path. We must make sure ourselves, and our users, aren’t in a tough spot later on because we only thought of the best case scenarios.
JavaScript
Regardless of your opinion on whether or not everything needs to be built primarily with JavaScript, if you’re choosing to build a JavaScript heavy app, you absolutely should be writing some combination of unit and integration tests.
Unit tests are for testing extremely isolated and small pieces of code, which we refer to as the units themselves. Great for reused functions and small, scoped areas, this is the closest you examine your code with the testing microscope. For example, if we were to build a calculator, the most minute piece we could test could be the basic operations.
/*
* This example uses a test framework called Jasmine
*/
describe("Calculator Operations", function () {
it("Should add two numbers", function () {
// Say we have a calculator
Calculator.init();
// We can run the function that does our addition calculation...
var result = Calculator.addNumbers(7,3);
// ...and ensure we're getting the right output
expect(result).toBe(10);
});
});
Even though these teeny bits work in isolation, we should ensure that connecting the large pieces work, as well. This is where integration tests excel. These tests ensure that two or more different areas of code, that may not directly know about each other, still behave in expected ways. Let’s build upon our calculator - we may want the operations to be saved in memory after a calculation runs. This isn’t as suited for a unit test because there are a few other moving pieces involved in the process (the calculations, checking if the result was an error, etc.).
it(“Should remember the last calculation”, function () {
// Run an operation
Calculator.addNumbers(7,10);
// Expect something else to have happened as a result
expect(Calculator.updateCurrentValue).toHaveBeenCalled();
expect(Calculator.currentValue).toBe(17);
});
Unit and integration tests provide assurance that your hand-rolled JavaScript should, for the most part, never fail in a grand fashion. Although it still might happen, you could be able to catch problems way sooner than without a test suite, and hopefully never push those failures to your production environment.
Interfaces
Regardless of how you’re building something, it most definitely has some kind of interface. Whether you’re using a very barebones structure, or you’re leveraging a whole design system, these things can be tested as well.
Acceptance testing helps us ensure that users can get from point A to point B within our web things, which can provide assurance that major features are always functioning properly. By simulating user input and data entry, we can go through whole user workflows to test for both success and failure scenarios. These are not necessarily for simulating edge-case scenarios, but rather ensuring that our core offerings are stable.
For example, if your site requires signup, you want to make sure the workflow is behaving as expected - allowing valid information to go through signup, while invalid information does not let you progress.
/*
* This example uses Jasmine along with an add-on called jasmine-integration
*/
describe("Acceptance tests", function () {
// Go to our signup page
var page = visit("/signup");
// Fill our signup form with invalid information
page.fill_in("input[name='email']", "Not An Email");
page.fill_in("input[name='name']", "Alicia");
page.click("button[type=submit]");
// Check that we get an expected error message
it("Shouldn't allow signup with invalid information", function () {
expect(page.find("#signupError").hasClass("hidden")).toBeFalsy();
});
// Now, fill our signup form with valid information
page.fill_in("input[name='email']", "thisismyemail@gmail.com");
page.fill_in("input[name='name']", "Gerry");
page.click("button[type=submit]");
// Check that we get an expected success message and the error message is hidden
it("Should allow signup with valid information", function () {
expect(page.find("#signupError").hasClass("hidden")).toBeTruthy();
expect(page.find("#thankYouMessage").hasClass("hidden")).toBeFalsy();
});
});
In terms of visual design, we’re now able to take snapshots of what our interfaces look like before and after any code changes to see what has changed. We call this visual regression testing. Rather than being a pass or fail test like our other examples thus far, this is more of an awareness test, intended to inform developers of all the visual differences that have occurred, intentional or not. Developers may accidentally introduce a styling change or fix that has unintended side effects on other areas of a website - visual regression testing helps us catch these sooner rather than later. These do require a bit more consistent grooming than other tests, but can be valuable in major CSS refactors or if your CSS is generally a bit like Jenga.
Tools like PhantomCSS will take screenshots of your pages, and do a visual comparison to check what has changed between two sets of images. The code would look something like this:
/*
* This example uses PhantomCSS
*/
casper.start("/home").then(function(){
// Initial state of form
phantomcss.screenshot("#signUpForm", "sign up form");
// Hit the sign up button (should trigger error)
casper.click("button#signUp");
// Take a screenshot of the UI component
phantomcss.screenshot("#signUpForm", "sign up form error");
// Fill in form by name attributes & submit
casper.fill("#signUpForm", {
name: "Alicia Sedlock",
email: "alicia@example.com"
}, true);
// Take a second screenshot of success state
phantomcss.screenshot("#signUpForm", "sign up form success");
});
You run this code before starting any development, to create your baseline set of screen captures. After you’ve completed a batch of work, you run PhantomCSS again. This will create a second batch of screenshots, which are then put through an image comparison tool to display any differences that occurred. Say you changed your margins on our form elements – your image diff would look something like this:
This is a great tool for ensuring not just your site retains its expected styling, but it’s also great for ensuring nothing accidentally changes in the living style guide or modular components you may have developed. It’s hard to keep eagle eyes on every visual aspect of your site or app, so visual regression testing helps to keep these things monitored.
Conclusion
The shape and size of what you’re testing for your site or app will vary. You may not need lots of unit or integration tests if you don’t write a lot of JavaScript. You may not need visual regression testing for a one page site. It’s important to assess your codebase to see which tests would provide the most benefit for you and your team.
Writing tests isn’t a joy for most developers, myself included. But I end up thanking Past Alicia a lot when there are tests, because otherwise I would have introduced a lot of issues into codebases. Shipping code that’s broken breaks trust with our users, and it’s our responsibility as developers to make sure that trust isn’t broken. Testing shouldn’t be considered a “nice to have” - it should be an integral piece of our workflow and our day-to-day job. |
2016 |
Alicia Sedlock |
aliciasedlock |
2016-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/a-favor-for-your-future-self/ |
code |
| 294 |
New Tricks for an Old Dog |
Much of my year has been spent helping new team members find their way around the expansive and complex codebase that is the TweetDeck front-end, trying to build a happy and productive group of people around a substantial codebase with many layers of legacy.
I’ve loved doing this. Everything from writing new documentation, drawing diagrams, and holding technical architecture sessions teaches you something you didn’t know or exposes an area of uncertainty that you can go work on.
In this article, I hope to share some experiences and techniques that will prove useful in your own situation and that you can impress your friends in some new and exciting ways!
How do you do, fellow kids?
To start with I’d like to introduce you to our JavaScript framework, Flight. Right now it’s used by twitter.com and TweetDeck although, as a company, Twitter is largely moving to React.
Over time, as we used Flight for more complex interfaces, we found it wasn’t scaling with us.
Composing components into trees was fiddly and often only applied for a specific parent-child pairing. It seems like an obvious feature with hindsight, but it didn’t come built-in to Flight, and it made reusing components a real challenge.
There was no standard way to manage the state of a component; they all did it slightly differently, and the technique often varied by who was writing the code. This cost us in maintainability as you just couldn’t predict how a component would be built until you opened it.
Making matters worse, Flight relied on events to move data around the application. Unfortunately, events aren’t good for giving structure to complex logic. They jump around in a way that’s hard to understand and debug, and force you to search your code for a specific string — the event name‚ to figure out what’s going on.
To find fixes for these problems, we looked around at other frameworks. We like React for it’s simple, predictable state management and reactive re-render flow, and Elm for bringing strict functional programming to everyone.
But when you have lots of existing code, rewriting or switching framework is a painful and expensive option. You have to understand how it will interact with your existing code, how you’ll test it alongside existing code, and how it will affect the size and performance of the application. This all takes time and effort!
Instead of planning a rewrite, we looked for the ideas hidden within other frameworks that we could reapply in our own situation or bring to the tools we already were using.
Boiled down, what we liked seemed quite simple:
Component nesting & composition
Easy, predictable state management
Normal functions for data manipulation
Making these ideas applicable to Flight took some time, but we’re in a much better place now. Through persistent trial-and-error, we have well documented, testable and standard techniques for creating complex component hierarchies, updating and reacting to state changes, and passing data around the app.
While the specifics of our situation and Flight aren’t really important, this experience taught me something:
Distill good tech into great ideas. You can apply great ideas anywhere.
You don’t have to use cool kids’ latest framework, hottest build tool or fashionable language to benefit from them. If you can identify a nugget of gold at the heart of it all, why not use it to improve what you have already?
Times, they are a changin’
Apart from stealing ideas from the new and shiny, how can we keep make the most of improved tooling and techniques? Times change and so should the way we write code.
Going back in time a bit, TweetDeck used some slightly outmoded tools for building and bundling. Without a transpiler like Babel we were missing out new language features, and without a more advanced build tools like Webpack, every module’s source was encased in AMD boilerplate.
In fact, we found ourselves with a mix of both AMD syntaxes:
define(["lodash"], function (_) {
// . . .
});
define(function (require) {
var _ = require("lodash");
// . . .
});
This just wouldn’t do. And besides, what we really wanted was CommonJS, or even ES2015 module syntax:
import _ from "lodash";
These days we’re using Babel, Webpack, ES2015 modules and many new language features that make development just… better. But how did we get there?
To explain, I want to introduce you to codemods and jscodeshift.
A codemod is a large-scale refactor of a whole codebase, often mechanical or repetitive. Think of renaming a module or changing an API like URL("...") to new URL("...").
jscodeshift is a toolkit for running automated codemods, where you express a code transformation using code. The automated codemod operates on each file’s syntax tree – a data-structure representation of the code — finding and modifying in place as it goes.
Here’s an example that renames all instances of the variable foo to bar:
module.exports = function (fileInfo, api) {
return api
.jscodeshift(fileInfo.source)
.findVariableDeclarators('foo')
.renameTo('bar')
.toSource();
};
It’s a seriously powerful tool, and we’ve used it to write a series of codemods that:
rename modules,
unify our use of AMD to a single syntax,
transition from one testing framework to another, and
switch from AMD to CommonJS.
These changes can be pretty huge and far-reaching. Here’s an example commit from when we switched to CommonJS:
commit 8f75de8fd4c702115c7bf58febba1afa96ae52fc
Date: Tue Jul 12 2016
Run AMD -> CommonJS codemod
418 files changed, 47550 insertions(+), 48468 deletions(-)
Yep, that’s just under 50k lines changed, tested, merged and deployed without any trouble. AMD be gone!
From this step-by-step approach, using codemods to incrementally tweak and improve, we extracted a little codemod recipe for making significant, multi-stage changes:
Find all the existing patterns
Choose the two most similar
Unify with a codemod
Repeat.
For example:
For module loading, we had 2 competing AMD patterns plus some use of CommonJS
The two AMD syntaxes were the most similar
We used a codemod to move to unify the AMD patterns
Later we returned to AMD to convert it to CommonJS
It’s worked for us, and if you’d like to know more about codemods then check out Evolving Complex Systems Incrementally by Facebook engineer, Christoph Pojer.
Welcome aboard!
As TweetDeck has gotten older and larger, the amount of things a new engineer has to learn about has exploded. The myriad of microservices that manage our data and their layers of authentication, security and business logic around them make for an overwhelming amount of information to hand to a newbie.
Inspired by Amy’s amazing Guide to the Care and Feeding of Junior Devs, we realised it was important to take time to design our onboarding that each of our new hires go through to make the most of their first few weeks.
Joining a new company, team, or both, is stressful and uncomfortable. Everything you can do to help a new hire will be valuable to them. So please, take time to design your onboarding!
And as you build up an onboarding process, you’ll create things that are useful for more than just new hires; it’ll force you to write documentation, for example, in a way that’s understandable for people who are unfamiliar with your team, product and codebase. This can lead to more outside contributions: potential contributors feel more comfortable getting set up on your product without asking for help.
This is something that’s taken for granted in open source, but somehow I think we forget about it in big companies.
After all, better documentation is just a good thing. You will forget things from time to time, and you’d be surprised how often the “beginner” docs help!
For TweetDeck, we put together system and architecture diagrams, and one-pager explanations of important concepts:
What are our dependencies?
Where are the potential points of failure?
Where does authentication live? Storage? Caching?
Who owns “X”?
Of course, learning continues long after onboarding. The landscape is constantly shifting; old services are deprecated, new APIs appear and what once true can suddenly be very wrong. Keeping up with this is a serious challenge, and more than any one person can track.
To address this, we’ve thought hard about our knowledge sharing practices across the whole team. For example, we completely changed the way we do code review.
In my opinion, code review is the single most effective practice you can introduce to share knowledge around, and build the quality and consistency of your team’s work. But, if you’re not doing it, here’s my suggestion for getting started:
Every pull request gets a +1 from someone else.
That’s all — it’s very light-weight and easy. Just ask someone to have a quick look over your code before it goes into master.
At Twitter, every commit gets a code review. We do a lot of reviewing, so small efficiency and effectiveness improvements make a big difference. Over time we learned some things:
Don’t review for more than hour 1
Keep reviews smaller than ~400 lines 2
Code review your own code first 2
After an hour, and above roughly 400 lines, your ability to detect issues in a code review starts to decrease. So review little and often. The gaps around lunch, standup and before you head home are ideal. And remember, if someone’s put code up for a review, that review is blocking them doing other work. It’s your job to unblock them.
On TweetDeck, we actually try to keep reviews under 250 lines. It doesn’t sound like much, but this constraint applies pressure to make smaller, incremental changes. This makes breakages easier to detect and roll back, and leads to a very natural feature development process that encourages learning and iteration.
But the most important thing I’ve learned personally is that reviewing my own code is the best way to spot issues. I try to approach my own reviews the way I approach my team’s: with fresh, critical eyes, after a break, using a dedicated code review tool.
It’s amazing what you can spot when you put a new in a new interface around code you’ve been staring at for hours!
And yes, this list features science. The data backs up these conclusions, and if you’d like to learn more about scientific approaches to software engineering then I recommend you buy Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It. It’s ace.
For more dedicated information sharing, we’ve introduced regular seminars for everyone who works on a specific area or technology. It works like this: a team-member shares or teaches something to everyone else, and next time it’s someone else’s turn. Giving everyone a chance to speak, and encouraging a wide range of topics, is starting to produce great results.
If you’d like to run a seminar, one thing you could try to get started: run a point at the thing you least understand in our architecture session — thanks to James for this idea. And guess what… your onboarding architecture diagrams will help (and benefit from) this!
More, please!
There’s a few ideas here to get you started, but there are even more in a talk I gave this year called Frontend Archaeology, including a look at optimising for confidence with front-end operations.
And finally, thanks to Amy for proof reading this and to Passy for feedback on the original talk.
Dunsmore et al. 2000. Object-Oriented Inspection in the Face of Delocalisation. Beverly, MA: SmartBear Software. ↩
Cohen, Jason. 2006. Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review. Proceedings of the 22nd ICSE 2000: 467-476. ↩ ↩ |
2016 |
Tom Ashworth |
tomashworth |
2016-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/new-tricks-for-an-old-dog/ |
code |
| 295 |
Internet of Stranger Things |
This year I’ve been running a workshop about using JavaScript and Node.js to work with all different kinds of electronics on the Raspberry Pi. So especially for 24 ways I’m going to show you how I made a very special Raspberry Pi based internet connected project! And nothing says Christmas quite like a set of fairy lights connected to another dimension1.
What you’ll see
You can rig up the fairy lights in your home, with the scrawly letters written under each one. The people from the other side (i.e. the internet) will be able to write messages to you from their browser in real time. In fact why not try it now; check this web page. When you click the lights in your browser, my lights (and yours) will turn on and off in real life! (There may be a queue if there are lots of people accessing it, hit the “Send a message” button and wait your turn.)
It’s all done with JavaScript, using Node.js running on both the Raspberry Pi and on the server. I’m using WebSockets to communicate in real time between the browser, server and Raspberry Pi.
What you’ll need
Raspberry Pi any of the following models: Zero (will need straight male header pins soldered2 and Micro USB OTG adaptor), A+, B+, 2, or 3
Micro SD card at least 4Gb Class 10 speed3
Micro USB power supply at least 2A
USB Wifi dongle (unless you have a Pi 3 - that has wifi built in).
Addressable fairy lights
Logic level shifter (with pins soldered unless you want to do it!)
Breadboard
Jumper wires (3x male to male and 4x female to male)
Optional but recommended
Base board to hold the Pi and Breadboard (often comes with a breadboard!)
Find links for where to buy all of these items that goes along with this tutorial. The total price should be around $1004.
Setting up the Raspberry Pi
You’ll need to install the SD card for the Raspberry Pi. You’ll find a link to download a disk image on the support document, ready-made with the Raspbian version of Linux, along with Node.js and all the files you need. Download it and write it to the SD card using the fantastic free software Etcher5.
Next up you have to configure the wifi details on the SD card. If you plug the card into your computer you should see a drive called BOOT. There’s a text file on there called wpa_supplicant.conf. Open it up in your favourite text editor and replace mywifi and mypassword with your wifi details6.
network={
ssid="mywifi"
psk="mypassword"
}
Save the file, eject the card from your computer and plug it into the Raspberry Pi.
If you have a base board or holder for the Raspberry Pi, attach it now. Then connect the wifi USB dongle7 and power supply, but don’t plug it in yet!
Wiring!
Time to wire everything up!
First of all, push the Logic Level Converter into the middle of the breadboard:
Logic Level Converter
The logic level converter may be labelled differently from the one in the diagram but the pins are usually exactly the same internally. I would just make sure the pins marked HV (High Voltage) are on the bottom and LV (Low Voltage) are on the top.
Raspberry Pi pins only output 3.3v but the lights need 5v. That’s why we need the logic level converter in there to boost up the signal.
Connect the first two wires between the Raspberry Pi pins and the breadboard:
Note that the pins on the Raspberry Pi are male, so you need a female to male jumper wire to connect between them and the breadboard. The colours don’t have to match but it’s easier to follow (and check) if you use the same ones as in the diagram.
Then the next two:
This is what you should have so far:
Lights
Now to connect the lights! My ones have a connector with three holes in it that I can push jumper wires into, and hopefully yours will too! So I used the male-to-male jumper wires to connect them to the breadboard.
Make sure that you connect the right end of the lights, mine has a male connector at the wrong end so it’s impossible to do this, but double check.
Also make sure that the holes in the light connector are the same as mine. To do this, follow the wires from the connector to the first light and look at the circuit board inside. You should just about be able to make out the connections labelled + (sometimes 5V, V+ or VCC), GND (or ‘-’ or G) and DI (sometimes DIN for data in).
You can just about make out the +, DI and GND on this picture. Note that on the other side of the board there is a DO for data out - that’s what takes the data along to the chip in the next light. Make sure that you’re plugging into the data-in and not the data-out!
That’s it! Everything’s plugged in and ready to go! But before you plug power into your Pi, double check all your wires and make sure they’re exactly right! You could damage your Raspberry Pi if it is not wired correctly. So triple check!
The Moment of Truth!
Plug in the Raspberry Pi and wait around a minute or two for it to boot up. If all is well, the lights should strobe rainbow colours for one second - that’s your confirmation that it’s connected to my WebSocket server and ready to receive messages from the upside-down!
However, if the first light in the string is pulsing red, it means that you’re not connected to the internet. So check the Troubleshooting section of the support document. If it’s pulsing green then you’re connected to the internet but can’t connect to my server. It must have gone down. Sorry! The code will keep trying so leave it running and maybe it’ll come back up.
Rig up the lights!
Fix the lights up on the wall however you want, pins, nails, tape. I’ve used cable clips. Just be careful! I’m using a 50 light string so I’ve programmed it to use the lights at the end for the letters. That way I have just under half the string to extend down to the floor where I can keep the Raspberry Pi.
Check the photo here to see how the lights line up, note that there are spare unused lights in-between each row:
Now visit lights.seb.ly and you’ll see this :
If you’re the only one online you’ll have direct connection to the lights and any letter you click on will light up both in the browser and in real life. If there are other people there, you’ll need to click the button to join the queue and wait your turn.
How it works - the geeky details!
Electronics:
The pins on the Raspberry Pi are known as GPIO pins, general-purpose input/output. You can connect a wide variety of electronic components to them, LED lights, buttons, switches, and sensors. You can turn the power to the pins on and off using Node.js (or Python, if you prefer).
