Jerry Cao, Author at Studio by UXPin

How To Get Started With Your UX Freelancing

Guest post by Georgina McNiff

UX Freelancing

How to get started with your UX freelancing: Be that much better.

There are many reasons why freelance work is appealing for UX designers: the ability to choose your own clients, to be your own boss, and the freedom to be able to work from home in your pajamas…sometimes. So for whatever reason you are thinking about beginning your own freelance or consulting venture there are a few things I’d like to share with you that have helped me land projects:

1. Your customer service needs to be that much better.

Because you don’t have extra support from your team or a business associate communicating with clients you have to that much more personable. You have to play all the roles of a small UX or design firm by yourself. So while producing great flow charts, mockups, and working prototypes are important, so is making your client feel like you are being attentive to their needs. What I have noticed is that getting your client on video conference or on the phone early can show them that you are making the extra effort to communicate with them, especially when working on small websites promoting only one person, product, or service. So now that you have established your pathos with the client let’s move on.

2. Your portfolio needs to be that much better.

So, we have established that your customer service needs to be that much better, you are most likely the only communicator with the potential client and you have to make a great impression…it’s all on you! Your portfolio also needs to be that much better. Many times just giving samples of your work isn’t going to convince clients, especially seasoned ones, that you know what you are doing. E-mailing clients a PDF with a few prior projects is the best way to do it. Just sending the link to your portfolio is informal and honestly a bit lazy. Unless your mailbox is overflowing with potential work opportunities take the time to e-mail your clients a well-developed PDF portfolio. Using a portfolio format helps ensure that your information is kept private and it should be easier for you to get consent from prior clients if you ask to display work you’ve done for them in a private and secure way, rather than displaying their site’s embarrassing before and after pics for the whole world to see.

Place emphasis on your process! People want to see HOW you got to your finished product. I have heard this from the beginning and I recently attended a UXPA meeting in NYC where this was the emphasis of the meeting. Show how you got to your finished product. It will be easier for you to get fairly compensated for your time and hard work if you show your client that you are using a well-honed process. In your portfolio describe and show (through pictures) that you have a process that works for you. Don’t be ashamed of showing pictures of your whiteboards, your post-it notes detailing your IA, or early sketches you did on a piece of computer paper. All of these things show that you have a process and that there is actual work that will go into your wireframes. If your client can conjure up the image of your working step-by-step on their project, chances are they will feel much more comfortable in hiring you.

3. Your designs need to be that much better!

There is nobody to fall back on but yourself. You might be working with programmers to execute your designs, but at the end of the day as a freelancer, you are the sole person responsible for your own work. This means that if you give your client a less than desirable user experience they aren’t going to recommend you to anybody. Unfortunately, they might even spread the word about their negative experience working with you. So take your time and make sure to go over all aspects of your project. Small-scale user testing throughout product design, or redesign, will help keep you on track and will allow an objective and fresh pairs of eyes to asses your design.

4. Your prices need to be that much better, but not THAT much better.

If you are reading this then you are interested in receiving advice on how to get started with your UX freelancing…yes? Well, what I have learned as a fairly new UX freelancer is that my prices have to be competitive. We all want to make a living, and sometimes it’s difficult to objectively think of a price for your client. Whether you want to charge per hour or one flat fee for project research must be done regarding the amount of time and work you will have to put into the project. Giving a client a rough estimate at the beginning of a project will often alleviate the nervous feeling they might be having. It’s like the feeling of terror when you call the electrician over to your house. You hope that he/she will play by the rules, but in the back of your head you are a little worried they might leave handing you a bill with a bunch of zeros at the end, telling you they’ll be back tomorrow to begin the rewiring you “need” throughout your entire home…sorry to the electricians out there.

Doing research on what your peers are charging help, but be honest, and charge what you think is fair for your work, your time, and your skill level.

So there we have it, folks.

Starting your freelance career off on the right foot means proving that you have what it takes to stand out against all of the other fish in the sea. It means taking time to build an online presence for yourself, it means a hard focus on your designs, and it means seeing every opportunity as a way to better advocate for your UX abilities and your freelance venture. So go ahead, get started!

Author’s Bio

Georgina McNiff is a native New Yorker and received her education at the University of Minnesota. She earned her degree in scientific and technical communication and focused on user experience and design work. Freelance work for Georgina began right after graduation as a means of making money during her post-college job search.

