It was brought to my attention by my colleague Jae Lee , here at Forward, and without his help I wouldn’t have been able to bag a ticket.  There were only 50 tickets available, and as they were free, there were a lot of people keen to get hold on one — thankfully Jae’s fast mouse-work managed to secure me one.

I’ve not been to a workshop / hackday type day before, so entered the event wondering what would happen, what type of people I’d meet, and more importantly what could I contribute & learn.

The event was held at the City University building just off Northampton Square, near London, which was thankfully a nice sunny 15 minute stroll from my apartment.

Johanna introduced the day, set out the brief and a few tech details, and got the teams to start work.  We had essentially 7 hours or so to take a design challenge and come up with some kind of prototype or at least wireframes of a product.

Team Waltz

We assigned ourselves into groups based on our skillset, and I found myself in team 3.  There were four of us (left to right in the photo): Adam (@admataz), Steve (@subcide), Jason (@jasonchanoz), and me.

We came up with the team name very quickly — Steve said as we were team 3 with 4 people, it was like the time signature for a waltz: 3/4 — so from that point we were Team Waltz.  This pretty much turned out to be the norm for us for the rest of the day, as we were able to get past the small details and get in to the big issues & work on the brief pretty quickly.

We all brought different skills to the table, with development, design, and UX all represented in pretty equal measures.

The teams were encouraged to keep track of what they were doing on tumblr blogs.  I found this to be a great way of documenting the process, so I tried to write out the different phases we covered during the day.

Rather than repeating myself and typing out everything we did on the day, here’s the tumblr blog for our team:

Team Waltz

At the end of the day we held presentations to show what we had all managed to put together in the time allowed, using the tumblrs (thank goodness I’d been typing for most of the day) and any sketches we needed.

I was happy to present our teams work as I was really proud of what we’d achieved, and everyone else was more than happy to let me!

What I learned

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve not done any full time UX work in nearly 2 years, but found to my relief that a lot of the techniques I’ve been using for a many years before are still valid.

In the time allotted to the problem we were acutely aware that some really useful UX techniques were impractical.

We really didn’t have time to do any user research, and as such didn’t feel we could build valid personas to base our work on (hence the very rough generic persona we created).

We also didn’t really have any time to do any paper prototyping, or any user testing of our ideas, relying only on the good balance of people in our group.

However, even though there were a lot of restrictions on what techniques we were able to use, the team worked really well together, and it reinforced how much I enjoy working in a team to resolve a complex problem.

It was great to see what the other teams were able to achieve in the time too — and to see the various techniques employed to get to the final result. You can read the other teams tumblrs: Team 1, Team 2, Team 4,Team 5, Team 6, Team 7, Team 8, Team 9 & Team 10.

I’d definitely do another one of these UX days, and have now started to look into other UX events that are going on.  I’ve missed the design and user experience part of my work as I’ve been focussing only on front end development for the past 18 months.

Design Jam relit the fire for me!

Chris Shiflett was the catalyst for the Ideas of March, and is asking people to:

• Write a post called Ideas of March.
• List some of the reasons you like blogs.
• Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
• Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.

So, here goes…

Why I love blogs

Over the past 7 years or so, I’ve kept a steady 50–60 blogs in my feed reader, all of which supply me with a variety of information, entertainment, and encouragement.  There are a number of reasons for this dedication to these blogs:

• Without blogs I wouldn’t have gained the sort of experience, and level of technical knowledge that now supports me on a daily basis;
• It’s great to get someone’s thoughts & reasoning behind a short status update or a tweet;
• I’ve often stumbled across a new blog through a post by someone I already read, and found some great content I would never have found otherwise;
• As other people share their wisdom, knowledge and links, I’ve built up a much better understanding of subjects that I wouldn’t even know where to start with normally.

My pledge

Almost exactly a year has passed since I wrote the obligatory first post on this blog.  It was at a time when I needed to update the content and design of this site, mostly to help secure more contract work and support my CV with some imparted wisdom.  Looking back, I had great intentions and ideas, but never  really fulfilled them, both through apathy and not really knowing what to write.

This should hopefully encourage me to write the posts I have planned on a variety of subjects, and I’m hoping it’ll help me to rationalise a lot of my thinking.  Without doubt it’ll also help my writing skills too.

So due to the reasons above and (a lot) more, I’m going to try my best to write more, more often, and join in the conversation where I can.

Grrrr…

A part of me was slightly rankled enough to tweet that I was unimpressed that BT were supporting a rising US artist, when I would have thought it more appropriate to support rising British talent.  After all, BT stands for British Telecom, right?

A good friend Rich Knowles, who works for BT, joined in the discussion (that I’d only had with myself at this point) and mentioned that the tune was “a ‘good’ song. And BT works in over 170+ countries” (I’ll get to his Daily Mail comment in a moment.)