Addressable LEDs or “Neopixels”
We’re only using one GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi (the other connections are 5V, 3.3V and ground) and that single pin is controlling all of the lights in the string. The code turns the pin on and off really fast in strictly timed morse-code-like dots and dashes to transmit binary data. The chips attached to each LED decode the binary and adjust the output to the LED accordingly. That chip then sends the data on to the next light in the string.
The chips on each light are the WS2811, part of the WS281x family that come in a multitude of different form factors and are often packaged with tiny LEDs in a single component. They are commonly referred to as Neopixels8 and I used them on my Laser Light Synths project.
Neopixels with the chip and the LED all in one - it’s the white square shaped component and the darker square inside is the chip. These are only 5mm wide!
A Laser Light Synth! Covered with around 800 super bright neopixels!
Logic Level Converter
The logic level converter is a really cheap and easy way to change the level from 3.3v to 5v and back again. You must be careful that you do not connect 5v into a GPIO pin or you will most likely damage the Raspberry Pi processor chip.
Power
Neopixels can often draw a lot of current so you need to be careful how you power them. I’ve measured the current draw from the string to be less than 800mA so you should be fine wired directly to the 5V output. But if you use more lights or have them all on really bright at once, you’ll need to use a separate 5V power supply. If you want to learn more, check out Adafruit’s Neopixel Uberguide.
Node.js
There are two Node.js apps running here, one on the Raspberry Pi and one on my server. You can see the code on my GitHub at github.com/sebleedelisle/stranger-lights for the Raspberry Pi and github.com/sebleedelisle/stranger-lights-server for the server. And they’re hosted on npm as stranger-lights and stranger-lights-server.
The server side code sets up a standard web server to deliver the HTML for the web interface. It also sets up a WebSocket server that allows for real-time communication between the browser and the server. This server code also manages the queue and who is in control of the lights at any given time.
WebSockets
I’m using the excellent Socket.io library to manage the WebSocket connection. Both the browser and the Raspberry Pi Node.js app connects to my WebSocket server.
When you click on a letter in the browser, a message is sent to the server, which forwards it to the connected Raspberry Pi clients and also all the web browsers9.
The Raspberry Pi code
The Node.js app runs automatically on startup, and I made this happen by adding this to the /etc/rc.local file:
node /home/pi/strangerthings/client.js > /dev/null &
Anything in the rc.local file gets executed when the Pi boots up and this line of code runs the Node.js app and routes its output to nowhere (ie /dev/null). The & means that it runs it in the background and doesn’t hold up the boot process.
Working with the Raspberry Pi headless
You might know that when a computer has no screen or keyboard, you would refer to it as “running headless”. So just like most web servers, you need to configure it over the network with ssh10. If you’re on a mac you can find your Pi on the network through the name raspberrypi.local11, otherwise you’ll need to find its IP address. There’s more on the guide to Remote Access instructions on the Raspberry Pi website. And if you’re very new to the terminal, I highly recommend this great online Linux command line tutorial.
Improvements
This is quite an early experiment and I’m sure I’ll discover lots of optimisations over the next few weeks, especially if the server gets a proper hammering today! But there are a few things you can do. Obviously I’ve just rigged up my lights with Post-it notes. It’d be a lot nicer to get a paint brush and try to recreate the Winona-in-a-manic-state text style.
Where next?
Finding quality resources about Node.js for electronics on the Pi can be somewhat hit and miss, but this is getting better all the time. Alternatively I am thinking about running some online courses, please let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in, or sign up to my mailing list at st4i.com.
There are many many more resources for the Raspberry Pi with Python (gpiozero is a good place to start), so if that language works for you, you’ll be spoilt for choice!
Also take a look at Arduino - it’s an incredibly popular platform for electronics and the internet is literally bursting with resources.
I hope you enjoyed this little foray into the world of JavaScript electronics on the Raspberry Pi! If you get this working at home please let me know! Tweet me at @seb_ly.
Not a particularly original idea, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do it quite like this before, ie using WebSockets, and Node.js on a Raspberry Pi. Other examples: Internet of Stranger Things, Strangerlights.com, and loads of examples on Instructables ↩︎
Video guide to soldering pins on to a Pi Zero and further soldering advice from Adafruit ↩︎
Slower cards will work but performance may suffer ↩︎
Or £5,000 in UK money. Sorry, Brexit joke :) ↩︎
You will need a card reader on your computer - most micro SD cards come with an adaptor that fits standard SD slots. ↩︎
SSID and password should be all that you need but you can see all the config options on this wpa supplicant guide ↩︎
Raspberry Pi Zero will require the OTG to USB adaptor to attach the wifi dongle ↩︎
Thanks to Adafruit who invented the term neopixels so we don’t have to refer to them as WS281x any more! ↩︎
So you can see other people sending messages in the browser ↩︎
ssh is short for Secure Shell and is a way to connect to a remote computer and type in it just like you would in the terminal. ↩︎
You can change this default hostname using raspi-config ↩︎ |
2016 |
Seb Lee-Delisle |
sebleedelisle |
2016-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/internet-of-stranger-things/ |
code |
| 296 |
Animation in Design Systems |
Our modern front-end workflow has matured over time to include design systems and component libraries that help us stay organized, improve workflows, and simplify maintenance. These systems, when executed well, ensure proper documentation of the code available and enable our systems to scale with reduced communication conflicts.
But while most of these systems take a critical stance on fonts, colors, and general building blocks, their treatment of animation remains disorganized and ad-hoc. Let’s leverage existing structures and workflows to reduce friction when it comes to animation and create cohesive and performant user experiences.
Understand the importance of animation
Part of the reason we treat animation like a second-class citizen is that we don’t really consider its power. When users are scanning a website (or any environment or photo), they are attempting to build a spatial map of their surroundings. During this process, nothing quite commands attention like something in motion.
We are biologically trained to notice motion: evolutionarily speaking, our survival depends on it. For this reason, animation when done well can guide your users. It can aid and reinforce these maps, and give us a sense that we understand the UX more deeply. We retrieve information and put it back where it came from instead of something popping in and out of place.
“Where did that menu go? Oh it’s in there.”
For a deeper dive into how animation can connect disparate states, I wrote about the Importance of Context-Shifting in UX Patterns for CSS-Tricks.
An animation flow on mobile.
Animation also aids in perceived performance. Viget conducted a study where they measured user engagement with a standard loading GIF versus a custom animation. Customers were willing to wait almost twice as long for the custom loader, even though it wasn’t anything very fancy or crazy. Just by showing their users that they cared about them, they stuck around, and the bounce rates dropped.
14 second generic loading screen.22 second custom loading screen.
This also works for form submission. Giving your personal information over to an online process like a static form can be a bit harrowing. It becomes more harrowing without animation used as a signal that something is happening, and that some process is completing. That same animation can also entertain users and make them feel as though the wait isn’t as long.
Eli Fitch gave a talk at CSS Dev Conf called: “Perceived Performance: The Only Kind That Really Matters”, which is one of my favorite talk titles of all time. In it, he discussed how we tend to measure things like timelines and network requests because they are more quantifiable–and therefore easier to measure–but that measuring how a user feels when visiting the site is more important and worth the time and attention.
In his talk, he states “Humans over-estimate passive waits by 36%, per Richard Larson of MIT”. This means that if you’re not using animation to speed up how fast the wait time of a form submission loads, users are perceiving it to be much slower than the dev tools timeline is recording.
Reign it in
Unlike fonts, colors, and so on, we tend to add animation in as a last step, which leads to disorganized implementations that lack overall cohesion. If you asked a designer or developer if they would create a mockup or build a UI without knowing the fonts they were working with, they would dislike the idea. Not knowing the building blocks they’re working with means that the design can fall apart or the development can break with something so fundamental left out at the start. Good animation works the same way.
The first step in reigning in your use of animation is to perform an animation audit. Look at all the places you are using animation on your site, or the places you aren’t using animation but probably should. (Hint: perceived performance of a loader on a form submission can dramatically change your bounce rates.)
Not sure how to perform a good audit? Val Head has a great chapter on it in her book, Designing Interface Animations, which has of buckets of research and great ideas.
Even some beautiful component libraries that have animation in the docs make this mistake. You don’t need every kind of animation, just like you don’t need every kind of font. This bloats our code. Ask yourself questions like: do you really need a flip 180 degree animation? I can’t even conceive of a place on a typical UI where that would be useful, yet most component libraries that I’ve seen have a mixin that does just this.
Which leads to…
Have an opinion
Many people are confused about Material Design. They think that Material Design is Motion Design, mostly because they’ve never seen anyone take a stance on animation before and document these opinions well. But every time you use Material Design as your motion design language, people look at your site and think GOOGLE. Now that’s good branding.
By using Google’s motion design language and not your own, you’re losing out on a chance to be memorable on your own website.
What does having an opinion on motion look like in practice? It could mean you’ve decided that you never flip things. It could mean that your eases are always going to glide. In that instance, you would put your efforts towards finding an ease that looks “gliding” and pulling out any transform: scaleX(-1) animation you find on your site. Across teams, everyone knows not to spend time mocking up flipping animation (even if they’re working on an entirely different codebase), and to instead work on something that feels like it glides. You save time and don’t have to communicate again and again to make things feel cohesive.
Create good developer resources
Sometimes people don’t incorporate animation into a design system because they aren’t sure how, beyond the base hover states. All animation properties can be broken into interchangeable pieces. This allows developers and designers alike to mix and match and iterate quickly, while still staying in the correct language. Here are some recommendations (with code and a demo to follow):
Create timing units, similar to h1, h2, h3. In a system I worked on recently, I called these t1, t2, t3. T1 would be reserved for longer pieces, down to t5 which is a bit like h5 in that it’s the default (usually around .25 seconds or thereabouts).
Keep animation easings for entrance, exit, entrance emphasis and exit emphasis that people can commonly refer to. This, and the animation-fill-mode, are likely to be the only two properties that can be reused for the entrance and exit of the animation.
Use the animation-name property to define the keyframes for the animation itself. I would recommend starting with 5 or 6 before making a slew of them, and see if you need more. Writing 30 different animations might seem like a nice resource, but just like your color palette having too many can unnecessarily bulk up your codebase, and keep it from feeling cohesive. Think critically about what you need here.
See the Pen Modularized Animation for Component Libraries by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.
The example above is pared-down, but you can see how in a robust system, having pieces that are interchangeable cached across the whole system would save time for iterations and prototyping, not to mention make it easy to make adjustments for different feeling movement on the same animation easily.
One low hanging fruit might be a loader that leads to a success dialog. On a big site, you might have that pattern many times, so writing up a component that does only that helps you move faster while also allowing you to really zoom in and focus on that pattern. You avoid throwing something together at the last minute, or using a GIF, which are really heavy and mushy on retina. You can make singular pieces that look really refined and are reusable.
React and Vue Implementations are great for reusable components, as you can create a building block with a common animation pattern, and once created, it can be a resource for all. Remember to take advantage of things like props to allow for timing and easing adjustments like we have in the previous example!
Responsive
At the very least we should ensure that interaction also works well on mobile, but if we’d like to create interactions that take advantage of all of the gestures mobile has to offer, we can use libraries like zingtouch or hammer to work with swipe or multiple finger detection. With a bit of work, these can all be created through native detection as well.
Responsive web pages can specify initial-scale=1.0 in the meta tag so that the device is not waiting the required 300ms on the secondary tap before calling action. Interaction for touch events must either start from a larger touch-target (40px × 40px or greater) or use @media(pointer:coarse) as support allows.
Buy-in
Sometimes people don’t create animation resources simply because it gets deprioritized. But design systems were also something we once had to fight for, too. This year at CSS Dev Conf, Rachel Nabors demonstrated how to plot out animation wants vs. needs on a graph (reproduced with her permission) to help prioritize them:
This helps people you’re working with figure out the relative necessity and workload of the addition of these animations and think more critically about it. You’re also more likely to get something through if you’re proving that what you’re making is needed and can be reused.
Good compromises can be made this way: “we’re not going to go all out and create an animated ‘About Us’ page like you wanted, but I suppose we can let our users know their contact email went through with a small progress and success notification.”
Successfully pushing smaller projects through helps build trust with your team, and lets them see what this type of collaboration can look like. This builds up the type of relationship necessary to push through projects that are more involved. It can’t be overstressed that good communication is key.
Get started!
With these tools and good communication, we can make our codebases more efficient, performant, and feel better for our users. We can enhance the user experience on our sites, and create great resources for our teams to allow them to move more quickly while innovating beautifully. |
2016 |
Sarah Drasner |
sarahdrasner |
2016-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/animation-in-design-systems/ |
code |
| 297 |
Public Speaking with a Buddy |
My book Demystifying Public Speaking focuses on the variety of fears we each have about giving a talk. From presenting to a client, to leading a team standup, to standing on a conference stage, there are lots of things we can do to prepare ourselves for the spotlight and reduce those fears.
Though it didn’t make it into the final draft, I wanted to highlight how helpful it can be to share that public speaking spotlight with another person, or a few more people. If you have fears about not knowing the answer to a question, fumbling your words, or making a mistake in the spotlight, then buddying up may be for you!
To some, adding more people to a presentation sounds like a recipe for on-stage disaster. To others, having a friendly face nearby—a partner who can step in if you fumble—is incredibly reassuring. As design director Yesenia Perez-Cruz writes, “While public speaking is a deeply personal activity, you don’t have to go it alone. Nothing has helped my speaking career more than turning it into a group effort.”
Co-presenting can level up a talk in two ways: an additional brain and presentation skill set can improve the content of the talk itself, and you may feel safer with the on-stage safety net of your buddy.
For example, when I started giving lengthy workshops about building mobile device labs with my co-worker Destiny Montague, we brought different experience to the table. I was able to talk about the user experience of our lab, and the importance of testing across different screen sizes. Destiny spoke about the hardware aspects of the lab, like power consumption and networking. Our audience benefitted from the spectrum of insight we included in the talk.
Moreover, Destiny and I kept each other energized and engaging while teaching our audience, having way more fun onstage. Partnering up alleviated the risk (and fear!) of fumbling; where one person makes a mistake, the other person is right there to help. Buddy presentations can be helpful if you fear saying “I don’t know” to a question, as there are other people around you who will be able to help answer it from the stage. By partnering with someone whom I trust and respect, and whose work and knowledge augments my own, it made the experience—and the presentation!—significantly better.
Co-presenting won’t work if you don’t trust the person you’re onstage with, or if you don’t have good chemistry working together. It might also not work if there’s an imbalance of responsibilities, both in preparing the talk and giving it. Read on for how to make partner talks work to your advantage!
Trustworthiness
If you want to explore co-presenting, make sure that your presentation partner is trustworthy and can carry their weight; it can be stressful if you find yourself trying to meet deadlines and prepare well and your partner isn’t being helpful. We’re all about reducing the fears and stress levels surrounding being in that spotlight onstage; make sure that the person you’re relying on isn’t making the process harder.
Before you start working together, sketch out the breakdown of work and timeline you’re each committing to. Have a conversation about your preferred work style so you each have a concrete understanding of the best ways to communicate (in what medium, and how often) and how to check in on each other’s progress without micromanaging or worrying about radio silence. Ask your buddy how they prefer to receive feedback, and give them your own feedback preferences, so neither of you are surprised or offended when someone’s work style or deliverable needs to be tweaked.
This should be a partnership in which you both feel supported; it’s healthy to set all these expectations up front, and create a space in which you can each tweak things as the work progresses.
Talk flow and responsibilities
There are a few different ways to organize the structure of your talk with multiple presenters. Start by thinking about the breakdown of the talk content—are there discrete parts you and the other presenters can own or deliver? Or does it feel more appropriate to deliver the entirety of the content together?
If you’re finding that you can break down the content into discrete chunks, figure out who should own which pieces, and what ownership means. Will you develop the content together but have only one person present the information? Or will one person research and prepare each content section in addition to delivering it solo onstage?
Rehearse how handoffs will go between sections so it feels natural, rather than stilted. I like breaking a presentation into “chapters” when I’m passionate about particular aspects of a topic and can speak on those, but know that there are other aspects to be shared and there’s someone else who can handle (and enjoy!) talking about them. When Destiny and I rehearsed our “chapter” handoffs, we developed little jingles that we’d both sing together onstage; it indicated to the audience that it was a planned transition in the content, and tied our independent work together into a partnership.
.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }
Alternatively, you can give the presentation in a way that’s close to having a rehearsed conversation, rather than independently presenting discrete parts of the talk. In this case, you’ll both be sharing the spotlight at the same time, throughout the duration of the talk. Preparation is key, here, to make sure that you each understand what needs to be communicated, and you have a sense of who will be taking responsibility for communicating those different pieces of information. A poorly-prepared talk like this will look like the co-presenters are talking over each other, or hesitating awkwardly to give the other person more room to speak; the audience will feel how uncomfortable this is, and will probably be distracted from the talk content. Practice the talk the whole way through multiple times so you know what each person is planning on covering and how you want to interact with each other while you’re both holding microphones; also figure out how you’ll be standing in relation to each other. More on that next!
Sharing the stage
If you choose to give a talk with a partner, determine ahead of time how you’ll stand (or sit). For example, if you each take “chapters” or major sections of the presentation, ensure that it’s clear who the audience should focus their attention on. You could sit in a chair off to the side (or stand). I recommend placing yourself far enough away that you’re not distracting to the audience; you don’t want them watching you while your partner is speaking. If the audience can still see you, but their focus should be on your buddy, be sure to not look distracted; keep your eyes on your buddy, and don’t just open your laptop and ignore what’s happening! Feel free to smile, laugh, or react how the audience should be reacting as your partner is speaking.
If you’re both sharing the spotlight at the same time and having a rehearsed conversation, make sure that your body language engages the audience and you’re not just speaking to each other, ignoring the folks watching. Watch this talk with Guy Podjarny and Assaf Hefetz who have partnered up to talk about security; they have clearly identified roles onstage, and remain engaged with the audience.
Consider whether or not you will share a microphone, or if you will both be mic’d. (Be sure that the event organizer, or the A/V team, has a heads-up well in advance to ensure they have the equipment handy!) Also talk through how you’d like to handle Q&A time during or after the talk, especially if you have clear “chapters” where Q&A might happen naturally during a handoff. The more clarity you and your partner have about who is responsible for which pieces of information sharing, the more you can feel and appear prepared.
Co-presenting does take a lot of preparation and requires a ton of communication between you and your partner. But the rewards can be awesome: double the brains onstage to help answer questions and communicate information, and a friendly face to help comfort you if you feel nervous. |
2016 |
Lara Hogan |
larahogan |
2016-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/public-speaking-with-a-buddy/ |
process |
| 298 |
First Steps in VR |
The web is all around us. As web folk, it is our responsibility to consider the impact our work can have. Part of this includes thinking about the future; the web changes lives and if we are building the web then we are the ones making decisions that affect people in every corner of the world. I find myself often torn between wanting to make the right decisions, and just wanting to have fun. To fiddle and play. We all know how important it is to sometimes just try ideas, whether they will amount to much or not.
I think of these two mindsets as production and prototyping, though of course there are lots of overlap and phases in between. I mention this because virtual reality is currently seen as a toy for rich people, and in some ways at the moment it is. But with WebVR we are able to create interesting experiences with a relatively low entry point. I want us to have open minds, play around with things, and then see how we can use the tools we have at our disposal to make things that will help people.
Every year we see articles saying it will be the “year of virtual reality”, that was especially prevalent this year. 2016 has been a year of progress, VR isn’t quite mainstream but with efforts like Playstation VR and Google Cardboard, we are definitely seeing much more of it. This year also saw the consumer editions of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. So it does seem to be a good time for an overview of how to get involved with creating virtual reality on the web.
WebVR is an API for connecting to devices and retrieving continuous data such as the position and orientation. Unlike the Web Audio API and some other APIs, WebVR does not feel like a framework. You use it however you want, taking the data and using it as you wish. To make it easier, there are plenty of resources such as Three.js, A-Frame and ReactVR that help to make the heavy lifting a bit easier.
