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  • With design agility must come design ability

    Duncan 5:00 pm on 13th July, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Design, ,

    Why Agile UX is Meaningless without an Agile Attitude

    This is an interesting post by Anders Ramsay.

    I definitely think design agility is an important skill, I think it goes without saying that if you do not have agility then you are not agile, but I also think that design ability is also just as important for agile teams.

    Sometimes when we need to produce ‘presentable’ wireframes to show a client complex interactions in an animatic we’ll spend some time polishing them up; but lately we have just been scanning in rough sketches. It makes it much more obviously ‘unfinished’ and definitely leads to looser design discussions.

    Often when we need to resolve design issues that come-up ‘in sprint’ we will have a quick chat with the team and produce a 10 second sketch to facilitate the design solution, job done. This is design agility to me. It does depend on the development team having at least some design ability though – luckily at Caplin our devs are all cool techreatives at heart.

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  • Freebie for Designers

    Arthur Smit 3:00 pm on 25th June, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Design, Free, photoshop, resource, ,

    Hello Designers!

    Tired of doing the same things again and again? Why not use my personal Lazy Kit,
    filled with useful time savers and ‘best practice’ principles. Give it a download and
    try it on your next website design mock-up.

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  • Optimise for Portable Devices

    Arthur Smit 2:41 pm on 14th June, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Design, , Interface, , Portable Devices, Ui, ,

    Platformability is now optimised for Portable Devices.
    (Give it a go on your mobile!)



    How to achieve a better User Experience on Portable Devices…
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  • Duncan: On The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover

    Duncan 2:02 pm on 7th April, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Design, , financial trading, Investment Banking, , ,

    Check out this great article from Dominique Leca over at UX Magazine: The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover

    It includes some concepts from IDEO who submitted a redesign proposal back in 2007…

    The comments are also interesting and focus on the fact that to an outsider Bloomberg might ‘look’ ugly, but to the actual ‘Bloomberg Users’ who are focussed on the ‘data and information patterns on screen’ they almost don’t even see the GUI.

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  • Narrative Journey Maps

    Duncan 4:49 pm on 4th March, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Design, ,

    Introducing Narrative Journey Maps

    The UX team at Caplin are always looking for ways to enhance our Usage Centered Design (UCD) process and tools because we realise the importance of UCD in helping us to uncover the pain points of our users.

    When designing/refining application ‘flow’ one of the tools we use is a Narrative Journey Map (NJM).

    This is a mashup inspired by other UCD techniques combined into something we find very useful. In this post I’m going to outline the NJM process we currently use – (we are always experimenting and evolving this technique). We will also be exploring the NJM process in detail as part of our upcoming Persona Driven Development workshop at SPA2010.

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  • Inadvertantly Abstract

    Adam Iley 11:57 am on 3rd February, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: API, Design, persona

    Yesterday you may have seen the @CaplinTech tweet about Zed Shaw’s essay which complains that programmers too often muddle the concepts of indirection and abstraction. In particular he bemoans that this confusion often results in programmers designing bad APIs.

    While the distinction he draws is a valuable one, there is more of a relationship between abstraction and indirection than Shaw acknowledges; any indirection that allows for more than one significantly different implementation is in fact an abstraction of the common elements of those different implementations.

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  • Livescribe - as tool for Contextual Inquiry

    Duncan 1:09 pm on 20th January, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Design, ,

    Livescribe smartpen and padLivescribe is a tool I’ve been using for a year or so now within the UX team here at Caplin, to capture notes from design meetings and ongoing UCD contextual inquiries. It’s a great tool and is also discreet – useful in contextual scenarios where setting up a video recorder would be too intrusive.

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