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. 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 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. Practice—Repetitive behavior for the purpose of producing and sustaining discipline. discipline—Rules, methods, or processes, and predictable results—that is, work products—that derive from practice. 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. 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.
Promoting divergent thinking[edit] Playfulness and divergent thinking[edit] 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. Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset: Which One Are You? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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.