Getting Started with A-Frame
I like taking the opportunity to learn new things whenever I can. So while planning this article I thought that instead of trying to teach WebGL or even Three.js in a way that is approachable for all, I would create my first project using A-Frame and write about that. This is not a tutorial as such, I just want to show how to go about getting involved with VR. The beauty of A-Frame is that it is very similar to web components, you can just write HTML to build worlds that will automatically work on all the different types of devices. It uses WebGL and WebVR but in such a way that it quite drastically reduces the learning curve. That’s not to say you can’t build complex things, you have complete access to write JavaScript and shaders.
I’m lazy. Whenever I learn a new language or framework I have found that the best way, personally, for me to learn is to have a project and to copy the starting code from someone else. A project lets you have a good idea of what you want to produce and it means you can ignore a lot of the irrelevant documentation, focussing purely on what you need. That reduces the stress of figuring things out. Copying code also makes it easier, because you know your boilerplate code is working. There’s nothing worse than getting stuck before anything actually works the first time. So I tinker. I take code and I modify it, I play around. It’s fun.
For this project I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, so I can easily explain it without the classic “draw a circle then draw an owl”. I wrote a list of requirements, with some stretch goals that you can give a try yourself if you fancy:
Must work on Google Cardboard at a minimum, because of price
Therefore, it must not rely on having a controller
Auto-moving around a maze would be a good example
Move in direction you look
Stretch goal: Scoring, time until you hit a wall or get stuck in maze
Stretch goal: Levels, so the map doesn’t need to be random
Stretch goal: Snow!
I decided to base this project on an example, Platforms, by Don McCurdy who wrote the really useful aframe-extras. Platforms has random 3D blocks that you can jump onto, going up into the sky. So I took his code and reduced it so that the blocks are randomly spread on the ground.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<title>24 ways</title>
<script src="https://aframe.io/releases/0.3.2/aframe.js"></script>
<script src="//cdn.rawgit.com/donmccurdy/aframe-extras/v2.6.1/dist/aframe-extras.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<a-scene>
<a-entity id="player"
camera
universal-controls
kinematic-body
position="0 1.8 0">
</a-entity>
<a-entity id="walls"></a-entity>
<a-grid id="ground" static-body></a-grid>
<a-sky id="sky" color="#AADDF0"></a-sky>
<!-- Lighting -->
<a-light type="ambient" color="#ccc"></a-light>
</a-scene>
<script>
document.querySelector('a-scene').addEventListener('render-target-loaded', function () {
var MAP_SIZE = 10,
PLATFORM_SIZE = 5,
NUM_PLATFORMS = 50;
var platformsEl = document.querySelector('#walls');
var v, box;
for (var i = 0; i < NUM_PLATFORMS; i++) {
// y: 0 is ground
v = {
x: (Math.floor(Math.random() * MAP_SIZE) - PLATFORM_SIZE) * PLATFORM_SIZE,
y: PLATFORM_SIZE / 2,
z: (Math.floor(Math.random() * MAP_SIZE) - PLATFORM_SIZE) * PLATFORM_SIZE
};
box = document.createElement('a-box');
platformsEl.appendChild(box);
box.setAttribute('color', '#39BB82');
box.setAttribute('width', PLATFORM_SIZE);
box.setAttribute('height', PLATFORM_SIZE);
box.setAttribute('depth', PLATFORM_SIZE);
box.setAttribute('position', v.x + ' ' + v.y + ' ' + v.z);
box.setAttribute('static-body', '');
}
console.info('Platforms loaded.');
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, this is very readable. Especially if you ignore the JavaScript that is used to create the maze. A-Frame (with A-Frame Extras) gives you a lot of power with relatively little to learn. We start with an <a-scene> which is the container for everything that is going to show up on the screen. There are a few <a-entity> which can be compared to <div> as they are essentially non-semantic containers, able to be used for any purpose. The attributes are used to define functionality, for example the camera attribute sets the entity to function as a camera and kinematic-body makes it collide instead of go through objects. Attributes are also used to set position and sizes, often using JavaScript to dynamically define them.
Styling
Now we’ve got the HTML written, we need to style it. To do this we add A-Frame compatible attributes such as color and material. I recommend playing around, you can get some quite impressive effects fairly easily. Originally I wanted a light snowy maze but it ended up being dark and foggy, as I really liked the feeling it gave.
Note, you will probably need a server running for images to work. You can do this by running python -m "SimpleHTTPServer" in the folder where the code is, then go to localhost:8000 in browser.
Textures
Unless you are going for a cartoony style, you probably want to find some textures. I found some on textures.com, one image worked well for the walls and the other for the floor.
<a-assets>
<img id="texture-floor" src="floor.jpg">
<img id="texture-wall" src="wall.jpg">
</a-assets>
The <a-assets> is used to define (as well as preload and cache) all assets, including images, audio and video. As you can see, images in the Asset Management System just use normal img tags. The ids are important here as we can use them later for using the textures.
To apply a texture to an object, you create a material. For a simple material where it just shows the image, you set the src to the id selector of the image.
Replace:
<a-grid id="ground" static-body></a-grid>
With:
<a-grid id="ground" static-body material="src: #texture-floor"></a-grid>
This will automatically make the image repeat over the entire floor, in my case filling it with bricks. The walls are pretty much identical, with the slight exception that it is set in JavaScript as they are dynamically defined.
box.setAttribute('material', 'src: #texture-wall');
That’s it for the textures, for now at least. These will not look completely realistic, as the light will bump off the rectangular wall rather than texture itself. This can be improved by using maps, textures that are used to modify the shape and physical properties of the object.
Lighting
The next part of styling is lighting. By using fog and different types of lighting, we are able to add atmospheric details to the game to make it feel that bit more realistic and polished.
There are lots of types of light in A-Frame (most coming from Three.js). You can add a light either by using the <a-light> entity or by attaching a light attribute to any other entity. If there are no lights defined then A-Frame adds some by default so that the scene is always lit.
To start with I wanted to light up the scene with a general light, type="ambient", so that the whole game felt slightly dark. I chose to set the light to a reddish colour #92455E. After playing around with intensity I chose 0.4, it added enough light to get the feeling I wanted without it being overly red. I also added a blue skybox (<a-sky>), as it looked a bit odd with a white sky.
<a-light type="ambient" color="#92455E" intensity="0.4"></a-light>
<a-sky id="sky" color="#0000ff"></a-sky>
I felt that the maze looked good with a red tinge but it was a bit flat, everything was the same colour and it was a bit dark. So I added a light within the #player entity, this could have been as an attribute but I set it as a child a-light instead. By using type="point" with a high intensity and low distance, it showed close walls as being lighter. It also added a sort-of object to the player, it isn’t a walking human or anything but by moving light where the player is it feels a bit more physical.
<a-light color="#fff" distance="5" intensity="0.7" type="point"></a-light>
By this point it was starting to look decent, so I wanted to add the fog to really give some personality and depth to the maze. To do this I added the fog attribute to the <a-scene> with type=exponential so it looks thicker the further away it is and a mid intensity, so you feel a bit lost but can still see.
I was very happy with this result. It took a lot of playing around with colours and values, which is fun in itself. I highly recommend you take the code (or write your own) and play around with the numbers.
Movement
One of the reasons I decided to use aframe-extras is that it has a few different camera controls built in. As you saw earlier, I am using the universal-controls which gives WASD (keyboard) controls by default. I wanted to make it automatically move in the direction that you’re looking, but I wasn’t quite sure how without rewriting the controls. So I asked Don McCurdy for advice and he very nicely gave me a small snippet of code to get it working.
AFRAME.registerComponent('automove-controls', {
init: function () {
this.speed = 0.1;
this.isMoving = true;
this.velocityDelta = new THREE.Vector3();
},
isVelocityActive: function () {
return this.isMoving;
},
getVelocityDelta: function () {
this.velocityDelta.z = this.isMoving ? -speed : 0;
return this.velocityDelta.clone();
}
});
Replace:
universal-controls
With:
universal-controls="movementControls: automove, gamepad, keyboard"
This works by creating a component automove-controls that adds auto-move to the player without overriding movement completely. It doesn’t even touch direction, it just checks if isMoving is true then moves the player by the set speed. Components can be creating for adding all kinds of functionality with relative ease. It makes it very powerful for people of all difficulty levels.
Building a map
Currently the maze is created randomly, which is great but means there will often be walls that overlap or the player gets trapped with nowhere to go. So to solve this, I decided to use a map editor (Tiled) so that we can create the mazes ourselves. This is a great start towards one of the stretch goals, levels.
I made the maze in Tiled by finding a random tileset online (we don’t need to actually show the images), I used one tile for the wall and another for the player. Then I exported as a JavaScript file and modified it in my text editor to get rid of everything I didn’t need. I made it so 0 is the path, 1 is the wall and 2 is the player. I then added the script to the HTML, as a separate file so it’s easy to update in the future.
var map =
{
"data":[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
"height":10,
"width":10
}
As you can see, this gives a simple 10x10 maze with some dead ends. The player starts in the bottom right corner (my choice, could be anywhere). I rewrote the random platforms code (from Don’s example) to instead loop over the map data and place walls where it is 1 and position the player where data is 2. I set the position so that the origin of the map would be 0,1.5,0. The y axis is in this case the height (ground being 0), but if a wall is positioned at 0 by its centre then some of it is underground. So the y needed to be the height divided by 2.
document.querySelector('a-scene').addEventListener('render-target-loaded', function () {
var WALL_SIZE = 5,
WALL_HEIGHT = 3;
var el = document.querySelector('#walls');
var wall;
for (var x = 0; x < map.height; x++) {
for (var y = 0; y < map.width; y++) {
var i = y*map.width + x;
var position = (x-map.width/2)*WALL_SIZE + ' ' + 1.5 + ' ' + (y-map.height/2)*WALL_SIZE;
if (map.data[i] === 1) {
// Create wall
wall = document.createElement('a-box');
el.appendChild(wall);
wall.setAttribute('color', '#fff');
wall.setAttribute('material', 'src: #texture-wall;');
wall.setAttribute('width', WALL_SIZE);
wall.setAttribute('height', WALL_HEIGHT);
wall.setAttribute('depth', WALL_SIZE);
wall.setAttribute('position', position);
wall.setAttribute('static-body', ');
}
if (map.data[i] === 2) {
// Set player position
document.querySelector('#player').setAttribute('position', position);
}
}
}
console.info('Walls added.');
});
With this added, it makes it nice and easy to change around the map as well as to add new features. Perhaps you want monsters or objects. Just set the number in the map data and add an if statement to the loop. In the future you could add layers, so multiple things can be in the same position. Or perhaps even make the maze go up the y axis too, with ramps or staircases. There’s a lot you can do with relative ease. As you can see, A-Frame really does reduce the learning curve of 3D and VR on the web.
It’s Not All Fun And Games
A lot of examples of virtual reality are games, including this one. So it is understandable to think that VR is for gaming, but actually that’s just a tiny subset. There are all sorts of applications for VR, including story telling, data visualisation and even meditation.
There have been a number of cases where it has been shown virtual reality can help as a tool for therapies:
Oxford study finds virtual reality can help treat severe paranoia
Virtual Reality Therapy for Phobias at the Duke Faculty Practice
Bravemind: Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy at the University of Southern California
These are just a few examples of where virtual reality is being used around the world to help people feel better and get through some very tough times. There have also been examples of it being used for simulating war zones or medical situations, both as a teaching and journalism tool.
Wrapping Up
Ten years ago, on this very site, Cameron Moll wrote an article explaining the mobile web. He explained how mobile phones with data plans were becoming increasingly common, that WAP 2.0 included the XHTML Mobile Profile meaning it would be familiar with web folk. “The mobile web is rapidly becoming an XHTML environment, and thus you and I can apply our existing “desktop web” skills to understand how to develop content for it.”
We can look at that and laugh a little, we have come a very long way in the last decade. Even people in developing countries with very little money have mobile phones with access to a web that is far more capable than the “desktop web” Cameron was referring to.
So while I am not saying virtual reality is going to change the world or replace our phones, who knows! We can use our skills as web folk to dabble, we don’t need to learn any new languages. If on the 2026 edition of 24 ways, somebody references this article and looks at how far we have come… well, let’s hope we have used our skills well and made the world just that little bit better. And if VR is a fad? Well it’s fun… have a go anyway. |
2016 |
Shane Hudson |
shanehudson |
2016-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/first-steps-in-vr/ |
code |
| 299 |
What the Heck Is Inclusive Design? |
Naming things is hard. And I don’t just mean CSS class names and JSON properties. Finding the right term for what we do with the time we spend awake and out of bed turns out to be really hard too.
I’ve variously gone by “front-end developer”, “user experience designer”, and “accessibility engineer”, all clumsy and incomplete terms for labeling what I do as an… erm… see, there’s the problem again.
It’s tempting to give up entirely on trying to find the right words for things, but this risks summarily dispensing with thousands of years spent trying to qualify the world around us. So here we are again.
Recently, I’ve been using the term “inclusive design” and calling myself an “inclusive designer” a lot. I’m not sure where I first heard it or who came up with it, but the terminology feels like a good fit for the kind of stuff I care to do when I’m not at a pub or asleep.
This article is about what I think “inclusive design” means and why I think you might like it as an idea.
Isn’t ‘inclusive design’ just ‘accessibility’ by another name?
No, I don’t think so. But that’s not to say the two concepts aren’t related. Note the ‘design’ part in ‘inclusive design’ — that’s not just there by accident. Inclusive design describes a design activity; a way of designing things.
This sets it apart from accessibility — or at least our expectations of what ‘accessibility’ entails. Despite every single accessibility expert I know (and I know a lot) recommending that accessibility should be integrated into design process, it is rarely ever done. Instead, it is relegated to an afterthought, limiting its effect.
The term ‘accessibility’ therefore lacks the power to connote design process. It’s not that we haven’t tried to salvage the term, but it’s beginning to look like a lost cause. So maybe let’s use a new term, because new things take new names. People get that.
The ‘access’ part of accessibility is also problematic. Before we get ahead of ourselves, I don’t mean access is a problem — access is good, and the more accessible something is the better. I mean it’s not enough by itself.
Imagine a website filled with poorly written and lackadaisically organized information, including a bunch of convoluted and confusing functionality. To make this site accessible is to ensure no barriers prevent people from accessing the content.
But that doesn’t make the content any better. It just means more people get to suffer it.
Whoopdidoo.
Access is certainly a prerequisite of inclusion, but accessibility compliance doesn’t get you all the way there. It’s possible to check all the boxes but still be left with an unusable interface. And unusable interfaces are necessarily inaccessible ones. Sure, you can take an unusable interface and make it accessibility compliant, but that only placates stakeholders’ lawyers, not users. Users get little value from it.
So where have we got to? Access is important, but inclusion is bigger than access. Inclusive design means making something valuable, not just accessible, to as many people as we can.
So inclusive design is kind of accessibility + UX?
Closer, but there are some problems with this definition.
UX is, you will have already noted, a broad term encompassing activities ranging from conducting research studies to optimizing the perceived affordance of interface elements. But overall, what I take from UX is that it’s the pursuit of making interfaces understandable.
As it happens, WCAG 2.0 already contains an ‘Understandable’ principle covering provisions such as readability, predictability and feedback. So you might say accessibility — at least as described by WCAG — already covers UX.
Unfortunately, the criteria are limited, plus some really important stuff (like readability) is relegated to the AAA level; essentially “bonus points if you get the time (you won’t).”
So better to let UX folks take care of this kind of thing. It’s what they do. Except, therein lies a danger. UX professionals don’t tend to be well versed in accessibility, so their ‘solutions’ don’t tend to work for that many people. My friend Billy Gregory coined the term SUX, or “Some UX”: if it doesn’t work for different users, it’s only doing part of the job it should be.
SUX won’t do, but it’s not just a disability issue. All sorts of user circumstances go unchecked when you’re shooting straight for what people like, and bypassing what people need: device type, device settings, network quality, location, native language, and available time to name just a few.
In short, inclusive design means designing things for people who aren’t you, in your situation. In my experience, mainstream UX isn’t very good at that. By bolting accessibility onto mainstream UX we labor under the misapprehension that most people have a ‘normal’ experience, a few people are exceptions, and that all of the exceptions pertain to disability directly.
So inclusive design isn’t really about disability?
It is about disability, but not in the same way as accessibility. Accessibility (as it is typically understood, anyway) aims to make sure things work for people with clinically recognized disabilities. Inclusive design aims to make sure things work for people, not forgetting those with clinically recognized disabilities. A subtle, but not so subtle, difference.
Let’s go back to discussing readability, because that’s a good example. Now: everyone benefits from readable text; text with concise sentences and widely-understood words. It certainly helps people with cognitive impairments, but it doesn’t hinder folks who have less trouble with comprehension. In fact, they’ll more than likely be thankful for the time saved and the clarity. Readable text covers the whole gamut. It’s — you’ve got it — inclusive.
Legibility is another one. A clear, well-balanced typeface makes the reading experience less uncomfortable and frustrating for all concerned, including those who have various forms of visual dyslexia. Again, everyone’s happy — so why even contemplate a squiggly, sketchy typeface? Leave well alone.
Contrast too. No one benefits from low contrast; everyone benefits from high contrast. Simple. There’s no more work involved, it just entails better decision making. And that’s what design is really: decision making.
How about zoom support? If you let your users pinch zoom on their phones they can compensate for poor eyesight, but they can also increase the touch area of controls, inspect detail in images, and compose better screen shots. Unobtrusively supporting options like zoom makes interfaces much more inclusive at very little cost.
And when it comes to the underlying HTML code, you’re in luck: it has already been designed, from the outset, to be inclusive. HTML is a toolkit for inclusion. Using the right elements for the job doesn’t just mean the few who use screen readers benefit, but keyboard accessibility comes out-of-the-box, you can defer to browser behavior rather than writing additional scripts, the code is easier to read and maintain, and editors can create content that is effortlessly presentable.
Wait… are you talking about universal design?
Hmmm. Yes, I guess some folks might think of “universal design” and “inclusive design” as synonymous. I just really don’t like the term universal in this context.
The thing is, it gives the impression that you should be designing for absolutely everyone in the universe. Though few would adopt a literal interpretation of “universal” in this context, there are enough developers who would deliberately misconstrue the term and decry universal design as an impossible task. I’ve actually had people push back by saying, “what, so I’ve got to make it work for people who are allergic to computers? What about people in comas?”
For everyone’s sake, I think the term ‘inclusive’ is less misleading. Of course you can’t make things that everybody can use — it’s okay, that’s not the aim. But with everything that’s possible with web technologies, there’s really no need to exclude people in the vast numbers that we usually are.
Accessibility can never be perfect, but by thinking inclusively from planning, through prototyping to production, you can cast a much wider net. That means more and happier users at very little if any more effort.
If you like, inclusive design is the means and accessibility is the end — it’s just that you get a lot more than just accessibility along the way.
Conclusion
That’s inclusive design. Or at least, that’s a definition for a thing I think is a good idea which I identify as inclusive design. I’ll leave you with a few tips.
Involve code early
Web interfaces are made of code. If you’re not working with code, you’re not working on the interface. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with sketching or paper prototyping — in fact, I recommend paper prototyping in my book on inclusive design. Just work with code as soon as you can, and think about code even before that. Maintain a pattern library of coded solutions and omit any solutions that don’t adhere to basic accessibility guidelines.
Respect conventions
Your content should be fresh, inventive, radical. Your interface shouldn’t. Adopt accepted conventions in the appearance, placement and coding of interface elements. Users aren’t there to experience interface design; they’re there to use an interface. In other words: stop showing off (unless, of course, the brief is to experiment with new paradigms in interface design, for an audience of interface design researchers).
Don’t be exact
“Perfection is the enemy of good”. But the pursuit of perfection isn’t just to be avoided because nothing ever gets finished. Exacting design also makes things inflexible and brittle. If your design depends on elements retaining precise coordinates, they’ll break easily when your users start adjusting font settings or zooming. Choose not to position elements exactly or give them fixed, “magic number” dimensions. Make less decisions in the interface so your users can make more decisions for it.
