How to increase your productivity as a Web Designer. Understanding and working closely with your client is the key to being a successful web designer. Increasing your productivity means doing a good job for your client and gaining more business in the long run. Being productive in any client-based role requires understanding their needs. Particularly for web design, it is crucial that those business models are clear enough to the designer that they can be translated into a visual brand for the client. As a website is the first port of call for many new and existing clients, it is vital that their website is designed to be functional, user-friendly, efficient, clear and interactive.
Consider these tips for how to increase your productivity as a web designer: Meet with your clients regularly to keep the project on track. Be innovative, daring, modern and competitive with your approach to marketing yourself as a web designer. WorkflowMax is a cloud-based software tool that will take the pain out of running your business. How to keep up to date on Front-End Technologies - The Recipe. Frontend - Agile development from a front end developer perspective. Invoisse.
Call Yourself a Practitioner? Prove It. By Nathaniel Davis Published: January 9, 2012 “Of the many professionals who say they practice information architecture, most don’t practice effectively. In fact, one could say the same regarding other professionals who operate within the domain of UX design.” What I am about to tell you may come as a surprise. Of the many professionals who say they practice information architecture, most don’t practice effectively. In fact, one could say the same regarding other professionals who operate within the domain of UX design. In the sense of the definition “repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency,” we don’t necessarily practice with the intent of creating a discipline —as in “a rule or system of rules.”
I tend to think that most UX professionals fail to recognize the subtle nuances of the terms practice and discipline. Insight 1: Practice Targets Unique Competencies Of course, you need not be an information architect of this methodology. 1. 2. The Many Hats of a Usability Professional. By Rebecca Albrand Published: October 8, 2012 “As a usability professional, you have to wear the hats of a facilitator, a consultant, a conversationalist, a note-taker, a technologist, and a psychologist.” Sometimes it seems as though usability professionals need to have superhuman multitasking abilities to conduct usability test sessions. As a usability professional, you have to wear the hats of a facilitator, a consultant, a conversationalist, a note-taker, a technologist, and a psychologist. You have to do everything from handling technology issues to understanding participants’ personalities and comfort levels, all while working within a session’s time constraints—and perhaps with the added pressure of having your client observing.
But despite your having to do all of these things, your main responsibility is to gather high-quality, valuable data for your client. The Facilitator Hat “Your main responsibility during a usability test session is being an effective facilitator.” Conclusion. Divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.
It is often used in conjunction with its cognitive opposite, convergent thinking, which follows a particular set of logical steps to arrive at one solution, which in some cases is a ‘correct’ solution. By contrast, divergent thinking typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fashion. Many possible solutions are explored in a short amount of time, and unexpected connections are drawn. After the process of divergent thinking has been completed, ideas and information are organized and structured using convergent thinking. Traits associated with divergent thinking[edit] Psychologists have found that a high IQ (like Albert Einstein) alone does not guarantee creativity. Instead, personality traits that promote divergent thinking are more important.
Promoting divergent thinking[edit] See also[edit] 1. 2. Convergent thinking. Convergent thinking is a term coined by Joy Paul Guilford as the opposite of divergent thinking. It generally means the ability to give the "correct" answer to standard questions that do not require significant creativity, for instance in most tasks in school and on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence.
Relevance[edit] A Map of how Convergent Thinking Works Convergent thinking is the type of thinking that focuses on coming up with the single, well-established answer to a problem.[1] It is oriented toward deriving the single best, or most often correct answer to a question. Convergent thinking is also linked to knowledge as it involves manipulating existing knowledge by means of standard procedures.[1] Knowledge is another important aspect of creativity. Convergent thinking is often used in conjunction with divergent thinking.
Convergent vs. divergent thinking[edit] Personality[edit] The personality correlates of divergent and convergent thinking have been studied. Mood[edit] Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset: Which One Are You? | Michael Graham Richard. Here is an excerpt from an article about Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University: Through more than three decades of systematic research, [Carol Dweck] has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed. To anyone who is into personal growth and self-improvement, this seems obvious.
But clearly, it is not obvious to everybody: look at this diagram by Nigel Holmes representing the two types of mindsets and I’ll sure you’ll recognize the attitudes of many people you know. Fixed Mindset Let’s have a look, starting with the Fixed Mindset side: People who hold these beliefs think that “they are the way they are”, but that doesn’t mean that they have less of a desire for a positive self-image than anyone else. Following Patterns and Innovating. By Steven Hoober Published: April 22, 2013 “Adding any widget, feature, interface, interaction, or piece of hardware never automatically solves your problems with any information service or application.” For the past few years, it has been fashionable to point out faults in things like TV interfaces and interactions, while positing that innovative new hardware like smartphones and tablets would fix everything any minute now—but it hasn’t yet.