Offline Safety in a Cloud App

Photo Credit: star5112 via Compfight cc

Cloud App working, even if you’re offline

Imagine this super scary situation: You’re working in you favorite cloud app (let say it’s a wireframing app). Suddenly…. BAM, you lost your Internet connection. The app stopped working and most probably you lost your data.

That’s scary, right?

We thought so.

You know well that ‘shit happens’. You might lose the connection, or the server might be temporary unavailable. That may kill all the benefits of a cloud app. Losing your data is unacceptable.

Having this problem in mind we’ve used local storage (all thanks to our wizard of programming Jacek) to prevent any data loss in case of lack of connection to the cloud.

If you’ll suddenly lose connection to the server, we’ll save your data locally (on your computer) and we’ll let you further use UXPin until the connection will come back. Next time you’ll connect to the server, we’ll synchronize your local data with the server.

Magic? Just a little bit, the rest is hard work.

Check out the scheme below:

With UXPin you’re safe, even if offline.

Update

Due to extreme popularity of this post (thank you so much for all the upvotes on Hackernews, likes etc.), I asked author of this feature to guide you through the meanders of his solution:

“Unfortunately our solution is not generic enough to talk about it in details :) But the general idea is quite simple. We use HTML5-called localStorage object to store changes in user’s projects locally and while the connection is on (or when it comes back), our synchronization mechanism just grabs local data and sends it to server.”/Jacek Złowocki

We invest in greater customer focus. UX Design means more than just UI.

We're all ears

2012 meant a huge increase in the number of customers for us, so it was by all means a very successful UXPin year!

But with success comes responsibility*.

Our customers have a wide range of needs and send more feedback than ever before (thank you!). However, we in the UXPin team hasn’t had the manpower to interact with, listen to and help our customers to the extent that we like to. We were all ears, and available for you as often as we could (hope you felt that!)… but well we just want more! You deserve that. We want to be customers obsessed! We’re starting today!

Please welcome Markus Zwick, our customer success coach! Markus, originally from Sweden, made UXPin internally international. He’s definitely bringing a new way of thinking into the company and we’re proud to have him on board! Let’s hear him!

“Today UXPin welcomed the latest addition to the team. This person will dedicate all his time to improve your experience while interacting with the UXPin product. This includes listening to your needs or questions and to convey all of it to the rest of the team. It also includes the task of creating tutorials in our knowledge base.

This person is no other than myself – Markus. One of the first things that people often notice about me is that huge curiosity that I’ve got for everything IT. This curiosity is one of the main reasons why I chose to work in this company, and also the reason why I’ve got much professional experience as well as an academic degree in IT. By now that curiosity has generated a lot of knowledge of IT, User Experience Design and the UXPin product – knowledge that I’ll make sure to use to enhance your experience while working with UXPin! The faith I have in this fantastic product and the team are the two other main reasons.

As a conclusion, I’ll once again emphasize the fact that the reason I’m working here is to listen to your needs and questions. UXPin consists of a bunch of extremely experienced and innovative professionals in the field of User Experience Design, so I’m 100 % sure that no request will be too big or impossible for us to carry out. Thus, do not hesitate to tell us what you think that we need to add, improve or even remove!

I’m looking forward to hearing from you all and wish you a truly successful and happy new year!

All the best regards,  Markus Zwick, UXPin Customer Success Coach

ps. You can contact Markus via e-mail markus.zwick[at]uxpin[dot]com

*Almost exact Spiderman’s saying

In UX Design: Create more than you need.

UXPin sketch

Great designers create many more artifacts and drafts of ideas that they actually use. Don’t ever stop at the first version of whatever you do.

It came back to me with the great Bento Box no. 1 by LUXr. I’m trying out the box working on Customer Development for UXPin.

First step in the LUXr process of CustDev is, no wonder, creation of persona. Janice Fraser from LUXr (previously CEO of Adaptive Path) teaches the wise way of creating a persona. According to Janice to make the persona work we need to describe four things:

Who the person is (name, one sentence in speech bubble little drawing)
Demographics
Behaviors (What this persona does?)
Needs & Goals

When we’re describing Demographics, Behaviors and Needs & Goals we suppose to write down 10 traits for each category and than… choose 5 most important. We’re not using half of the things that we wrote down! Suddenly priorities become obvious.

Love it!

UXPin in San Francisco. Part #1: How the hell it happened?