Enforce simplicity
The virtue of simplicity is difficult to overestimate. The simpler an interface is, the easier it is to use for all kinds of users. Simpler interfaces require less code to make too, so there’s an obvious performance advantage. There are many design decisions that require user research, but keeping things simple is always the right thing to do. Not simplified or simple-seeming or simplistic, but simple.
Do a little and do it well, for as many people as you can. |
2016 |
Heydon Pickering |
heydonpickering |
2016-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/what-the-heck-is-inclusive-design/ |
process |
| 300 |
Taking Device Orientation for a Spin |
When The Police sang “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” they weren’t talking about using a smartphone to view a panoramic image on Facebook, but they could have been. For years, technology has driven relentlessly towards devices we can carry around in our pockets, and now that we’re there, we’re expected to take the thing out of our pocket and wave it around in front of our faces like a psychotic donkey in search of its own dangly carrot.
But if you can’t beat them, join them.
A brave new world
A couple of years back all sorts of specs for new HTML5 APIs sprang up much to our collective glee. Emboldened, we ran a few tests and found they basically didn’t work in anything and went off disheartened into the corner for a bit of a sob.
Turns out, while we were all busy boohooing, those browser boffins have actually being doing some work, and lo and behold, some of these APIs are even half usable. Mostly literally half usable—we’re still talking about browsers, after all.
Now, of course they’re all a bit JavaScripty and are going to involve complex methods and maths and science and probably about a thousand dependancies from Github that will fall out of fashion while we’re still trying to locate the documentation, right? Well, no!
So what if we actually wanted to use one of these APIs, say to impress our friends with our ability to make them wave their phones in front of their faces (because no one enjoys looking hapless more than the easily-technologically-impressed), how could we do something like that? Let’s find out.
The Device Orientation API
The phone-wavy API is more formally known as the DeviceOrientation Event Specification. It does a bunch of stuff that basically doesn’t work, but also gives us three values that represent orientation of a device (a phone, a tablet, probably not a desktop computer) around its x, y and z axes. You might think of it as pitch, roll and yaw if you like to spend your weekends wearing goggles and a leather hat.
The main way we access these values is through an event listener, which can inform our code every time the value changes. Which is constantly, because you try and hold a phone still and then try and hold the Earth still too.
The API calls those pitch, roll and yaw values alpha, beta and gamma. Chocks away:
window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(e) {
console.log(e.alpha);
console.log(e.beta);
console.log(e.gamma);
});
If you look at this test page on your phone, you should be able to see the numbers change as you twirl the thing around your body like the dance partner you never had. Wrist strap recommended.
One important note
Like may of these newfangled APIs, Device Orientation is only available over HTTPS. We’re not allowed to have too much fun without protection, so make sure that you’re working on a secure line. I’ve found a quick and easy way to share my local dev environment over TLS with my devices is to use an ngrok tunnel.
ngrok http -host-header=rewrite mylocaldevsite.dev:80
ngrok will then set up a tunnel to your dev site with both HTTP and HTTPS URL options. You, of course, want the HTTPS option.
Right, where were we?
Make something to look at
It’s all well and good having a bunch of numbers, but they’re no use unless we do something with them. Something creative. Something to inspire the generations. Or we could just build that Facebook panoramic image viewer thing (because most of us are familiar with it and we’re not trying to be too clever here). Yeah, let’s just build one of those.
Our basic framework is going to be similar to that used for an image carousel. We have a container, constrained in size, and CSS overflow property set to hidden. Into this we place our wide content and use positioning to move the content back and forth behind the ‘window’ so that the part we want to show is visible.
Here it is mocked up with a slider to set the position. When you release the slider, the position updates. (This actually tests best on desktop with your window slightly narrowed.)
The details of the slider aren’t important (we’re about to replace it with phone-wavy goodness) but the crucial part is that moving the slider results in a function call to position the image. This takes a percentage value (0-100) with 0 being far left and 100 being far right (or ‘alt-nazi’ or whatever).
var position_image = function(percent) {
var pos = (img_W / 100)*percent;
img.style.transform = 'translate(-'+pos+'px)';
};
All this does is figure out what that percentage means in terms of the image width, and set the transform: translate(…); CSS property to move the image. (We use translate because it might be a bit faster to animate than left/right positioning.)
Ok. We can now read the orientation values from our device, and we can programatically position the image. What we need to do is figure out how to convert those raw orientation values into a nice tidy percentage to pass to our function and we’re done. (We’re so not done.)
The maths bit
If we go back to our raw values test page and make-believe that we have a fascinating panoramic image of some far-off beach or historic monument to look at, you’ll note that the main value that is changing as we swing back and forth is the ‘alpha’ value. That’s the one we want to track.
As our goal here is hey, these APIs are interesting and fun and not let’s build the world’s best panoramic image viewer, we’ll start by making a few assumptions and simplifications:
When the image loads, we’ll centre the image and take the current nose-forward orientation reading as the middle.
Moving left, we’ll track to the left of the image (lower percentage).
Moving right, we’ll track to the right (higher percentage).
If the user spins round, does cartwheels or loads the page then hops on a plane and switches earthly hemispheres, they’re on their own.
Nose-forward
When the page loads, the initial value of alpha gives us our nose-forward position. In Safari on iOS, this is normalised to always be 0, whereas most everywhere else it tends to be bound to pointy-uppy north. That doesn’t really matter to us, as we don’t know which direction the user might be facing in anyway — we just need to record that initial state and then use it to compare any new readings.
var initial_position = null;
window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(e) {
if (initial_position === null) {
initial_position = Math.floor(e.alpha);
};
var current_position = initial_position - Math.floor(e.alpha);
});
(I’m rounding down the values with Math.floor() to make debugging easier - we’ll take out the rounding later.)
We get our initial position if it’s not yet been set, and then calculate the current position as a difference between the new value and the stored one.
These values are weird
One thing you need to know about these values, is that they range from 0 to 360 but then you also get weird left-of-zero values like -2 and whatever. And they wrap past 360 back to zero as you’d expect if you do a forward roll.
What I’m interested in is working out my rotation. If 0 is my nose-forward position, I want a positive value as I turn right, and a negative value as I turn left. That puts the awkward 360-tipping point right behind the user where they can’t see it.
var rotation = current_position;
if (current_position > 180) rotation = current_position-360;
Which way up?
Since we’re talking about orientation, we need to remember that the values are going to be different if the device is held in portrait on landscape mode. See for yourself - wiggle it like a steering wheel and you get different values. That’s easy to account for when you know which way up the device is, but in true browser style, the API for that bit isn’t well supported. The best I can come up with is:
var screen_portrait = false;
if (window.innerWidth < window.innerHeight) {
screen_portrait = true;
}
It works. Then we can use screen_portrait to branch our code:
if (screen_portrait) {
if (current_position > 180) rotation = current_position-360;
} else {
if (current_position < -180) rotation = 360+current_position;
}
Here’s the code in action so you can see the values for yourself. If you change screen orientation you’ll need to refresh the page (it’s a demo!).
Limiting rotation
Now, while the youth of today are rarely seen without a phone in their hands, it would still be unreasonable to ask them to spin through 360° to view a photo. Instead, we need to limit the range of movement to something like 60°-from-nose in either direction and normalise our values to pan the entire image across that 120° range. -60 would be full-left (0%) and 60 would be full-right (100%).
If we set max_rotation = 60, that code ends up looking like this:
if (rotation > max_rotation) rotation = max_rotation;
if (rotation < (0-max_rotation)) rotation = 0-max_rotation;
var percent = Math.floor(((rotation + max_rotation)/(max_rotation*2))*100);
We should now be able to get a rotation from -60° to +60° expressed as a percentage. Try it for yourself.
The big reveal
All that’s left to do is pass that percentage to our image positioning function and would you believe it, it might actually work.
position_image(percent);
You can see the final result and take it for a spin. Literally.
So what have we made here? Have we built some highly technical panoramic image viewer to aid surgeons during life-saving operations using only JavaScript and some slightly questionable mathematics? No, my friends, we have not. Far from it.
What we have made is progress. We’ve taken a relatively newly available hardware API and a bit of simple JavaScript and paired it with existing CSS knowledge and made something that we didn’t have this morning. Something we probably didn’t even want this morning. Something that if you take a couple of steps back and squint a bit might be a prototype for something vaguely interesting. But more importantly, we’ve learned that our browsers are just a little bit more capable than we thought.
The web platform is maturing rapidly. There are new, relatively unexplored APIs for doing all sorts of crazy thing that are often dismissed as the preserve of native apps. Like some sort of app marmalade. Poppycock.
The web is an amazing, exciting place to create things. All it takes is some base knowledge of the fundamentals, a creative mind and a willingness to learn. We have those! So let’s create things. |
2016 |
Drew McLellan |
drewmclellan |
2016-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/taking-device-orientation-for-a-spin/ |
code |
| 301 |
Stretching Time |
Time is valuable. It’s a precious commodity that, if we’re not too careful, can slip effortlessly through our fingers. When we think about the resources at our disposal we’re often guilty of forgetting the most valuable resource we have to hand: time.
We are all given an allocation of time from the time bank. 86,400 seconds a day to be precise, not a second more, not a second less.
It doesn’t matter if we’re rich or we’re poor, no one can buy more time (and no one can save it). We are all, in this regard, equals. We all have the same opportunity to spend our time and use it to maximum effect. As such, we need to use our time wisely.
I believe we can ‘stretch’ time, ensuring we make the most of every second and maximising the opportunities that time affords us.
Through a combination of ‘Structured Procrastination’ and ‘Focused Finishing’ we can open our eyes to all of the opportunities in the world around us, whilst ensuring that we deliver our best work precisely when it’s required. A win win, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Structured Procrastination
I’m a terrible procrastinator. I used to think that was a curse – “Why didn’t I just get started earlier?” – over time, however, I’ve started to see procrastination as a valuable tool if it is used in a structured manner.
Don Norman refers to procrastination as ‘late binding’ (a term I’ve happily hijacked). As he argues, in Why Procrastination Is Good, late binding (delay, or procrastination) offers many benefits:
Delaying decisions until the time for action is beneficial… it provides the maximum amount of time to think, plan, and determine alternatives.
We live in a world that is constantly changing and evolving, as such the best time to execute is often ‘just in time’. By delaying decisions until the last possible moment we can arrive at solutions that address the current reality more effectively, resulting in better outcomes.
Procrastination isn’t just useful from a project management perspective, however. It can also be useful for allowing your mind the space to wander, make new discoveries and find creative connections. By embracing structured procrastination we can ‘prime the brain’.
As James Webb Young argues, in A Technique for Producing Ideas, all ideas are made of other ideas and the more we fill our minds with other stimuli, the greater the number of creative opportunities we can uncover and bring to life.
By late binding, and availing of a lack of time pressure, you allow the mind space to breathe, enabling you to uncover elements that are important to the problem you’re working on and, perhaps, discover other elements that will serve you well in future tasks.
When setting forth upon the process of writing this article I consciously set aside time to explore. I allowed myself the opportunity to read, taking in new material, safe in the knowledge that what I discovered – if not useful for this article – would serve me well in the future.
Ron Burgundy summarises this neatly:
Procrastinator? No. I just wait until the last second to do my work because I will be older, therefore wiser.
An ‘older, therefore wiser’ mind is a good thing. We’re incredibly fortunate to live in a world where we have a wealth of information at our fingertips. Don’t waste the opportunity to learn, rather embrace that opportunity. Make the most of every second to fill your mind with new material, the rewards will be ample.
Deadlines are deadlines, however, and deadlines offer us the opportunity to focus our minds, bringing together the pieces of the puzzle we found during our structured procrastination.
Like everyone I’ll hear a tiny, but insistent voice in my head that starts to rise when the deadline is approaching. The older you get, the closer to the deadline that voice starts to chirp up.
At this point we need to focus.
Focused Finishing
We live in an age of constant distraction. Smartphones are both a blessing and a curse, they keep us connected, but if we’re not careful the constant connection they provide can interrupt our flow.
When a deadline is accelerating towards us it’s important to set aside the distractions and carve out a space where we can work in a clear and focused manner.
When it’s time to finish, it’s important to avoid context switching and focus. All those micro-interactions throughout the day – triaging your emails, checking social media and browsing the web – can get in the way of you hitting your deadline. At this point, they’re distractions.
Chunking tasks and managing when they’re scheduled can improve your productivity by a surprising order of magnitude. At this point it’s important to remove distractions which result in ‘attention residue’, where your mind is unable to focus on the current task, due to the mental residue of other, unrelated tasks.
By focusing on a single task in a focused manner, it’s possible to minimise the negative impact of attention residue, allowing you to maximise your performance on the task at hand.
Cal Newport explores this in his excellent book, Deep Work, which I would highly recommend reading. As he puts it:
Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
To help you focus on finishing it’s helpful to set up a work-focused environment that is purposefully free from distractions. There’s a time and a place for structured procrastination, but – equally – there’s a time and a place for focused finishing.
The French term ‘mise en place’ is drawn from the world of fine cuisine – I discovered it when I was procrastinating – and it’s applicable in this context. The term translates as ‘putting in place’ or ‘everything in its place’ and it refers to the process of getting the workplace ready before cooking.
Just like a professional chef organises their utensils and arranges their ingredients, so too can you.
Thanks to the magic of multiple users on computers, it’s possible to create a separate user on your computer – without access to email and other social tools – so that you can switch to that account when you need to focus and hit the deadline.
Another, less technical way of achieving the same result – depending, of course, upon your line of work – is to close your computer and find some non-digital, unconnected space to work in.
The goal is to carve out time to focus so you can finish. As Newport states:
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive – no matter how skilled or talented you are.
Procrastination is fine, but only if it’s accompanied by finishing. Create the space to finish and you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds.
In closing…
There is a time and a place for everything: there is a time to procrastinate, and a time to focus. To truly reap the rewards of time, the mind needs both.
By combining the processes of ‘Structured Procrastination’ and ‘Focused Finishing’ we can make the most of our 86,400 seconds a day, ensuring we are constantly primed to make new discoveries, but just as importantly, ensuring we hit the all-important deadlines.
Make the most of your time, you only get so much. Use every second productively and you’ll be thankful that you did. Don’t waste your time, once it’s gone, it’s gone… and you can never get it back. |
2016 |
Christopher Murphy |
christophermurphy |
2016-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/stretching-time/ |
process |
| 302 |
Flexible Project Management in Inflexible Environments |
Handling unforeseen circumstances is an inevitable part of any project. It’s 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’t 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’re committed to.
The reality is that as someone leading a project you know there will be challenges, but, in general, it’s 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’re already juggling twenty other things. If you’re 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’s important when you’re overcoming a challenge or problem, but it’s also important for allowing ideas to evolve and be refined as much as they can be throughout the course of a project.
Where theory falls short
The 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’s 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.
Delivering digital services to clients—within an agency setting or as a freelancer—often demands a more rigid structure. You need clear sign-off points, there’s 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—and there are agencies that operate an agile setup—it 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.
So 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’s work properly, which can result in very expensive and inefficient development.
Equally, for reasons we’ve already touched upon, running fully agile teams often isn’t 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.
Although I don’t have a perfect formula—and can very much assert there is no one perfect way of managing a project because every project is different to the next—I’ve identified a few different ways you can approach flexibility that have really helped me in running projects more smoothly within more realistic constraints.
Planned Flexibility
Drawing 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.
Planning 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’re minimising what will or may catch you by surprise. A good time to do this is in a weekly catch up meeting. It’s not going to fix all your problems, but it will make sure you have a head start on the ones you can see coming.
On 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 ‘tell you later’, and them actually coming over to tell you directly and immediately. Despite the overhead of meetings, and looping people into stages that they aren’t 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.
Building 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.
It’s 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’s unlikely you want high staff turnover because everyone fell out while you were screaming money at them and they didn’t feel like they could do a good job. It’s 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’re 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’re left with nowhere to move.
Transparency
Having 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—and the goals surrounding your client’s reasons to commission the project in the first place—will 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’re willing to talk and explain things.
As I’m sure all of us have realised at one point or another, a lot of people think they know what they want, and it’s 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’s often down to you to educate them, and to help them recognise and understand the work involved and you and your team’s reasoning behind your decisions.
Being 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’s 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’t 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.
Taking 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’t need to be ‘scope creep’ if it’s raised in a practical, value-orientated, and level headed discussion. There is usually a way forward for new ideas, as long as they’re 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’s value and reason, it shows integrity to the project and respect for its success. You can’t expect for this to go smoothly without having invested in the client relationship, so it’s a large point in paving the way to handling change well.
Reactive Flexibility
Finally, if you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll know by now that you can’t anticipate everything. Sometimes you will have to react and change the plan under circumstances that aren’t easy. When an unexpected problem first rears its head—a client’s casual afterthought that’s threatening the scope of the project, an internal resource conflict, a junior member of staff that’s not grasping the ropes quite as quickly as you’d hoped—you have to react quickly.
In his book, ‘Pitch Anything’, Oren Klaff talks about people’s first reactions being processed by their ‘crocodile brain’ before they’ve had a chance to refine and digest the information more intelligibly. As project managers, product owners, or scrum masters, it’s 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’s here you need to remember to not let your imagination get the better of you, especially if you’ve 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’t 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’t be your best one.
From an internal point of view, it’s very important that whatever went wrong doesn’t turn into a finger pointing exercise and you don’t 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’re reacting to a problem—apart form obviously thinking of ways forward—is to communicate. Don’t go quiet until you feel like you have a plan, you’ll 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.
In 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’s involved in each other’s work and cultivating a client/stakeholder relationship that’s 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. |
2016 |
Gillian Sibthorpe |
gilliansibthorpe |
2016-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/flexible-project-management/ |
process |
| 303 |
We Need to Talk About Technical Debt |
In my work with clients, a lot of time is spent assessing old, legacy, sprawling systems and identifying good code, bad code, and technical debt.
One thing that constantly strikes me is the frequency with which bad code and technical debt are conflated, so let me start by saying this:
Not all technical debt is bad code, and not all bad code is technical debt.
Sometimes your bad code is just that: bad code. Calling it technical debt often feels like a more forgiving and friendly way of referring to what may have just been a poor implementation or a substandard piece of work.
It is an oft-misunderstood phrase, and when mistaken for meaning ‘anything legacy or old hacky or nasty or bad’, technical debt is swept under the carpet along with all of the other parts of the codebase we’d rather not talk about, and therein lies the problem.
We need to talk about technical debt.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Technical Debt
The thing that separates technical debt from the rest of the hacky code in our project is the fact that technical debt, by definition, is something that we knowingly and strategically entered into. Debt doesn’t happen by accident: debt happens when we choose to gain something otherwise-unattainable immediately in return for paying it back (with interest) later on.
An Example
You’re a front-end developer working on a SaaS product, and your sales team is courting a large customer – a customer so large that you can’t really afford to lose them. The customer tells you that as long as you can allow them to theme your SaaS application according to their branding, they are willing to sign on the dotted line… the problem being that your CSS architecture was never designed to incorporate theming at all, and there isn’t currently a nice, clean way to incorporate a theme into the codebase.
You and the business make the decision that you will hack a theme into the product in two days. It’s going to be messy, it’s going to be ugly, but you can’t afford to lose a huge customer just because your CSS isn’t quite right, right now. This is technical debt.
You deliver the theme, the customer signs up, and everyone is happy. Except you (and the business, because you are one and the same) have a decision to make:
Do we go back and build theming into the CSS architecture as a first-class citizen, porting the hacked theme back into a codified and formal framework?
Do we carry on as we are? Things are working okay, and the customer paid up, so is there any reason to invest time and effort into things after we (and the customer) got what we wanted?
Option 1 is choosing to pay off your debts; Option 2 is ignoring your repayments.
With Option 1, you’re acknowledging that you did what you could given the constraints, but, free of constraints, you’d have done something different. Now, you are choosing to implement that something different.
With Option 2, however, you are avoiding your responsibility to repay your debt, and you are letting interest accrue. The problem here is that…
your SaaS product now offers theming to one of your customers;
another potential customer might also demand the ability to theme their instance of your product;
you can’t refuse them that request, nor can you quickly fulfil it;
you hack in another theme, thus adding to the balance of your existing debt;
and so on (plus interest) for every subsequent theme you need to implement.