I already thought the tune was good (if not a little reminiscent of recent technology adverts like Sony, O2, Orange, Vodafone, and T-Mobile have used), so the point about being a ‘good’ song was cool.

What I find hard to understand is why, when specifically targeting a UK audience, BT chose to use a foreign artist. Surely there are plenty of British musicians producing great quality tunes that could have suited the advert just as equally?

It’s not about race or creed

At this point I’ve got to rebut Rich’s comment about being ‘Daily Mail’ about it (and Rich if you read this, please don’t take this bit personally, you just touched a nerve, I still love you mate!).

It seems we’ve slipped into a era where any possible chance there is to make someone feel bad about their opinion when it comes to the mention of ‘Johnny Foreigner’, that anyone who wants to improve British pride or see British talent get pushed to the front at every opportunity is branded some kind of right-wing, BNP supporting, Daily Mail reader (of which I am none, thank you very much!).

How did it get to be like this?  When did it become such a bad thing being proud of our nation? Have we got to a point where the thought of being proud of your nation has been captured by the nutters like Nick Griffin, or the Daily “we’re not racist, but it’s the immigrants fault” Mail, so we’re frightened to say so?

More importantly how do we go about re-capturing it and making it something worthwhile again?

I’m not the first to fly the flag on St. George’s day (another note about that will be coming soon), but I do like being British, supporting British where I can, and hopefully seeing the country doing well enough to feel proud.

Yes, BT is a global company, but it started as British Telecom. If they can’t push their ad agencies to use British talent when targeting the Brits, then why should any other global company care when they’re peddling their wares here?

I had to share this. These are some amazing business card ninja like skills! And, yes, I know it’s a viral ad, but it’s worth sharing the good ones… (via Mike D)

It took 5 times?

A few years ago, I was fortunate to see a usability lab that was trying to determine drop out rates on a group of specific e-commerce forms.  The biggest revelation I had at the time was provided by watching a gentleman customer try 5 times (unsuccessfully) to enter his date of birth into a form, in the way that the form required.

The form had a small amount of help text showing that he should enter it as dd/mm/yyyy, but the error message just asked for a ‘valid date’.  The gentleman professed to not be very computer savvy, but it really highlighted to me how we often force users to fit in with our model of how a form should behave.

Showing our cleverness

For a while I accepted that we needed to validate the date so that it could be stored in a database, or manipulated by some piece of code.  More recently I’ve seen a couple of implementations of on-the-fly date formatting (in JS) that take the entered date, in what ever format, and rewrite it in the format we want.  So a date entered as ‘23rd March 1997′ would get changed to ’23/03/1997′ (in UK date format).

Although I can understand that we’d need to do this at some point to make it easy to store, do we really need to do it in front of the user?  Is it not a bit like saying ‘OK thanks for entering a valid date but we wanted you to type it like this, so we’re just going to change it for you and show you even if it makes you think you got it wrong’?

Surely with improvements in modern development practices we should be validating against valid dates client side (using perhaps your favourite JS library of choice), then performing the conversion on the server side, before storing it or using it as we wish?

I think I need to investigate this a bit further…

Most browsers use the normal ‘content box’ model to render table cell content (some slightly differently, and we have all had to deal with these box model quirks over the years), but Firefox uses the ‘border box’ model.  You can see a group of examples on Bruno Fassino’s site.

Simply put, it changes the calculation of the total rendered height of the table cell.  So setting a height of 130px and a border of 5px means that the cell will be rendered as 140px in Firefox but 130px in every other browser. Bah!

It also ignores min-height values, and treats height values as min-height instead.

There is a CSS3 property called box-sizing, that allows you to specify which model you want to use, but that changes the model for the width as well, which causes some more issues for width calculations.

Solutions

There are a couple of solutions to get round this if you need a whole row of table cells to be a certain height, but don’t want the hassle of working out widths (if you use the box-sizing css3).

1. Find a cell on the row that contains a fixed height element (e.g. a button, or a title you know won’t change in length), and set top and bottom padding on that to get what you need.

2. Or, if you don’t have a fixed height element, then you can add a div around the contents of a table cell and set the min-height on that.

Simple fix, but it took me a good bit of poking around to find the reason for the quirk, I hope it helps someone else.

In the IT support world, the separation is more apparent — you’re either a company trying to gain multiple clients and grow your business, or you’re a contractor that moves from role to role (usually).

I guess I’d like to pass on some of my experience as an IT support contractor, a stay at home freelancer, an employer of freelancers (in a permanent management role) and now a contract freelancer in web development myself.

It’s all about your professional attitude

When I was employing freelancers on a regular basis, I was often shocked at some of their attitudes (and sometimes their aptitude) when they arrived at the studio.  Over a few years I met a range of scruffy, uninterested, half asleep developers that were more interested in putting their personal view across (or playing online games) than getting some work done. Of course I also got to work with some folks that were awesome, switched on and made their presence missed when their time on a project was over.