For example, I chose my television programming service provider largely based on the service’s usability and usefulness. But there’s a problem: There are issues of consistency that make it difficult to switch between the user interfaces. In a recent interview, Alan Kay spoke about providing devices like iPads in every classroom. “I’ve used the analogy of what would happen if you put a piano in every classroom.
“In other words, ‘the music is not in the piano.’” The same is true in any context. Best Practices Patterns and Innovation Applying Old Patterns. Want to Change the World? Be Resilient. - John McKinley. By John McKinley | 1:00 PM February 26, 2013 What’s the difference between someone with a good idea and a person who can transform their ideas into real impact? To tackle the world’s biggest problems, we need to be able to identify and support the people who are capable of creating lasting change. At Acumen Fund, we spend a lot of time trying to find and train aspiring and established leaders from around the world who have the right mix of talent, ideas, and passion.
And what we’ve found time and again is: Resilience matters most. Resilient leaders have three key characteristics: Grit: Short-term focus on tasks at hand, a willingness to slog through broken systems with limited resources, and pragmatic problem-solving skills.Courage: Action in the face of fear and embracing the unknown.Commitment: Long-term optimism and focus on big-picture goals. Grit: Natalie Grillon, a former Peace Corps volunteer and recent MBA graduate, embodies grit.
And resilience can be trained. Frontend is a separate application. Despite my experience with working on desktop applications, I've been avoiding any frontend (here meaning JavaScript/html) for years. It wasn't because I didn't know JavaScript, it's just that I am a developer who cares about code quality and JavaScript coding was far from any "quality" areas (in my mind).
I felt safe with programming backends and I was more than happy with Rails. Rails is a framework that is really good at abstracting the frontend problems. It gives you a set of view helpers, so that you can do almost everything in Ruby. Whenever I had a project that involved more JavaScript (because the UX designer required it) it was a painful experience to me. I just couldn't find a good way of structuring the JS code.
I didn't know how to test it well (and yes, I knew Selenium, thank you). Now I love working on frontends. Why the change? I realized that my mental model of a web applications, that I had in my mind, was wrong. We live in exciting times. If you read this far you should. Fighting the Fears that Block Creativity - Tom Kelley and David Kelley. By Tom Kelley and David Kelley | 1:00 PM November 20, 2012 What does it take to spark your creativity? For Doug Dietz, the executive behind GE Healthcare’s magnetic resonance-imaging (MRI) equipment, it was seeing a little girl cry. He remembers the day vividly. He’d come to a hospital to see one of his machines in action and was initially pleased.
He first shared his concerns with his boss at GE, who suggested he attend a customer-focused innovation class at Stanford’s Hasso Plassner Institute of Design, or d.school, which is where we met him. These simple changes made a big difference, significantly reducing the use of sedation for pediatric patients needing MRIs and greatly increasing family satisfaction rates. But the real proof of success for Dietz was hearing another young girl who had just been through a new Adventure Series machine ask: “Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?” Dietz was able to reinvent the pediatric imaging experience because he reclaimed his creative confidence. How to keep up to date on Front-End Technologies - The Recipe. Attributes of Innovation.
People often say: “Be innovative!” You may have heard this from your boss or colleagues. Everyone wants to be ahead of the curve and lead their industry—to set an example for others to follow. In the digital sphere, customer- and service-oriented products are in the midst of a great many innovations right now, with the emergence of elements like cloud computing, tablets, mobile location services, and social media integration.
Now is a fertile time for innovation. But what does it take to be innovative? What does an innovative product look like? There are attributes that materialize differently depending on the product or service, but they are attributes that all innovations have in common. Innovation is Disruptive I know, disruptive sounds like a bad thing. The original iPhone is an example of a disruptive innovation. People’s behavior changed—they carried fewer devices and used a single one for many purposes. Innovation Fills a Gap Innovation Addresses Your Audience’s Needs. Rails Conf 2013 How to Talk to Developers by Ben Orenstein.
From backend to frontend - the mental transition. Recently I blogged about my thoughts on the idea that frontends are in fact separate applications. Today, I'd like to describe the transition of my mental model in thinking about views and frontends. I thought that it was only me who went that path, but this excellent Backbone introduction slide deck helped me realize that it's a common process for backend developers. This process consists of the following steps: 1. No-JavaScript phase No JavaScript at all, or using it through some kind of backend plugins (like the ones Rails gives - link_to_remote etc.) 2. This happens when you use straight JQuery, there is lots of JQuery plugins updating different views, replacing html and using some simple Ajax. 3. 4. Single page application is the phase in which you move all of the html generation from the server to the client.
Any other phase? I'm in the 4th phase for quite a while now and I don't feel any need of a framework. Just to be clear, I'm fine with Backbone or AngularJS or others.