Here you have increased entropy whilst making little to no attempt to address what you already knew to be problems.
Your second, third, fourth, fifth request for theming will be hacked on top of your hack, further accumulating debt whilst offering nothing by way of a repayment. After a long enough period, the code involved will get so unwieldy, so hard to work with, that you are forced to tear it all down and start again, and the most painful part of this is that you’re actually paying off even more than your debt repayments would have been in the first place. Two days of hacking plus, say, five days of subsequent refactoring, would still have been substantially less than the weeks you will now have to spend rewriting your CSS to fix and incorporate the themes properly. You’ve made a loss; your strategic debt ultimately became a loss-making exercise.
The important thing to note here is that you didn’t necessarily write bad code. You knew there were two options: the quick way and the correct way. The decision to take the quick route was a definite choice, because you knew there was a better way. Implementing the better way is your repayment.
Good Debt and Bad Debt
Technical debt is acceptable as long as you have intentions to settle; it can be a valuable solution to a business problem, provided the right approach is taken afterwards. That doesn’t, however, mean that all debt is born equal. Just as in real life, there is good debt and there is bad debt.
Good debt might be…
a mortgage;
a student loan, or;
a business loan.
These are types of debt that will secure you the means of repaying them. These are well considered debts whose very reason for being will allow you to make the money to pay them off—they have real, tangible benefit.
A business loan to secure some equipment and premises will allow you to start an enterprise whose revenue will allow you to pay that debt back; a student loan will allow you to secure the kind of job that has the ability to pay a student loan back.
These kinds of debt involve a considered and well-balanced decision to acquire something in the short term in the knowledge that you will have the means, in the long term, to pay it back.
Conversely, bad debt might be…
borrowing $1,000 from a loan shark so you can go to Vegas, or;
taking out a payday loan in order to buy a new television.
Both of these kinds of debt will leave you paying for things that didn’t provide you a way of earning your own capital. That is to say, the loans taken did not secure anything that would help pay off said loans. These are bad debts that will usually provide a net loss. You really are only gaining the short term in exchange for a long term financial responsibility: i.e., was it worth it?
A good litmus test for debt is to compare the gains of its immediate benefit with the cost of its long term commitment.
The earlier example of theming a site is a good debt, provided we are keeping up our repayments (all debt is bad debt if you don’t). A calculated decision to do something ‘wrong’ in the short term with the promise of better payoffs later on.
Bad Technical Debt
The majority of my work is with front-end development teams—CSS is what I do. To that end, the most succinct example of technical debt for that audience is simply:
!important
All front-end developers know the horrors and dangers associated with using !important, yet we continue to use it. Why?
It’s not necessarily because we’re bad developers, but because we see a shortcut. !important is usually implemented as a quick way out of a sticky specificity situation. We could spend the rest of the day refactoring our CSS to fix the issue at its source, or we can spend mere seconds typing the word !important and patch over the symptoms.
This is us making an explicit decision to do something less than ideal now in exchange for immediate benefit. After all, refactoring our CSS will take a lot more time, and will still only leave us with the same outcome that the vastly quicker !important solution will, so it seems to make better business sense.
However, this is a bad debt. !important takes seconds to implement but weeks to refactor. The cost of refactoring this back out later will be an order of magnitude higher than it would be to have done things properly the first time. The first !important usually sets a precedent, and subsequent developers are likely to have to use it themselves in order to get around the one that you left.
So many CSS projects deteriorate because of this one simple word, and rewrites become more and more imminent. That makes it possibly the most costly 10 bytes a CSS developer could ever write.
Bad Code
Now we’ve got a good idea of what constitutes technical debt, let’s take a look at what constitutes bad code. Something I hear time and time again in my client work goes a little like this:
We’ve amassed a lot of technical debt and we’d like to get a strategy in place
to begin dealing with it.
Whilst I genuinely admire their willingness to identify and desire to fix problems in their code, sometimes they’re not looking at technical debt at
all—sometimes they’re just looking at bad code, plain and simple.
Where technical debt is knowing that there’s a better way, but the quicker way makes more sense right now, bad code is not caring if there’s a better way at all.
Again, looking at a CSS-specific world, a lot of bad code is contributed by non-front-end developers with little training, appreciation, or even respect for the front-end landscape. Writing code with reckless abandon should not be described as technical debt, because to do so would imply that…
the developers knew they were implementing a sub-par solution, but…
the developers also knew that a better solution was out there, which…
implies that it can be tidied up relatively simply.
Developers writing bad code is a larger and more cultural problem that requires a lot more effort to fix. Hopefully—and usually—bad code is in the minority, but it helps to be objective in identifying and solving it. Bad code usually doesn’t happen for a good enough reason, and is therefore much harder to justify.
Technical debt often represents ability in judgement, whereas bad code often represents a gap in skills.
Takeaway
Take time to familiarise yourself with the true concepts underlying technical debt and why it exists. Understand that technical debt can be good or bad. Admit that sometimes code is just of poor quality.
Understanding these points will allow you to make better calls around what you might need to refactor and when, and what skills gaps you might have in your team.
Sometimes it’s okay to cut corners if there is a tangible gain to be had in the immediate term.
Technical debt is okay provided it is a sensible debt and you have intentions to pay it off.
Technical debt is not necessarily synonymous with bad code, and bad code isn’t necessarily technical debt. Technical debt is code that was implemented given limited knowledge or resource, with the understanding that you would need to repay something in future.
Technical debt is not inherently bad—failure to make repayments is. Periodically, it is justifiable—encouraged, even—to enter a debt in order to fulfil a more pressing matter. However, it is imperative that we begin making repayments as soon as we are capable, be that based on newly available time or knowledge.
Bad code is worse than technical debt as it represents a lack of knowledge or quality control within a team. It needs a much more fundamental fix. |
2016 |
Harry Roberts |
harryroberts |
2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/we-need-to-talk-about-technical-debt/ |
code |
| 304 |
Five Lessons From My First 18 Months as a Dev |
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.
Having started my career as a journalist, the title ‘engineer’ 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.
Since I started learning to code I’ve often felt compelled to write about my experience. I want to share my excitement and struggles with the world! But as a junior I’ve been held back by thoughts like ‘whatever you have to say won’t be technical enough’, ‘any time spent writing a blog would be better spent writing code’, ‘blogging is narcissistic’, etc.
Well, I’ve been told that your thirties are the years where you stop caring so much about what other people think. And I’m almost 30. So here goes!
These are five key lessons from my first year and a half in tech:
Deployments should delight, not dread
Lesson #1: Making your deployment process as simple as possible is worth the investment.
In 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: ‘All aboard! The deployment train leaves in 3, 2, 1…”
When 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’s weekend time — and 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.
The team knew deployments were a problem. They were constantly striving to improve them. And what I’ve learnt from Twitter is that when they do, their lives will be bliss.
TweetDeck’s deployment process fills me with joy and delight. It’s quick, easy and stress free. In fact, it’s 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’s no rush to make the deployment train. No manual preparation. No fuss. Value — whether in the form of big new features, simple UI improvements or even production bug fixes — can be shipped in an instant. The team assures me the process wasn’t always like this. They invested lots of time in making their deployments better. And it’s clearly paid off.
Code reviews need love, time and acceptance
Lesson #2: Code reviews are a three-way gift. Every time I review someone else’s code, I help them, the team and myself.
Code 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’s code because I felt too junior, like my review didn’t carry any weight.
The 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 “someone else will do it” mentality would kick in, and nothing would get done.
At 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’re seen to be equally, if not more important, than your own work. I haven’t seen a review sit for longer than a few hours without comments.
We also don’t 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’s going to take up more than an hour of someone’s time, it will be sent back.
What I’ve 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 “get out of jail free card”. In fact, it’s 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’re 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.
Get friendly with feature flagging
Lesson #3: Feature flagging gives you complete control over how you build and release a project.
Say you’re implementing a new feature. It’s going to take a few weeks to complete. You’ll 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’t see the changes until they’re ready? With feature flagging — it doesn’t matter. In fact, with feature flagging, by the time you are ready to release your feature, it’s already deployed, sitting happily in master with the rest of your codebase.
A feature flag is a boolean value that gets wrapped around the code relating to the thing you’re working on. The code will only be executed if the value is true.
if (TD.decider.get(‘new_feature’)) {
//code for new feature goes here
}
In my first dev job, I deployed a navigation link to the feature I’d been working on, making it visible in the product, even though the feature wasn’t ready. “Why didn’t you use a feature flag?” a senior dev asked me. An honest response would have been: “Because they’re confusing to implement and I don’t understand the benefits of using them.” The fix had to wait until the next deployment.
The 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.
At 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.
Sometimes a piece of work requires changes to existing business logic. So the code might look more like this:
if (TD.decider.get(‘change_to_existing_feature’)) {
//new logic goes here
} else {
//old logic goes here
}
This 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’t 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.
Let data and experimentation drive development
Lesson #4: Use data to determine the direction of your product and measure its success.
The 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 “bring data” to show why it was necessary. “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion,” 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.
But how do you design that feature? How do you know that the design you choose will have the desired impact? That’s where experiments come into play.
At 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.
We can’t assume a change we want to make will have the impact we expect. So we run an experiment. Here’s how it works. Users are placed into buckets. One bucket of users will have access to the new feature, the other won’t. We hypothesise that the bucket exposed to the new feature will have better results. The beauty of running an experiment is that we’ll know for sure. Instead of blindly releasing the feature to all users without knowing its impact, once the experiment has run its course, we’ll have the data to make decisions accordingly.
Hire the developer, not the degree
Lesson #5: Testing candidates on real world problems will allow applicants from all backgrounds to shine.
Surely, 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’t the case. The process was insanely difficult—don’t get me wrong—but the team at TweetDeck gave me real world problems to solve.
The 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.
In 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’s ever had. “We designed an interview process that gave us a way to simulate the actual job,” he said. “It’s not about testing whether you learnt an algorithm in school.”
Is 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’t seen an algorithm in their seven years at the company.
These 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’t excluding these people. |
2016 |
Amy Simmons |
amysimmons |
2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/my-first-18-months-as-a-dev/ |
process |
| 305 |
CSS Writing Modes |
Since you may not have a lot of time, I’m going to start at the end, with the dessert.
You can use a little-known, yet important and powerful CSS property to make text run vertically. Like this.
Or instead of running text vertically, you can layout a set of icons or interface buttons in this way. Or, of course, with anything on your page.
The CSS I’ve applied makes the browser rethink the orientation of the world, and flow the layout of this element at a 90° angle to “normal”. Check out the live demo, highlight the headline, and see how the cursor is now sideways.
See the Pen Writing Mode Demo — Headline by Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) on CodePen.
The code for accomplishing this is pretty simple.
h1 {
writing-mode: vertical-rl;
}
That’s all it takes to switch the writing mode from the web’s default horizontal top-to-bottom mode to a vertical right-to-left mode. If you apply such code to the html element, the entire page is switched, affecting the scroll direction, too.
In my example above, I’m telling the browser that only the h1 will be in this vertical-rl mode, while the rest of my page stays in the default of horizontal-tb.
So now the dessert course is over. Let me serve up this whole meal, and explain the the CSS Writing Mode Specification.
Why learn about writing modes?
There are three reasons I’m teaching writing modes to everyone—including western audiences—and explaining the whole system, instead of quickly showing you a simple trick.
We live in a big, diverse world, and learning about other languages is fascinating. Many of you lay out pages in languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Or you might be inspired to in the future.
Using writing-mode to turn bits sideways is cool. This CSS can be used in all kinds of creative ways, even if you are working only in English.
Most importantly, I’ve found understanding Writing Modes incredibly helpful when understanding Flexbox and CSS Grid. Before I learned Writing Mode, I felt like there was still a big hole in my knowledge, something I just didn’t get about why Grid and Flexbox work the way they do. Once I wrapped my head around Writing Modes, Grid and Flexbox got a lot easier. Suddenly the Alignment properties, align-* and justify-*, made sense.
Whether you know about it or not, the writing mode is the first building block of every layout we create. You can do what we’ve been doing for 25 years – and leave your page set to the default left-to-right direction, horizontal top-to-bottom writing mode. Or you can enter a world of new possibilities where content flows in other directions.
CSS properties
I’m going to focus on the CSS writing-mode property in this article. It has five possible options:
writing-mode: horizontal-tb;
writing-mode: vertical-rl;
writing-mode: vertical-lr;
writing-mode: sideways-rl;
writing-mode: sideways-lr;
The CSS Writing Modes Specification is designed to support a wide range of written languages in all our human and linguistic complexity. Which—spoiler alert—is pretty insanely complex. The global evolution of written languages has been anything but simple.
So I’ve got to start with explaining some basic concepts of web page layout and writing systems. Then I can show you what these CSS properties do.
Inline Direction, Block Direction, and Character Direction
In the world of the web, there’s a concept of ‘block’ and ‘inline’ layout. If you’ve ever written display: block or display: inline, you’ve leaned on these concepts.
In the default writing mode, blocks stack vertically starting at the top of the page and working their way down. Think of how a bunch of block-levels elements stack—like a bunch of a paragraphs—that’s the block direction.
Inline is how each line of text flows. The default on the web is from left to right, in horizontal lines. Imagine this text that you are reading right now, being typed out one character at a time on a typewriter. That’s the inline direction.
The character direction is which way the characters point. If you type a capital “A” for instance, on which side is the top of the letter? Different languages can point in different directions. Most languages have their characters pointing towards the top of the page, but not all.
Put all three together, and you start to see how they work as a system.
The default settings for the web work like this.
Now that we know what block, inline, and character directions mean, let’s see how they are used in different writing systems from around the world.
The four writing systems of CSS Writing Modes
The CSS Writing Modes Specification handles all the use cases for four major writing systems; Latin, Arabic, Han and Mongolian.
Latin-based systems
One writing system dominates the world more than any other, reportedly covering about 70% of the world’s population.
The text is horizontal, running from left to right, or LTR. The block direction runs from top to bottom.
It’s called the Latin-based system because it includes all languages that use the Latin alphabet, including English, Spanish, German, French, and many others. But there are many non-Latin-alphabet languages that also use this system, including Greek, Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc.), and Brahmic scripts (Devanagari, Thai, Tibetan), and many more.
You don’t need to do anything in your CSS to trigger this mode. This is the default.
Best practices, however, dictate that you declare in your opening <html> element which language and which direction (LTR or RTL) you are using. This website, for instance, uses <html lang='en-gb' dir='ltr'> to let the browser know this content is published in Great Britian’s version of English, in a left to right direction.
Arabic-based systems
Arabic, Hebrew and a few other languages run the inline direction from right to left. This is commonly known as RTL.
Note that the inline direction still runs horizontally. The block direction runs from top to bottom. And the characters are upright.
It’s not just the flow of text that runs from right to left, but everything about the layout of the website. The upper right-hand corner is the starting position. Important things are on the right. The eyes travel from right to left. So, typically RTL websites use layouts that are just like LTR websites, only flipped.
On websites that support both LTR and RTL, like the United Nations’ site at un.org, the two layouts are mirror images of each other.
For many web developers, our experiences with internationalization have focused solely on supporting Arabic and Hebrew script.
CSS layout hacks for internationalization & RTL
To prepare an LTR project to support RTL, developers have had to create all sorts of hacks. For example, the Drupal community started a convention of marking every margin-left and -right, every padding-left and -right, every float: left and float: right with the comment /* LTR */. Then later developers could search for each instance of that exact comment, and create stylesheets to override each left with right, and vice versa. It’s a tedious and error prone way to work. CSS itself needed a better way to let web developers write their layout code once, and easily switch language directions with a single command.
Our new CSS layout system does exactly that. Flexbox, Grid and Alignment use start and end instead of left and right. This lets us define everything in relationship to the writing system, and switch directions easily. By writing justify-content: flex-start, justify-items: end, and eventually margin-inline-start: 1rem we have code that doesn’t need to be changed.
This is a much better way to work. I know it can be confusing to think through start and end as replacements for left and right. But it’s better for any multiligual project, and it’s better for the web as a whole.
Sadly, I’ve seen CSS preprocessor tools that claim to “fix” the new CSS layout system by getting rid of start and end and bringing back left and right. They want you to use their tool, write justify-content: left, and feel self-righteous. It seems some folks think the new way of working is broken and should be discarded. It was created, however, to fulfill real needs. And to reflect a global internet. As Bruce Lawson says, WWW stands for the World Wide Web, not the Wealthy Western Web. Please don’t try to convince the industry that there’s something wrong with no longer being biased towards western culture. Instead, spread the word about why this new system is here.
Spend a bit of time drilling the concept of inline and block into your head, and getting used to start and end. It will be second nature soon enough.
I’ve also seen CSS preprocessors that let us use this new way of thinking today, even as all the parts aren’t fully supported by browsers yet. Some tools let you write text-align: start instead of text-align: left, and let the preprocessor handle things for you. That is terrific, in my opinion. A great use of the power of a preprocessor to help us switch over now.
But let’s get back to RTL.
How to declare your direction
You don’t want to use CSS to tell the browser to switch from an LTR language to RTL. You want to do this in your HTML. That way the browser has the information it needs to display the document even if the CSS doesn’t load.
This is accomplished mainly on the html element. You should also declare your main language. As I mentioned above, the 24 ways website is using <html lang='en-gb' dir='ltr'> to declare the LTR direction and the use of British English. The UN Arabic website uses <html lang='ar' dir='rtl'>to declare the site as an Arabic site, using a RTL layout.
Things get more complicated when you’ve got a page with a mix of languages. But I’m not going to get into all of that, since this article is focused on CSS and layouts, not explaining everything about internationalization.
Let me just leave direction here by noting that much of the heavy work of laying out the characters which make up each word is handled by Unicode. If you are interested in learning more about LTR, RTL and bidirectional text, watch this video: Introduction to Bidirectional Text, a presentation by Elika Etemad.
Meanwhile, let’s get back to CSS.
The writing mode CSS for Latin-based and Arabic-based systems
For both of these systems—Latin-based and Arabic-based, whether LTR or RTL—the same CSS property applies for specifying the writing mode: writing-mode: horizontal-tb. That’s because in both systems, the inline text flow is horizontal, while the block direction is top-to-bottom. This is expressed as horizontal-tb.
horizontal-tb is the default writing mode for the web, so you don’t need to specify it unless you are overriding something else higher up in the cascade. You can just imagine that every site you’ve ever built came with:
html {
writing-mode: horizontal-tb;
}
Now let’s turn our attention to the vertical writing systems.
Han-based systems
This is where things start to get interesting.
Han-based writing systems include CJK languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and others. There are two options for laying out a page, and sometimes both are used at the same time.
Much of CJK text is laid out like Latin-based languages, with a horizontal top-to-bottom block direction, and a left-to-right inline direction. This is the more modern way to doing things, started in the 20th century in many places, and further pushed into domination by the computer and later the web.
The CSS to do this bit of the layouts is the same as above:
section {
writing-mode: horizontal-tb;
}
Or, you know, do nothing, and get that result as a default.
Alternatively Han-based languages can be laid out in a vertical writing mode, where the inline direction runs vertically, and the block direction goes from right to left.
See both options in this diagram:
Note that the horizontal text flows from left to right, while the vertical text flows from right to left. Wild, eh?
This Japanese issue of Vogue magazine is using a mix of writing modes. The cover opens on the left spine, opposite of what an English magazine does.
This page mixes English and Japanese, and typesets the Japanese text in both horizontal and vertical modes. Under the title “Richard Stark” in red, you can see a passage that’s horizontal-tb and LTR, while the longer passage of text at the bottom of the page is typeset vertical-rl. The red enlarged cap marks the beginning of that passage. The long headline above the vertical text is typeset LTR, horizontal-tb.
The details of how to set the default of the whole page will depend on your use case. But each element, each headline, each section, each article can be marked to flow the opposite of the default however you’d like.