Add some value

There are some key things you can do to make yourself valuable to a team, and make a positive impact on the people you work with:

Keeping positive

It’s not about being the most hyper and cheery person in the room (that can get very old, very quickly).  It’s more about keeping positive about any task that you’re set, and being positive that you can help get things done in the right way. This means that you’ve got to know your stuff, and can be confident that if you don’t know the answer to a problem, you can use your skills to work it out.  The wrong way to deal with dull tasks is to argue, or even sulk about it (worryingly, I’ve seen this more than once).

Being awake and alert

This may be obvious to most people, but turning up to a freelance gig yawning, not paying attention, or being distracted by other things is a sure fire way to annoy the person who is employing you.  You’re there because they need your skills, and they are likely to get frustrated with someone who acts like they’re just another ‘bum on a seat’.

Remember you’re there to help

If you’ve seen a clients problem or issue happen before, and you can contribute in a meaningful way, then make sure you do so (but remember to be tactful).  If you see some team members going through the ringer trying to fix an issue that you can solve, and you stay quiet, but let them know after they’ve fixed it, you’re not going to win any friends.

Make sure your skills are better than average

As a freelancer you need be at the top of your game. No excuses. If your skills don’t justify your wages, why should someone employ you?  Don’t be a big head tho, another way to lose friends is to try and tell everyone you know everything.  If you do know a lot more than the people around you, then introduce your knowledge gently.  No one likes to be made to feel like they don’t know what theyr’re doing. And remember to soak up your environment like a sponge: if you get the chance to work in a new methodology, or technology, then learn as much as you can about it while you’re there.

Be sensitive to other people

This is something that came up very recently on a contract for me, but remember that how you see the world is not necessarily the way that everyone else does. Try to be aware that phrases you use might not fit in with the company environment (I’m not talking about swearing here), and without fail be ready to admit that you might be wrong and apologise where necessary.

Don’t mention the money

It goes without saying, but you should never talk about your rate, or the money you earn each year. It’s boring for a start, but it can also unsettle people who might otherwise be happy with their job, and possibly make them resent you. Freelancing isn’t a popularity contest, but it helps if the people you work with enjoy working with you.

I’m sure there’s a few more things that I’ve forgotten, but hopefully this will help someone out.

Just recently I wandered past the BMW garage on Park Lane, and spotted a beautiful M3 coupe in gleaming white.  I’ve since seen the same model in various colours, but none seem to show off the lines and shapes in the car’s design as well as the white version. Maybe its the shading caused by the sweeping lines down the sides, or the way the hump in the middle of the bonnet hints at the power below, but it really is standing out as a beautiful car.

Even BMW are using the white model in their advertising and promotional material.

Another stunning white car is the Audi A5, just as visually appealing as the BMW, and for the same reasons: the lines seem to be accentuated by the colour.

Even white used cars seem to be just as popular as other colours these days — Autoquake, labeled as the UK’s largest online used car retailer, found that searches on their site for white cars were almost equal to red, grey and blue (5% compared to 6.6%, 5.7% and 5.3% respectively).  However Black and silver are still the leaders (at 65.9% and 11.5% respectively).

As far back as 2008 car makers were starting to see the differences in sales of white cars — apparently sales of white cars increased by more than 60% the previous year.

All the stats are interesting, but I think from a visual point of view current car design really suits a coat of white.

Over the years I’ve coached clients and worked with marketing specialists to help them improve their online presence by showing their skills and help potential clients understand them by writing fresh content as often as possible.  Well, I think it’s about time I practiced what I preach.

Excuses, excuses, excuses

Excuses are sometimes reasons, so I guess I can put my lack of output to a number of them:

• I’ve got plenty of experience but used to find it difficult to articulate my thoughts.
• I was worried that I’d say something that could be construed in the wrong way (and I’ve never enjoyed confrontation).
• There are so many voices out there online that I really respect that I didn’t think I had anything to add.
• Keeping a consistent level of content coming is a terrifying prospect!

Wow, looking at that list it sounds a lot like what I hear from other people about why they shouldn’t write online.

So, what’s changed?

Over the past few months I’ve spent a fair amount of time explaining my work, and my decisions to colleagues and friends, and have found that I actually have some strong opinions on subjects that I keep to myself.

I’ve also realised that the reasons (excuses) for not writing were fairly rubbish, and due to a number of changes in my life over the past few years (a post or two about that later), I now have the tools to deal with these and any other fears.

Based on these changes, I’m unlikely to worry about sticking to a regular posting schedule, but I’ll be trying to keep up a stream of thoughts about technology, the web, design, music, film, and creativity — all the subjects I’ve found my voice for.