For example, perhaps you leave the default as horizontal-tb, and specify your vertical elements like this:
div.articletext {
writing-mode: vertical-rl;
}
Or alternatively you could change the default for the page to a vertical orientation, and then set specific elements to horizontal-tb, like this:
html {
writing-mode: vertical-rl;
}
h2, .photocaptions, section {
writing-mode: horizontal-tb;
}
If your page has a sideways scroll, then the writing mode will determine whether the page loads with upper left corner as the starting point, and scroll to the right (horizontal-tb as we are used to), or if the page loads with the upper right corner as the starting point, scrolling to the left to display overflow. Here’s an example of that change in scrolling direction, in a CSS Writing Mode demo by Chen Hui Jing. Check out her demo — you can switch from horizontal to vertical writing modes with a checkbox and see the difference.
Mongolian-based systems
Now, hopefully so far all of this kind of makes sense. It might be a bit more complicated than expected, but it’s not so hard. Well, enter the Mongolian-based systems.
Mongolian is also a vertical script language. Text runs vertically down the page. Just like Han-based systems. There are two major differences. First, the block direction runs the other way. In Mongolian, block-level elements stack from left to right.
Here’s a drawing of how Wikipedia would look in Mongolian if it were laid out correctly.
Perhaps the Mongolian version of Wikipedia will be redone with this layout.
Now you might think, that doesn’t look so weird. Tilt your head to the left, and it’s very familiar. The block direction starts on the left side of the screen and goes to the right. The inline direction starts on the top of the page and moves to the bottom (similar to RTL text, just turned 90° counter-clockwise). But here comes the other huge difference. The character direction is “upside down”. The top of the Mongolian characters are not pointing to the left, towards the start edge of the block direction. They point to the right. Like this:
Now you might be tempted to ignore all this. Perhaps you don’t expect to be typesetting Mongolian content anytime soon. But here’s why this is important for everyone — the way Mongolian works defines the results writing-mode: vertical-lr. And it means we cannot use vertical-lr for typesetting content in other languages in the way we might otherwise expect.
If we took what we know about vertical-rl and guessed how vertical-lr works, we might imagine this:
But that’s wrong. Here’s how they actually compare:
See the unexpected situation? In both writing-mode: vertical-rl and writing-mode: vertical-lr latin text is rotated clockwise. Neither writing mode let’s us rotate text counter-clockwise.
If you are typesetting Mongolian content, apply this CSS in the same way you would apply writing-mode to Han-based writing systems. To the whole page on the html element, or to specific pages of the page like this:
section {
writing-mode: vertical-lr;
}
Now, if you are using writing-mode for a graphic design effect on a language that is otherwise typesets horizontally, I don’t think writing-mode: vertical-lr is useful. If the text wraps onto two lines, it stacks in a very unexpected way. So I’ve sort of obliterated it from my toolkit. I find myself using writing-mode: vertical-rl a lot. And never using -lr. Hm.
Writing modes for graphic design
So how do we use writing-mode to turn English headlines sideways? We could rely on transform: rotate()
Here are two examples, one for each direction. (By the way, each of these demos use CSS Grid for their overall layout, so be sure to test them in a browser that supports CSS Grid, like Firefox Nightly.)
In this demo 4A, the text is rotated clockwise using this code:
h1 {
writing-mode: vertical-rl;
}
In this demo 4B, the text is rotated counter-clockwise using this code:
h1 {
writing-mode: vertical-rl;
transform: rotate(180deg);
text-align: right;
}
I use vertical-rl to rotate the text so that it takes up the proper amount of space in the overall flow of the layout. Then I rotate it 180° to spin it around to the other direction. And then I use text-align: right to get it to rise up to the top of it’s container. This feels like a hack, but it’s a hack that works.
Now what I would like to do instead is use another CSS value that was designed for this use case — one of the two other options for writing mode.
If I could, I would lay out example 4A with:
h1 {
writing-mode: sideways-rl;
}
And layout example 4B with:
h1 {
writing-mode: sideways-lr;
}
The problem is that these two values are only supported in Firefox. None of the other browsers recognize sideways-*. Which means we can’t really use it yet.
In general, the writing-mode property is very well supported across browsers. So I’ll use writing-mode: vertical-rl for now, with the transform: rotate(180deg); hack to fake the other direction.
There’s much more to what we can do with the CSS designed to support multiple languages, but I’m going to stop with this intermediate introduction.
If you do want a bit more of a taste, look at this example that adds text-orientation: upright; to the mix — turning the individual letters of the latin font to be upright instead of sideways.
It’s this demo 4C, with this CSS applied:
h1 {
writing-mode: vertical-rl;
text-orientation: upright;
text-transform: uppercase;
letter-spacing: -25px;
}
You can check out all my Writing Modes demos at labs.jensimmons.com/#writing-modes.
I’ll leave you with this last demo. One that applies a vertical writing mode to the sub headlines of a long article. I like how small details like this can really bring a fresh feeling to the content.
See the Pen Writing Mode Demo — Article Subheadlines by Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) on CodePen. |
2016 |
Jen Simmons |
jensimmons |
2016-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/css-writing-modes/ |
code |
| 306 |
What next for CSS Grid Layout? |
In 2012 I wrote an article for 24 ways detailing a new CSS Specification that had caught my eye, at the time with an implementation only in Internet Explorer. What I didn’t realise at the time was that CSS Grid Layout was to become a theme on which I would base the next four years of research, experimentation, writing and speaking.
As I write this article in December 2016, we are looking forward to CSS Grid Layout being shipped in Chrome and Firefox. What will ship early next year in those browsers is expanded and improved from the early implementation I explored in 2012. Over the last four years the spec has been developed as part of the CSS Working Group process, and has had input from browser engineers, specification writers and web developers. Use cases have been discussed, and features added.
The CSS Grid Layout specification is now a Candidate Recommendation. This status means the spec is to all intents and purposes, finished. The discussions now happening are on fine implementation details, and not new feature ideas. It makes sense to draw a line under a specification in order that browser vendors can ship complete, interoperable implementations. That approach is good for all of us, it makes development far easier if we know that a browser supports all of the features of a specification, rather than working out which bits are supported. However it doesn’t mean that works stops here, and that new use cases and features can’t be proposed for future levels of Grid Layout. Therefore, in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the things I think grid layout could do in the future. I would love for these thoughts to prompt you to think about how Grid - or any CSS specification - could better suit the use cases you have.
Subgrid - the missing feature of Level 1
The implementation of CSS Grid Layout in Chrome, Firefox and Webkit is comparable and very feature complete. There is however one standout feature that has not been implemented in any browser as yet - subgrid. Once you set the value of the display property to grid, any direct children of that element become grid items. This is similar to the way that flexbox behaves, set display: flex and all direct children become flex items. The behaviour does not apply to children of those items. You can nest grids, just as you can nest flex containers, but the child grids have no relationship to the parent.
Nesting Grids by Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The subgrid behaviour would enable the grid defined on the parent to be used by the children. I feel this would be most useful when working with a multiple column flexible grid - for example a typical 12 column grid. I could define a grid on a wrapper, then position UI elements on that grid - from the major structural elements of my page down through the child elements to a form where I wanted the field to line up with items above.
The specification contained an initial description of subgrid, with a value of subgrid for grid-template-columns and grid-template-rows, you can read about this in the August 2015 Working Draft. This version of the specification would have meant you could declare a subgrid in one dimension only, and create a different set of tracks in the other.
In an attempt to get some implementation of subgrid, a revised specification was proposed earlier this year. This gives a single subgrid value of the display property. As we now cannot specify a subgrid on rows OR columns this limits us to have a subgrid that works in two dimensions. At this point neither version has been implemented by anyone, and subgrids are marked as “at risk” in the Level 1 Candidate Recommendation. With regard to ‘at-risk’ this is explained as follows:
“‘At-risk’ is a W3C Process term-of-art, and does not necessarily imply that the feature is in danger of being dropped or delayed. It means that the WG believes the feature may have difficulty being interoperably implemented in a timely manner, and marking it as such allows the WG to drop the feature if necessary when transitioning to the Proposed Rec stage, without having to publish a new Candidate Rec without the feature first.”
If we lose subgrid from Level 1, as it looks likely that we will, this does give us a chance to further discuss and iterate on that feature. My current thoughts are that I’m not completely happy about subgrids being tied to both dimensions and feel that a return to the earlier version, or something like it, would be preferable.
Further reading about subgrid
My post from 2015 detailing why I feel subgrid is important
My post based on the revised specification
Eric Meyer’s thoughts on subgrid
Write-up of a discussion from Igalia who work on the Blink and Webkit browser implementations
Styling cells, tracks and areas
Having defined a grid with CSS Grid Layout you can place child elements into that grid, however what you can’t do is style the grid tracks or cells. Grid doesn’t even go as far as multiple column layout, which has the column-rule properties.
In order to set a background colour on a grid cell at the moment you would have to add an empty HTML element or insert some generated content as in the below example. I’m using a 1 pixel grid gap to fake lines between grid cells, and empty div elements, and some generated content to colour those cells.
Faked backgrounds and borders by Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
I think it would be a nice addition to Grid Layout to be able to directly add backgrounds and borders to cells, tracks and areas. There is an Issue raised in the CSS WG Drafts repository for Decorative Grid Cell pseudo-elements, if you want to add thoughts to that.
More control over auto placement
If you haven’t explicitly placed the direct children of your grid element they will be laid out according to the grid auto placement rules. You can see in this example how we have created a grid and the items are placing themselves into cells on that grid.
Items auto-place on a defined grid by Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The auto-placement algorithm is very cool. We can position some items, leaving others to auto-place; we can set items to span more than one track; we can use the grid-auto-flow property with a value of dense to backfill gaps in our grid.
Websafe colors meet CSS Grid (auto-placement demo) by Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
I think however this could be taken further. In this issue posted to my CSS Grid AMA on GitHub, the question is raised as to whether it would be possible to ask grid to place items on the next available line of a certain name. This would allow you to skip tracks in the grid when using auto-placement, an issue that has also been raised by Emil Björklund in this post to the www-style list prior to spec discussion moving to Github. I think there are probably similar issues, if you can think of one add a comment here.
Creating non-rectangular grid areas
A grid area is a collection of grid cells, defined by setting the start and end lines for columns and rows or by creating the area in the value of the grid-template-areas property as shown below. Those areas however must be rectangular - you can’t create an L-shaped or otherwise non-regular shape.
Grid Areas by Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Perhaps in the future we could define an L-shape or other non-rectangular area into which content could flow, as in the below currently invalid code where a quote is embedded into an L-shaped content area.
.wrapper {
display: grid;
grid-template-areas:
"sidebar header header"
"sidebar content quote"
"sidebar content content";
}
Flowing content through grid cells or areas
Some uses cases I have seen perhaps are not best solved by grid layout at all, but would involve grid working alongside other CSS specifications. As I detail in this post, there are a class of problems that I believe could be solved with the CSS Regions specification, or a revised version of that spec.
Being able to create a grid layout, then flow content through the areas could be very useful. Jen Simmons presented to the CSS Working Group at the Lisbon meeting a suggestion as to how this might work.
In a post from earlier this year I looked at a collection of ideas from specifications that include Grid, Regions and Exclusions. These working notes from my own explorations might prompt ideas of your own.
Solving the keyboard/layout disconnect
One issue that grid, and flexbox to a lesser extent, raises is that it is very easy to end up with a layout that is disconnected from the underlying markup. This raises problems for people navigating using the keyboard as when tabbing around the document you find yourself jumping to unexpected places. The problem is explained by Léonie Watson with reference to flexbox in Flexbox and the keyboard navigation disconnect.
The grid layout specification currently warns against creating such a disconnect, however I think it will take careful work by web developers in order to prevent this. It’s also not always as straightforward as it seems. In some cases you want the logical order to follow the source, and others it would make more sense to follow the visual. People are thinking about this issue, as you can read in this mailing list discussion.
Bringing your ideas to the future of Grid Layout
When I’m not getting excited about new CSS features, my day job involves working on a software product - the CMS that is serving this very website, Perch. When we launched Perch there were many use cases that we had never thought of, despite having a good idea of what might be needed in a CMS and thinking through lots of use cases. The additional use cases brought to our attention by our customers and potential customers informed the development of the product from launch. The same will be true for Grid Layout.
As a “product” grid has been well thought through by many people. Yet however hard we try there will be use cases we just didn’t think of. You may well have one in mind right now. That’s ok, because as with any CSS specification, once Level One of grid is complete, work can begin on Level Two. The feature set of Level Two will be informed by the use cases that emerge as people get to grips with what we have now.
This is where you get to contribute to the future of layout on the web. When you hit up against the things you cannot do, don’t just mutter about how the CSS Working Group don’t listen to regular developers and code around the problem. Instead, take a few minutes and write up your use case. Post it to your blog, to Medium, create a CodePen and go to the CSS Working Group GitHub specs repository and post an issue there. Write some pseudo-code, draw a picture, just make sure that the use case is described in enough detail that someone can see what problem you want grid to solve. It may be that - as with any software development - your use case can’t be solved in exactly the way you suggest. However once we have a use case, collected with other use cases, methods of addressing that class of problems can be investigated.
I opened this article by explaining I’d written about grid layout four years ago, and how we’re only now at a point where we will have Grid Layout available in the majority of browsers. Specification development, and implementation into browsers takes time. This is actually a good thing, as it’s impossible to take back CSS once it is out there and being used by production websites. We want CSS in the wild to be well thought through and that takes time. So don’t feel that because you don’t see your use case added to a spec immediately it has been ignored. Do your future self a favour and write down your frustrations or thoughts, and we can all make sure that the web platform serves the use cases we’re dealing with now and in the future. |
2016 |
Rachel Andrew |
rachelandrew |
2016-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/what-next-for-css-grid-layout/ |
code |
| 307 |
Get the Balance Right: Responsive Display Text |
Last year in 24 ways I urged you to Get Expressive with Your Typography. I made the case for grabbing your readers’ attention by setting text at display sizes, that is to say big. You should consider very large text in the same way you might a hero image: a picture that creates an atmosphere and anchors your layout.
When setting text to be read, it is best practice to choose body and subheading sizes from a pre-defined scale appropriate to the viewport dimensions. We set those sizes using rems, locking the text sizes together so they all scale according to the page default and your reader’s preferences. You can take the same approach with display text by choosing larger sizes from the same scale.
However, display text, as defined by its purpose and relative size, is text to be seen first, and read second. In other words a picture of text. When it comes to pictures, you are likely to scale all scene-setting imagery - cover photos, hero images, and so on - relative to the viewport. Take the same approach with display text: lock the size and shape of the text to the screen or browser window.
Introducing viewport units
With CSS3 came a new set of units which are locked to the viewport. You can use these viewport units wherever you might otherwise use any other unit of length such as pixels, ems or percentage. There are four viewport units, and in each case a value of 1 is equal to 1% of either the viewport width or height as reported in reference1 pixels:
vw - viewport width,
vh - viewport height,
vmin - viewport height or width, whichever is smaller
vmax - viewport height or width, whichever is larger
In one fell swoop you can set the size of a display heading to be proportional to the screen or browser width, rather than choosing from a scale in a series of media queries. The following makes the heading font size 13% of the viewport width:
h1 {
font-size: 13 vw;
}
So for a selection of widths, the rendered font size would be:
Rendered font size (px)
Viewport width
13 vw
320
42
768
100
1024
133
1280
166
1920
250
A problem with using vw in this manner is the difference in text block proportions between portrait and landscape devices. Because the font size is based on the viewport width, the text on a landscape display is far bigger than when rendered on the same device held in a portrait orientation.
Landscape text is much bigger than portrait text when using vw units.
The proportions of the display text relative to the screen are so dissimilar that each orientation has its own different character, losing the inconsistency and considered design you would want when designing to make an impression.
However if the text was the same size in both orientations, the visual effect would be much more consistent. This where vmin comes into its own. Set the font size using vmin and the size is now set as a proportion of the smallest side of the viewport, giving you a far more consistent rendering.
h1 {
font-size: 13vmin;
}
Landscape text is consistent with portrait text when using vmin units.
Comparing vw and vmin renderings for various common screen dimensions, you can see how using vmin keeps the text size down to a usable magnitude:
Rendered font size (px)
Viewport
13 vw
13 vmin
320 × 480
42
42
414 × 736
54
54
768 × 1024
100
100
1024 × 768
133
100
1280 × 720
166
94
1366 × 768
178
100
1440 × 900
187
117
1680 × 1050
218
137
1920 × 1080
250
140
2560 × 1440
333
187
Hybrid font sizing
Using vertical media queries to set text in direct proportion to screen dimensions works well when sizing display text. In can be less desirable when sizing supporting text such as sub-headings, which you may not want to scale upwards at the same rate as the display text. For example, we can size a subheading using vmin so that it starts at 16 px on smaller screens and scales up in the same way as the main heading:
h1 {
font-size: 13vmin;
}
h2 {
font-size: 5vmin;
}
Using vmin alone for supporting text can scale it too quickly
The balance of display text to supporting text on the phone works well, but the subheading text on the tablet, even though it has been increased in line with the main heading, is starting to feel disproportionately large and a little clumsy. This problem becomes magnified on even bigger screens.
A solution to this is use a hybrid method of sizing text2. We can use the CSS calc() function to calculate a font size simultaneously based on both rems and viewport units. For example:
h2 {
font-size: calc(0.5rem + 2.5vmin);
}
For a 320 px wide screen, the font size will be 16 px, calculated as follows:
(0.5 × 16) + (320 × 0.025) = 8 + 8 = 16px
For a 768 px wide screen, the font size will be 27 px:
(0.5 × 16) + (768 × 0.025) = 8 + 19 = 27px
This results in a more balanced subheading that doesn’t take emphasis away from the main heading:
To give you an idea of the effect of using a hybrid approach, here’s a side-by-side comparison of hybrid and viewport text sizing:
table.ex--scale{width:100%;overflow: hidden;} table.ex--scale td{vertical-align:baseline;text-align:center;padding:0} tr.ex--scale-key{color:#666} tr.ex--scale-key td{font-size:.875rem;padding:0 0.125em} .ex--scale-2 tr.ex--scale-size{color:#ccc} tr.ex--scale-size td{font-size:1em;line-height:.34em;padding-bottom:.5rem} td.ex--scale-step{color:#000} td.ex--scale-hilite{color:red} .ex--scale-3 tr.ex--scale-size td{line-height:.9em}
top: calc() hybrid method; bottom: vmin only
16
20
27
32
35
40
44
16
24
38
48
54
64
72
320
480
768
960
1080
1280
1440
Over this festive period, try experiment with the proportion of rem and vmin in your hybrid calculation to see what feels best for your particular setting.
A reference pixel is based on the logical resolution of a device which takes into account double density screens such as Retina displays. ↩︎
For even more sophisticated uses of hybrid text sizing see the work of Mike Riethmuller. ↩︎ |
2016 |
Richard Rutter |
richardrutter |
2016-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/responsive-display-text/ |
code |
| 308 |
How to Make a Chrome Extension to Delight (or Troll) Your Friends |
If you’re like me, you grew up drawing mustaches on celebrities. Every photograph was subject to your doodling wrath, and your brilliance was taken to a whole new level with computer programs like Microsoft Paint. The advent of digital cameras meant that no one was safe from your handiwork, especially not your friends. And when you finally got your hands on Photoshop, you spent hours maniacally giggling at your artistic genius.
But today is different. You’re a serious adult with important things to do and a reputation to uphold. You keep up with modern web techniques and trends, and have little time for fun other than a random Giphy on Slack… right?
Nope.
If there’s one thing 2016 has taught me, it’s that we—the self-serious, world-changing tech movers and shakers of the universe—haven’t changed one bit from our younger, more delightable selves.
How do I know? This year I created a Chrome extension called Tabby Cat and watched hundreds of thousands of people ditch productivity for randomly generated cats. Tabby Cat replaces your new tab page with an SVG cat featuring a silly name like “Stinky Dinosaur” or “Tiny Potato”. Over time, the cats collect goodies that vary in absurdity from fishbones to lawn flamingos to Raybans. Kids and adults alike use this extension, and analytics show the majority of use happens Monday through Friday from 9-5. The popularity of Tabby Cat has convinced me there’s still plenty of room in our big, grown-up hearts for fun.
Today, we’re going to combine the formula behind Tabby Cat with your intrinsic desire to delight (or troll) your friends, and create a web app that generates your friends with random objects and environments of your choosing. You can publish it as a Chrome extension to replace your new tab, or simply host it as a website and point to it with the New Tab Redirect extension.
Here’s a sneak peek at my final result featuring my partner, my cat, and I in cheerfully weird accessories. Your result will look however you want it to.
Along the way, we’ll cover how to build a Chrome extension that replaces the new tab page, and explore ways to program randomness into your work to create something truly delightful.
What you’ll need
Adobe Illustrator (or a similar illustration program to export PNG)
Some images of your friends
A text editor
Note: This can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Most of the application is pre-built so you can focus on kicking back and getting in touch with your creative side. If you want to dive in deeper, you’ll find ways to do it.
Getting started
Download a local copy of the boilerplate for today’s tutorial here, and open it in a text editor. Inside, you’ll find a simple web app that you can run in Chrome.
Open index.html in Chrome. You should see a grey page that says “Noname”.
Open template.pdf in Adobe Illustrator or a similar program that can export PNG. The file contains an artboard measuring 800px x 800px, with a dotted blue outline of a face. This is your template.
Note: We’re using Google Chrome to build and preview this application because the end-result is a Chrome extension. This means that the application isn’t totally cross-browser compatible, but that’s okay.
Step 1: Gather your friends
The first thing to do is choose who your muses are. Since the holidays are upon us, I’d suggest finding inspiration in your family.
Create your artwork
For each person, find an image where their face is pointed as forward as possible. Place the image onto the Artwork layer of the Illustrator file, and line up their face with the template. Then, rename the artboard something descriptive like face_bob. Here’s my crew:
As you can see, my use of the word “family” extends to cats. There’s no judgement here.
Notice that some of my photos don’t completely fill the artboard–that’s fine. The images will be clipped into ovals when they’re rendered in the application.
Now, export your images by following these steps:
Turn the Template layer off and export the images as PNGs.
In the Export dialog, tick the “Use Artboards” checkbox and enter the range with your faces.
Export at 72ppi to keep things running fast.
Save your images into the images/ folder in your project.
Add your images to config.js
Open scripts/config.js. This is where you configure your extension.
Add key value pairs to the faces object. The key should be the person’s name, and the value should be the filepath to the image.
faces: {
leslie: 'images/face_leslie.png',
kyle: 'images/face_kyle.png',
beep: 'images/face_beep.png'
}
The application will choose one of these options at random each time you open a new tab. This pattern is used for everything in the config file. You give the application groups of choices, and it chooses one at random each time it loads. The only thing that’s special about the faces object is that person’s name will also be displayed when their face is chosen.
Now, when you refresh the project in Chrome, you should see one of your friends along with their name, like this:
Congrats, you’re off and running!
Step 2: Add adjectives
Now that you’ve loaded your friends into the application, it’s time to call them names. This step definitely yields the most laughs for the least amount of effort.
Add a list of adjectives into the prefixes array in config.js. To get the words flowing, I took inspiration from ways I might describe some of my relatives during a holiday gathering…
prefixes: [
'Loving',
'Drunk',
'Chatty',
'Merry',
'Creepy',
'Introspective',
'Cheerful',
'Awkward',
'Unrelatable',
'Hungry',
...
]
When you refresh Chrome, you should see one of these words prefixed before your friend’s name. Voila!
Step 3: Choose your color palette
Real talk: I’m bad at choosing color palettes, so I have a trick up my sleeve that I want to share with you. If you’ve been blessed with the gift of color aptitude, skip ahead.
How to choose colors
To create a color palette, I start by going to a Coolors.co, and I hit the spacebar until I find a palette that I like. We need a wide gamut of hues for our palette, so lock down colors you like and keep hitting the spacebar until you find a nice, full range. You can use as many or as few colors as you like.
Copy these colors into your swatches in Adobe Illustrator. They’ll be the base for any illustrations you create later.
Now you need a set of background colors. Here’s my trick to making these consistent with your illustration palette without completely blending in. Use the “Adjust Palette” tool in Coolors to dial up the brightness a few notches, and the saturation down just a tad to remove any neon effect. These will be your background colors.
Add your background colors to config.js
Copy your hex codes into the bgColors array in config.js.
bgColors: [
'#FFDD77',
'#FF8E72',
'#ED5E84',
'#4CE0B3',
'#9893DA',
...
]
Now when you go back to Chrome and refresh the page, you’ll see your new palette!
Step 4: Accessorize
This is the fun part. We’re going to illustrate objects, accessories, lizards—whatever you want—and layer them on top of your friends.
Your objects will be categorized into groups, and one option from each group will be randomly chosen each time you load the page. Think of a group like “hats” or “glasses”. This will allow combinations of accessories to show at once, without showing two of the same type on the same person.
Create a group of accessories
To get started, open up Illustrator and create a new artboard out of the template. Think of a group of objects that you can riff on. I found hats to be a good place to start. If you don’t feel like illustrating, you can use cut-out images instead.
Next, follow the same steps as you did when you exported the faces. Here they are again:
Turn the Template layer off and export the images as PNGs.
In the Export dialog, tick the “Use Artboards” checkbox and enter the range with your hats.
Export at 72ppi to keep things running fast.
Save your images into the images/ folder in your project.
Add your accessories to config.js
In config.js, add a new key to the customProps object that describes the group of accessories that you just created. Its value should be an array of the filepaths to your images. This is my hats array:
customProps: {
hats: [
'images/hat_crown.png',
'images/hat_santa.png',
'images/hat_tophat.png',
'images/hat_antlers.png'
]
}
Refresh Chrome and behold, accessories!
Create as many more accessories as you want
Repeat the steps above to create as many groups of accessories as you want. I went on to make glasses and hairstyles, so my final illustrator file looks like this:
The last step is adding your new groups to the config object. List your groups in the order that you want them to be stacked in the DOM. My final output will be hair, then hats, then glasses:
customProps: {
hair: [
'images/hair_bowl.png',
'images/hair_bob.png'
],
hats: [
'images/hat_crown.png',
'images/hat_santa.png',
'images/hat_tophat.png',
'images/hat_antlers.png'
],
glasses: [
'images/glasses_aviators.png',
'images/glasses_monacle.png'
]
}
And, there you have it! Randomly generated friends with random accessories.
Feel free to go much crazier than I did. I considered adding a whole group of animals in celebration of the new season of Planet Earth, or even adding Sir David Attenborough himself, or doing a bit of role reversal and featuring the animals with little safari hats! But I digress…
Step 5: Publish it
It’s time to put this in your new tabs! You have two options:
Publish it as a Chrome extension in the Chrome Web Store.
Host it as a website and point to it with the New Tab Redirect extension.
Today, we’re going to cover Option #1 because I want to show you how to make the simplest Chrome extension possible. However, I recommend Option #2 if you want to keep your project private. Every Chrome extension that you publish is made publicly available, so unless your friends want their faces published to an extension that anyone can use, I’d suggest sticking to Option #2.
How to make a simple Chrome extension to replace the new tab page
All you need to do to make your project into a Chrome extension is add a manifest.json file to the root of your project with the following contents. There are plenty of other properties that you can add to your manifest file, but these are the only ones that are required for a new tab replacement:
{
"manifest_version": 2,
"name": "Your extension name",
"version": "1.0",
"chrome_url_overrides" : {
"newtab": "index.html"
}
}
To test your extension, you’ll need to run it in Developer Mode. Here’s how to do that:
Go to the Extensions page in Chrome by navigating to chrome://extensions/.
Tick the checkbox in the upper-right corner labelled “Developer Mode”.
Click “Load unpacked extension…” and select this project.
If everything is running smoothly, you should see your project when you open a new tab. If there are any errors, they should appear in a yellow box on the Extensions page.
Voila! Like I said, this is a very light example of a Chrome extension, but Google has tons of great documentation on how to take things further. Check it out and see what inspires you.
Share the love
Now that you know how to make a new tab extension, go forth and create! But wield your power responsibly. New tabs are opened so often that they’ve become a part of everyday life–just consider how many tabs you opened today. Some people prefer to-do lists in their tabs, and others prefer cats.
At the end of the day, let’s make something that makes us happy. Cheers! |
2016 |
Leslie Zacharkow |
lesliezacharkow |
2016-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/how-to-make-a-chrome-extension/ |
code |
| 309 |
HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers: The Perfect Partnership |
Being a web developer today is exciting! The web has come a long way since its early days and there are so many great technologies that enable us to build faster, better experiences for our users. One of these technologies is HTTP/2 which has a killer feature known as HTTP/2 Server Push.
During this year’s Chrome Developer Summit, I watched a really informative talk by Sam Saccone, a Software Engineer on the Google Chrome team. He gave a talk entitled Planning for Performance, and one of the topics that he covered immediately piqued my interest; the idea that HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers were the perfect web performance combination.
If you’ve never heard of HTTP/2 Server Push before, fear not - it’s not as scary as it sounds. HTTP/2 Server Push simply allows the server to send data to the browser without having to wait for the browser to explicitly request it first. In this article, I am going to run through the basics of HTTP/2 Server Push and show you how, when combined with Service Workers, you can deliver the ultimate in web performance to your users.
What is HTTP/2 Server Push?
When a user navigates to a URL, a browser will make an HTTP request for the underlying web page. The browser will then scan the contents of the HTML document for any assets that it may need to retrieve such as CSS, JavaScript or images. Once it finds any assets that it needs, it will then make multiple HTTP requests for each resource that it needs and begin downloading one by one. While this approach works well, the problem is that each HTTP request means more round trips to the server before any data arrives at the browser. These extra round trips take time and can make your web pages load slower.
Before we go any further, let’s see what this might look like when your browser makes a request for a web page. If you were to view this in the developer tools of your browser, it might look a little something like this:
As you can see from the image above, once the HTML file has been downloaded and parsed, the browser then makes HTTP requests for any assets that it needs.
This is where HTTP/2 Server Push comes in. The idea behind HTTP/2 Server Push is that when the browser requests a web page from the server, the server already knows about all the assets that are needed for the web page and “pushes” it to browser. This happens when the first HTTP request for the web page takes place and it eliminates an extra round trip, making your site faster.
Using the same example above, let’s “push” the JavaScript and CSS files instead of waiting for the browser to request them. The image below gives you an idea of what this might look like.
Whoa, that looks different - let’s break it down a little. Firstly, you can see that the JavaScript and CSS files appear earlier in the waterfall chart. You might also notice that the loading times for the files are extremely quick. The browser doesn’t need to make an extra HTTP request to the server, instead it receives the critical files it needs all at once. Much better!
There are a number of different approaches when it comes to implementing HTTP/2 Server Push. Adoption is growing and many commercial CDNs such as Akamai and Cloudflare already offer support for Server Push. You can even roll your own implementation depending on your environment. I’ve also previously blogged about building a basic HTTP/2 Server Push example using Node.js. In this post, I’m not going to dive into how to implement HTTP/2 Server Push as that is an entire post in itself! However, I do recommend reading this article to find out more about the inner workings.
HTTP/2 Server Push is awesome, but it isn’t a magic bullet. It is fantastic for improving the load time of a web page when it first loads for a user, but it isn’t that great when they request the same web page again. The reason for this is that HTTP/2 Server Push is not cache “aware”. This means that the server isn’t aware about the state of your client. If you’ve visited a web page before, the server isn’t aware of this and will push the resource again anyway, regardless of whether or not you need it. HTTP/2 Server Push effectively tells the browser that it knows better and that the browser should receive the resources whether it needs them or not. In theory browsers can cancel HTTP/2 Server Push requests if they’re already got something in cache but unfortunately no browsers currently support it. The other issue is that the server will have already started to send some of the resource to the browser by the time the cancellation occurs.
HTTP/2 Server Push & Service Workers
So where do Service Workers fit in? Believe it or not, when combined together HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers can be the perfect web performance partnership. If you’ve not heard of Service Workers before, they are worker scripts that run in the background of your website. Simply put, they act as middleman between the client and the browser and enable you to intercept any network requests that come and go from the browser. They are packed with useful features such as caching, push notifications, and background sync. Best of all, they are written in JavaScript, making it easy for web developers to understand.
Using Service Workers, you can easily cache assets on a user’s device. This means when a browser makes an HTTP request for an asset, the Service Worker is able to intercept the request and first check if the asset already exists in cache on the users device. If it does, then it can simply return and serve them directly from the device instead of ever hitting the server.
Let’s stop for a second and analyse what that means. Using HTTP/2 Server Push, you are able to push critical assets to the browser before the browser requests them. Then, using Service Workers you are able to cache these resources so that the browser never needs to make a request to the server again. That means a super fast first load and an even faster second load!
Let’s put this into action. The following HTML code is a basic web page that retrieves a few images and two JavaScript files.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>HTTP2 Push Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>HTTP2 Push</h1>
<img src="./images/beer-1.png" width="200" height="200" />
<img src="./images/beer-2.png" width="200" height="200" />
<br>
<br>
<img src="./images/beer-3.png" width="200" height="200" />
<img src="./images/beer-4.png" width="200" height="200" />
<!-- Scripts -->
<script async src="./js/promise.min.js"></script>
<script async src="./js/fetch.js"></script>
<script>
// Register the service worker
if ('serviceWorker' in navigator) {
navigator.serviceWorker.register('./service-worker.js').then(function(registration) {
// Registration was successful
console.log('ServiceWorker registration successful with scope: ', registration.scope);
}).catch(function(err) {
// registration failed :(
console.log('ServiceWorker registration failed: ', err);
});
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
In the HTML code above, I am registering a Service Worker file named service-worker.js. In order to start caching assets, I am going to use the Service Worker toolbox . It is a lightweight helper library to help you get started creating your own Service Workers. Using this library, we can actually cache the base web page with the path /push.
The Service Worker Toolbox comes with a built-in routing system which is based on the same routing as Express. With just a few lines of code, you can start building powerful caching patterns.
I’ve add the following code to the service-worker.js file.
(global => {
'use strict';
// Load the sw-toolbox library.
importScripts('/js/sw-toolbox/sw-toolbox.js');
// The route for any requests
toolbox.router.get('/push', global.toolbox.fastest);
toolbox.router.get('/images/(.*)', global.toolbox.fastest);
toolbox.router.get('/js/(.*)', global.toolbox.fastest);
// Ensure that our service worker takes control of the page as soon as possible.
global.addEventListener('install', event => event.waitUntil(global.skipWaiting()));
global.addEventListener('activate', event => event.waitUntil(global.clients.claim()));
})(self);
Let’s break this code down further. Around line 4, I am importing the Service Worker toolbox. Next, I am specifying a route that will listen to any requests that match the URL /push. Because I am also interested in caching the images and JavaScript for that page, I’ve told the toolbox to listen to these routes too.
The best thing about the code above is that if any of the assets exist in cache, we will instantly return the cached version instead of waiting for it to download. If the asset doesn’t exist in cache, the code above will add it into cache so that we can retrieve it when it’s needed again.
You may also notice the code global.toolbox.fastest - this is important because gives you the compromise of fulfilling from the cache immediately, while firing off an additional HTTP request updating the cache for the next visit.
But what does this mean when combined with HTTP/2 Server Push? Well, it means that on the first load of the web page, you are able to “push” everything to the user at once before the browser has even requested it. The Service Worker activates and starts caching the assets on the users device. The next time a user visits the page, the Service Worker will intercept the request and serve the asset directly from cache. Amazing!
Using this technique, the waterfall chart for a repeat visit should look like the image below.
If you look closely at the image above, you’ll notice that the web page returns almost instantly without ever making an HTTP request over the network. Using the Service Worker library, we cached the base page for the route /push, which allowed us to retrieve this directly from cache.
Whether used on their own or combined together, the best thing about these two features is that they are the perfect progressive enhancement. If your user’s browser doesn’t support them, they will simply fall back to HTTP/1.1 without Service Workers. Your users may not experience as fast a load time as they would with these two techniques, but it would be no different from their normal experience. HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers are really the perfect partners when it comes to web performance.
Summary
When used correctly, HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers can have a positive impact on your site’s load times. Together they mean super fast first load times and even faster repeat views to a web page. Whilst this technique is really effective, it’s worth noting that HTTP/2 push is not a magic bullet. Think about the situations where it might make sense to use it and don’t just simply “push” everything; it could actually lead to having slower page load times. If you’d like to learn more about the rules of thumb for HTTP/2 Server Push, I recommend reading this article for more information.
All of the code in this example is available on my Github repo - if you have any questions, please submit an issue and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
If you’d like to learn more about this technique and others relating to HTTP/2, I highly recommend watching Sam Saccone’s talk at this years Chrome Developer Summit.
I’d also like to say a massive thank you to Robin Osborne, Andy Davies and Jeffrey Posnick for helping me review this article before putting it live! |
2016 |
Dean Hume |
deanhume |
2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/http2-server-push-and-service-workers/ |
code |
| 310 |
Fairytale of new Promise |
There are only four good Christmas songs.
I know, yeah, JavaScript or whatever. We’ll get to that in a minute, I promise.
First—and I cannot stress this enough— there are four good Christmas songs. You’re free to disagree with me here, of course, but please try to understand that you will be wrong.
They don’t all have the most safe-for-work titles; I can’t list all of them here, but if you choose to let your fingers do the walkin’ to your nearest search engine, I will say that one was released by the band FEAR way back in 1982 and one was on Run the Jewels’ self-titled debut album. The lyrics are a hell of a lot worse than the titles, so maybe wait until you get home from work before you queue them up. Wear headphones, if you’ve got thin walls.
For my money, though, the two I can reference by name are the top of that small heap: Tom Waits’ Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis, and The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York. The former once held the honor of being the only good Christmas song—about which which I was also unequivocally correct, right up until I changed my mind. It’s not the song up for discussion today, but feel free to familiarize yourself just the same—I’ll wait.
Fairytale of New York—the top of the list—starts out by hinting at some pretty standard holiday fare; dreams and cheer and whatnot. Typical seasonal stuff, so long as you ignore that the story seems to be recounted as a drunken flashback in a jail cell. You can probably make a few guesses at the underlying spirit of the song based on that framing: following a lucky break, our bright-eyed protagonists move to New York in search of fame and fortune, only to quickly descend into bad decisions, name-calling, and vaguely festive chaos.
This song speaks to me on a couple of levels, not the least of which is as a retelling of my day-to-day interactions with JavaScript. Each day’s melody might vary a little bit, granted, but the lyrics almost always follow a pretty clear arc toward “PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT.” You might have heard a similar tune yourself; it goes a little somethin’ like setTimeout(function() { console.log( "this should be happening last" ); }, 1000); . Callbacks are calling callbacks calling callbacks and something is happening somewhere, as the JavaScript interpreter plods through our code start-to-finish, line-by-line, step-by-step. If we need to take actions based on the results of something that could take its sweet time resolving, well, we’d better fiddle with the order of things to make sure those actions don’t happen too soon.
“But I can see a better time,” as the song says, “when all our dreams come true.” So, with that Pogues brand of holiday spirit squarely in mind—by which I mean that your humble narrator is almost certainly drunk, and may be incarcerated at the time of publication—gather ’round for a story of hope, of hardships, of semi-asynchronous JavaScript programming, and ultimately: of Promise unfulfilled.
The Main Thread
JavaScript is single-minded, in a manner of speaking. Anything we tell the JavaScript runtime to do goes into a single-file queue; you’ll see it referred to as the “main thread,” or “UI thread.” That thread can be shared by a number of critical browser processes, like rendering and re-rendering parts of the page, and user interactions ranging from the simple—say, highlighting text—to the more complex—interacting with form elements.
If that sounds a little scary to you, well, that’s because it is. The more complex our scripts, the more we’re cramming into that single-file main thread, to be processed along with—say—some of our CSS animations. Too much JavaScript clogging up the main thread means a lot of user-facing performance jankiness. Getting away from that single thread is a big part of all the excitement around Web Workers, which allow us to offload entire scripts into their own dedicated background threads—though not without limitations of their own. Outside of Web Workers, that everything-thread is the only game in town: scripts executed one thing at a time, functions calling functions calling functions, taking numbers and crowding up the same deli counter as a user’s interactions—which, in this already strained metaphor, would be ham, I guess?
Asynchronous JavaScript
Now, those queued actions may include asynchronous things. For example: AJAX callbacks, setTimeout/setInterval, and addEventListener won’t block the main thread while we’re waiting for a request to come back, a timer to tick away, or an event to trigger. Once those things do kick in, though, the actions they’re meant to perform will get shuffled right back into that single-thread queue.
There are a couple of places you might have written asynchronously-fired JavaScript, even if you’re not super familiar with the overarching concept: XMLHttpRequest—“AJAX,” if ya nasty—or just kicking off a function once a user triggers a click or mouseenter event. Event-driven development is writ a little larger, with the overall flow of the script dictated by events, both internal and external. Writing event-driven JavaScript applications is a step in the right direction for sure—it won’t cure what ails the main thread, but it does work with the medium in a reasonable way. Event-driven development allows us to manage our use of the main thread in a way that makes sense. If any of this rings a bell for you, the motivation for Promises should feel familiar.
For example, a custom init event might kick things off, and fire a create event that applies our classes and restructures our markup which, on completion, fires a bindEvents event to handle all the event listeners for user interaction. There might not sound like much difference between that and one big function that kicks off, manipulates the DOM, and binds our events line-by-line—but in a script of sufficient size and complexity we’re not only provided with a decoupled flow through the script, but obvious touchpoints for future updates and a predictable structure for ongoing maintenance.
This pattern falls apart a little where we were still creating, binding, and listening for events in the same top-to-bottom, one-item-at-a-time way—we had to set a listener on a given object before the event fires, or nothing would happen:
// Create the event:
var event = document.createEvent( "Event" );
// Name the event:
event.initEvent( "doTheStuff", true, true );
// Listen for the custom `doTheStuff` event on `window`:
window.addEventListener( "doTheStuff", initializeEverything );
// Fire the custom event
window.dispatchEvent( event );
This example is a little contrived, and this stuff is a lot more manageable for sure with the addition of a framework, but that’s the basic gist: create and name the event, add a listener for the event, and—after setting our listener—dispatch the event.
Events and callbacks aren’t the only game in town for weaving our way in and out of the main thread, though—at least, not anymore.
Promises
A Promise is, at the risk of sounding sentimental, pure potential—an empty container into which a value eventually results. A Promise can exist in several states: “pending,” while the computation they contain is being performed or “resolved” once that computation is complete. Once resolved, a Promise is “fulfilled” if it gave us back something we expect, or “rejected” if it didn’t.
The Promise constructor accepts a callback with two arguments: resolve and reject. We perform an action—asynchronous or otherwise—within that callback. If everything in there has gone according to plan, we call resolve. If something has gone awry, we call reject—with an error, conventionally. To illustrate, let’s tack something together with a pretty decent chance of doing what we don’t want: a promise meant only to give us the number 1, but has a chance of giving us back a 2. No reasonable person would ever do this, of course, but I wouldn’t necessarily put it past me.
var promisedOne = new Promise( function( resolve, reject ) {
var coinToss = Math.floor( Math.random() * 2 ) + 1;
if( coinToss === 1 ) {
resolve( coinToss );
} else {
reject( new Error( "That ain’t a one." ) );
}
});
There’s nothing too surprising in there, after you boil it all down. It’s a little return-y, with the exception that we’re flagging results as “as expected” or “something went wrong.”
Tapping into that Promise uses another new keyword: then—and as someone who attempts to make sense of JavaScript by breaking it down to plain ol’ human-language, I’m a big fan of this syntax. then is tacked onto our Promise identifier, and does just what it says on the tin: once the Promise is resolved, then do one of two things, both supplied as callbacks: the first in the case of a fulfilled promise, and the second in the case of a rejected one. Those two callbacks will have, as arguments, the results we specified with resolve orreject, respectively. It sounds like a lot in prose, but in code it’s a pretty simple pattern:
promisedOne.then( function( result ) {
console.log( result );
}, function( error ) {
console.error( error );
});
If you’ve spent any time working with AJAX—jQuery-wise, in particular—you’ve seen something like this pattern before: a success callback and an error callback. The state of a promise, once fulfilled or rejected, cannot be changed—any reference we make to promisedOne will have a single, fixed result.
It may not look like too much the way I’m using it here, but it’s powerful stuff—a pattern for asynchronously resolving anything. I’ve recently used Promises alongside a script that emulates Font Load Events, to apply webfonts asynchronously and avoid a potential performance hit. Font Face Observer allows us to, as the name implies, determine when the files referenced by our @font-face rules have finished loading.
var fontObserver = new FontFaceObserver( "Fancy Font" );
fontObserver.check().then(function() {
document.documentElement.className += " fonts-loaded";
}, function( error ) {
console.error( error );
});
fontObserver.check() gives us back a Promise, allowing us to chain on a then containing our callbacks for success and failure. We use the fulfilled callback to bolt a class onto the page once the font file has been fully transferred. We don’t bother including an argument in the first function, since we don’t care about the result itself so much as we care that the promise resolved without error—we’re not doing anything with the resolved value, just adding a class to the page. We do include the error argument, since we’ll want to know what happened should something go wrong.
Now, this isn’t the tidiest syntax around—at least to my eyes—with those two functions just kinda floating in a then. Luckily there’s an similar alternative syntax; one that I find a bit easier to parse at-a-glance:
fontObserver.check()
.then(function() {
document.documentElement.className += " fonts-loaded";
})
.catch(function( error ) {
console.log( error );
});
The first callback inside then provides us with our success state, while the catch provides us with a single, explicit “something went wrong” callback. The two syntaxes aren’t completely identical in all situations, but for a simple case like this, I find it a little neater.
The Common Thread
I guess I still owe you an explanation, huh. Not about the JavaScript-whatever; I think I’ve explained that plenty. No, I mean Fairytale of New York, and why it’s perched up there at the top of the four (4) song heap.
Fairytale is a sad song, ostensibly. If you follow the main thread—start to finish, line-by-line, step by step— Fairytale is a sad song. And I can see you out there, visions of Die Hard dancing in your heads: “but is it a Christmas song?”
Well, for my money, nothing says “holidays” quite like unreliable narration.
Shane MacGowan, the song’s author, has placed the first verse about “Christmas Eve in the drunk tank” as happening right after the “lucky one, came in eighteen-to-one”—not at the chronological end of the story. That means the song might not be mostly drunken flashback, but all of it a single, overarching flashback including a Christmas Eve in protective custody. It could be that the man and woman are, together, recounting times long past—good times and bad times—maybe not even in chronological order. Hell, the “NYPD Choir” mentioned in the chorus? There’s no such thing.
We’re not big Christmas folks, my family and I. But just the same, every year, the handful of us get together, and every year—like clockwork—there’s a lull in conversation, there’s a sharp exhale, and Ma says “we all made it.” Not to a house, not to a dinner, but through another year, to another Christmas. At this point, without fail, someone starts telling a story—and one begets another, and so on. Sometimes the stories are happy, sometimes they’re sad, more often than not they’re both. Some are about things we were lucky to walk away from, some are about a time when another one of us didn’t.
Start-to-finish, line-by-line, step-by-step, the main thread through the year doesn’t change, and maybe there isn’t a whole lot we can do to change it. But by carefully weaving our way in and out of that thread—stories all out of sync and resolving one way or the other, with the results determined by questionably reliable narrators—we can change the way we interact with it and, little by little, we can start making sense of it. |
2016 |
Mat Marquis |
matmarquis |
2016-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/fairytale-of-new-promise/ |
code |
| 311 |
Designing Imaginative Style Guides |
(Living) style guides and (atomic) patterns libraries are “all the rage,” as my dear old Nana would’ve said. If articles and conference talks are to be believed, making and using them has become incredibly popular. I think there are plenty of ways we can improve how style guides look and make them better at communicating design information to creatives without it getting in the way of information that technical people need.
Guides to libraries of patterns
Most of my consulting work and a good deal of my creative projects now involve designing style guides. I’ve amassed a huge collection of brand guidelines and identity manuals as well as, more recently, guides to libraries of patterns intended to help designers and developers make digital products and websites.
Two pages from one of my Purposeful style guide packs. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense.
“Style guide” is an umbrella term for several types of design documentation. Sometimes we’re referring to static style or visual identity guides, other times voice and tone. We might mean front-end code guidelines or component/pattern libraries. These all offer something different but more often than not they have something in common. They look ugly enough to have been designed by someone who enjoys configuring a router.
OK, that was mean, not everyone’s going to think an unimaginative style guide design is a problem. After all, as long as a style guide contains information people need, how it looks shouldn’t matter, should it?
Inspiring not encyclopaedic
Well here’s the thing. Not everyone needs to take the same information away from a style guide. If you’re looking for markup and styles to code a ‘media’ component, you’re probably going to be the technical type, whereas if you need to understand the balance of sizes across a typographic hierarchy, you’re more likely to be a creative. What you need from a style guide is different.
Sure, some people1 need rules:
“Do this (responsive pattern)” or “don’t do that (auto-playing video.)”
Those people probably also want facts:
“Use this (hexadecimal value)” and not that inaccessible colour combination.”
Style guides need to do more than list facts and rules. They should demonstrate a design, not just document its parts. The best style guides are inspiring not encyclopaedic. I’ll explain by showing how many style guides currently present information about colour.
Colours communicate
I’m sure you’ll agree that alongside typography, colour’s one of the most important ingredients in a design. Colour communicates personality, creates mood and is vital to an easily understandable interactive vocabulary. So you’d think that an average style guide would describe all this in any number of imaginative ways. Well, you’d be disappointed, because the most inspiring you’ll find looks like a collection of chips from a paint chart.
Lonely Planet’s Rizzo does a great job of separating its Design Elements from UI Components, and while its ‘Click to copy’ colour values are a thoughtful touch, you’ll struggle to get a feeling for Lonely Planet’s design by looking at their colour chips.
Lonely Planet’s Rizzo style guide.
Lonely Planet approach is a common way to display colour information and it’s one that you’ll also find at Greenpeace, Sky, The Times and on countless more style guides.
Greenpeace, Sky and The Times style guides.
GOV.UK—not a website known for its creative flair—varies this approach by using circles, which I find strange as circles don’t feature anywhere else in its branding or design. On the plus side though, their designers have provided some context by categorising colours by usage such as text, links, backgrounds and more.
GOV.UK style guide.
Google’s Material Design offers an embarrassment of colours but most helpfully it also advises how to combine its primary and accent colours into usable palettes.
Google’s Material Design.
While the ability to copy colour values from a reference might be all a technical person needs, designers need to understand why particular colours were chosen as well as how to use them.
Inspiration not documentation
Few style guides offer any explanation and even less by way of inspiring examples. Most are extremely vague when they describe colour:
“Use colour as a presentation element for either decorative purposes or to convey information.”
The Government of Canada’s Web Experience Toolkit states, rather obviously.
“Certain colors have inherent meaning for a large majority of users, although we recognize that cultural differences are plentiful.”
Salesforce tell us, without actually mentioning any of those plentiful differences.
I’m also unsure what makes the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards colours a “distinctly American palette” but it will have to work extremely hard to achieve its goal of communicating “warmth and trustworthiness” now.
In Canada, “bold and vibrant” colours reflect Alberta’s “diverse landscape.”
Adding more colours to their palette has made Adobe “rich, dynamic, and multi-dimensional” and at Skype, colours are “bold, colourful (obviously) and confident” although their style guide doesn’t actually provide information on how to use them.
The University of Oxford, on the other hand, is much more helpful by explaining how and why to use their colours:
“The (dark) Oxford blue is used primarily in general page furniture such as the backgrounds on the header and footer. This makes for a strong brand presence throughout the site. Because it features so strongly in these areas, it is not recommended to use it in large areas elsewhere. However it is used more sparingly in smaller elements such as in event date icons and search/filtering bars.”
OpenTable style guide.
The designers at OpenTable have cleverly considered how to explain the hierarchy of their brand colours by presenting them and their supporting colours in various size chips. It’s also obvious from OpenTable’s design which colours are primary, supporting, accent or neutral without them having to say so.
Art directing style guides
For the style guides I design for my clients, I go beyond simply documenting their colour palette and type styles and describe visually what these mean for them and their brand. I work to find distinctive ways to present colour to better represent the brand and also to inspire designers.
For example, on a recent project for SunLife, I described their palette of colours and how to use them across a series of art directed pages that reflect the lively personality of the SunLife brand. Information about HEX and RGB values, Sass variables and when to use their colours for branding, interaction and messaging is all there, but in a format that can appeal to both creative and technical people.
SunLife style guide. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense.
Purposeful style guides
If you want to improve how you present colour information in your style guides, there’s plenty you can do.
For a start, you needn’t confine colour information to the palette page in your style guide. Find imaginative ways to display colour across several pages to show it in context with other parts of your design. Here are two CSS gradient filled ‘cover’ pages from my Purposeful style sheets.
Colour impacts other elements too, including typography, so make sure you include colour information on those pages, and vice-versa.
Purposeful. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense.
A visual hierarchy can be easier to understand than labelling colours as ‘primary,’ ‘supporting,’ or ‘accent,’ so find creative ways to present that hierarchy. You might use panels of different sizes or arrange boxes on a modular grid to fill a page with colour.
Don’t limit yourself to rectangular colour chips, use circles or other shapes created using only CSS. If irregular shapes are a part of your brand, fill SVG silhouettes with CSS and then wrap text around them using CSS shapes.
Purposeful. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense.
Summing up
In many ways I’m as frustrated with style guide design as I am with the general state of design on the web. Style guides and pattern libraries needn’t be dull in order to be functional. In fact, they’re the perfect place for you to try out new ideas and technologies. There’s nowhere better to experiment with new properties like CSS Grid than on your style guide.
The best style guide designs showcase new approaches and possibilities, and don’t simply document the old ones. Be as creative with your style guide designs as you are with any public-facing part of your website.
Purposeful are HTML and CSS style guides templates designed to help you develop creative style guides and pattern libraries for your business or clients. Save time while impressing your clients by using easily customisable HTML and CSS files that have been designed and coded to the highest standards. Twenty pages covering all common style guide components including colour, typography, buttons, form elements, and tables, plus popular pattern library components. Purposeful style guides will be available to buy online in January.
Boring people ↩ |
2016 |
Andy Clarke |
andyclarke |
2016-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/designing-imaginative-style-guides/ |
design |
| 312 |
Preparing to Be Badass Next Year |
Once we’ve eaten our way through the holiday season, people will start to think about new year’s resolutions. We tend to focus on things that we want to change… and often things that we don’t like about ourselves to “fix”. We set rules for ourselves, or try to start new habits or stop bad ones. We focus in on things we will or won’t do.
For many of us the list of things we “ought” to be spending time on is just plain overwhelming – family, charity/community, career, money, health, relationships, personal development.
It’s kinda scary even just listing it out, isn’t it? I want to encourage you to think differently about next year.
The ever-brilliant Kathy Sierra articulates a better approach really well when talking about the attitude we should have to building great products. She tells us to think not about what the user will do with our product, but about what they are trying to achieve in the real world and how our product helps them to be badass1.
When we help the user be badass, then we are really making a difference.
I suppose this is one way of saying: focus not on what you will do, focus on what it will help you achieve. How will it help you be awesome?
In what ways do you want to be more badass next year?
A professional lens
Though of course you might want to focus in on health or family or charity or community or another area next year, many people will want to become more badass in their chosen career.
So let’s talk about a scaffold to help you figure out your professional / career development next year.
First up, an assumption: everyone wants to be awesome. Nobody gets up in the morning aiming to be crap at their job. Nobody thinks to themselves “Today I am aiming for just south of mediocre, and if I can mess up everybody else’s ability to do good work then that will be just perfect2”.
Ergo, you want to be awesome. So what does awesome look like?
Danger!
The big trap that people fall into when think about their professional development is to immediately focus on the things that they aren’t good at. When you ask people “what do you want to work on getting better at next year?” they frequently gravitate to the things that they believe they are bad at.
Why is this a trap? Because if you focus all your time and energy on improving the areas that you suck at, you are going to end up middling at everything. Going from bad → mediocre at a given skill / behaviour takes a bunch of time and energy. So if you spend all your time going from bad → mediocre at things, what do you think you end up? That’s right, mediocre.
Mediocrity is not a great career goal, kids.
What do you already rock at?
The much better investment of time and energy is to go from good → awesome. It often takes the same amount of relative time and energy, but wow the end result is better! So first, ask yourself and those who know you well what you are already pretty damn good at. Combat imposter syndrome by asking others.
Then figure out how to double down on those things. What does brilliant look like for a given skill? What’s the knowledge or practice that you need to level yourself up even further in that thing?
But what if I really really suck?
Admittedly, sometimes something you suck at really is holding you back. But it’s important to separate out weaknesses (just something you suck at) from controlling weaknesses (something you suck at that actually matters for your chosen career).
If skill x is just not an important thing for you to be good at, you may never need to care that you aren’t good at it. If your current role or the one you aspire to next really really requires you to be great at x, then it’s worth investing your time and energy (and possibly money too) getting better at it.
So when you look at the things that you aren’t good at, which of those are actually essential for success?
The right ratio
A good rule of thumb is to pick three things you are already good at to work on becoming awesome at and limit yourself to one weakness that you are trying to improve on. That way you are making sure that you get to awesome in areas where you already have an advantage, and limit the amount of time you are spending on going from bad → mediocre.
Levelling up learning
So once you’ve figured out your areas you want to focus on next year, what do you actually decide to do?
Most of all, you should try to design your day-to-day work in a way that it is also an effective learning experience. This means making sure you have a good feedback loop – you get to try something, see if it works, learn from it, rinse and repeat.
It’s also about balance: you want to be challenged enough for work to be interesting, without it being so hard it’s frustrating. You want to do similar / the same things often enough that you get to learn and improve, without it being so repetitive that it’s boring.
Continuously getting better at things you are already good at is actually both easier and harder than it sounds. The advantage is that it’s pretty easy to add the feedback loop to make sure that you are improving; the disadvantage is that you’re already good at these skills so you could easily just “do” without ever stopping to reflect and improve. Build in time for personal retrospectives (“What went well? What didn’t? What one thing will I choose to change next time?”) and find a way of getting feedback from outside sources as well.
As for the new skills, it’s worth knowing that skill development follows a particular pattern:
We all start out unconsciously incompetent (we don’t know what to do and if we tried we’d unwittingly get it wrong), progress on to conscious incompetence (we now know we’re doing it wrong) then conscious competence (we’re doing it right but wow it takes effort and attention) and eventually get to unconscious competence (automatically getting it right).
Your past experiences and knowledge might let you move faster through these stages, but no one gets to skip them. Invest the time and remember you need the feedback loop to really improve.
What about keeping up?
Everything changes very fast in our industry. We need to invest in not falling behind, in keeping on top of what great looks like. There are a bunch of ways to do this, from reading blog posts, following links on Twitter, reading books to attending conferences or workshops, or just finding time to build things in new ways or with new technologies.
Which will work best for you depends on how you best learn. Do you prefer to swallow a book? Do you learn most by building or experimenting?
Whatever your learning style though, remember that there are three real needs:
Scan the landscape (what’s changing, does it matter)
Gain the knowledge or skills (get the detail)
Apply the knowledge or skills (use it in reality)
When you remember that you need all three of these things it can help you get more of what you do.
For me personally, I use a combination of conferences and blogs / Twitter to scan the landscape. Half of what I want out of a conference is just a list of things to have on my radar that might become important. I then pick a couple of things to go read up on more (I personally learn most effectively by swallowing a book or spec or similar). And then I pick one thing at a time to actually apply in real life, to embed the skill / knowledge.
In summary
Aim to be awesome (mediocrity is not a career goal).
Figure out what you already rock at.
Only care about stuff you suck at that matters for your career.
Pick three things to go from good → awesome and one thing to go from bad → mediocre (or mediocre → good) this year.
Design learning into your daily work.
Scan the landscape, learn new stuff, apply it for real.
Be badass!
She wrote a whole book about it. You should read it: Badass: Making Users Awesome ↩
Before you argue too vehemently: I suppose some antisocial sociopathic bastards do exist. Identify them, and then RUN AWAY FAST AS YOU CAN #realtalk ↩ |
2016 |
Meri Williams |
meriwilliams |
2016-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/preparing-to-be-badass-next-year/ |
business |