Jason Fraser crap jobs vs dream jobs

“Crap jobs are created by other people. Dream jobs you make yourself.” – picture above, originally from co-working space Rackspace is held by Jason Fraser, founder of LUXr (future of Lean UX).

I love it, but as every rule it has certain exceptions. We had great jobs (UX folks at important eCommerce company). Nonetheless we decided to leave them 3 weeks ago, packed our stuff and traveled to San Francisco to meet with our clients, friends and heroes.

We left our comfort zone, because we’re passionate about User Experience Design and we want to resolve problems caused by lack of dedicated UX Design tools.

We had great, intense, time. We’ve met with: Luke Wroblewski, Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, Indi Young, Mike Kuniavsky, Liz Goodman, Chris Baum, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Michal Kopec, Dave McClure, Paul Singh, Richard Boardman, Hiten Shah, Kate Rutter, Jason Fraser… to mention few of our great mentors.

I thought I will have time to give you at least short glimpse of the meetings. I’m sorry, I didn’t. I will try now to make it up to you. Expect San Francisco stories to be told every couple of days.

When You’re Holding A Hammer Everything Seems Like A Nail

This post is inspired by a conversation with one of the winners of the UXBite competition, Tomek. We were talking about various wireframing tools and one of the things Tomek said caught my attention: I was trying to work with ***, but I felt like they gave me a hammer and now I’m obliged to only see nails around me. That made me thinking.

We are being limited by the names we give to specific objects and tools. We are being limited by our habits. We are being limited by habits of other people. And we are being limited by our own usual ways of using certain tools.

For example: what you can do with a hammer? First thing that comes to mind: hit the nails with it of course! What a stupid question?! But as you keep thinking you can find different ways of using a hammer. You can hit nails with it but you can take them out of wooden boards as well. Or you can kill someone with this tool. Everything depends on current needs.

I know that you may be thinking prototyping / wireframing tool is only for wireframing or prototyping. Period. Today I want to show you a little alternative way of using JustProto. How? See below.

Product Retrospect.

Product Retrospect is a simple yet effective way of summary after the project’s closed. You gather the whole team and discuss every pro and con that’s project related. You don’t point fingers saying “You screwed this up by not talking to me earlier” but say “This was badly executed due to lack of communication”. Sometimes when your team is spread all over the world it’s extremely difficult to do this kind of project retrospective – time difference and gathering everyone on the same page is hard. JustProto’s collaborative features come in handy in this time of need:

Multiple Collaborators,
Real-Time Collaboration,
Chat,
Project Preview with just One Link,
Live Preview.

How it works?

Each JustProto account have an Administrator/Owner, who can grant access to others – The Collaborators. Each Collaborator gets his unique login and password to login to the project at a certain time. Using nothing else but computer with Internet access everyone edit the same project at the same time and everyone see all changes in the real time (that’s the Real-Time Collaboration).Kinda like on Google Docs while editing the same spreadsheet or word document.

Each person choses note, tag or pin color they like and that’s that – by editing its text Collaborators – The Team add their point of view on a closed project. What is important – everyone can talk on a project Chat. Smart history will save all the conversations. This way everyone’s up to date even if the Internet connection dies: Chat history and current version of the retrospective is saved and always available online.

Any person who is not on the project team but gets the Preview Link will see the retrospective project. Let’s say your boss is not one of your project team but you’d like him to know the results of the retrospective – send him a Preview Link and that’s that!

What’s even more fun and handy and cool – if a person who get the Preview Link will open it while you and your team edit the notes, they will see everything in the real time too thanks to Realtime Preview! How the project retrospective can all look like? See here.

This example shows that you don’t ALWAYS need to stick to the tool’s purpose. Don’t be limited, try thinking of other ways you can use the tools you like : ) What it also shows is the fact that wireframing tool can be helpful not only while design happen – it can also become pretty useful after the project is done. Remember that the tool is just a hammer. You don’t need to see nails everywhere.

Four Ways Of Making Your Wireframing Job Easier!

Is it even possible? Well… YES! We did a lot of listening and thinking lately and now we can proudly present four new features that will make your job easier and faster! So, let’s cut the chit-chat.

Feature One – Context-Sensitive Menu and the Properties Tab

After years of using non-web-based prototyping tools such as Axure, I am accustomed to right-clicking on elements and this is one area that unfortunately the limitations of the medium created some difficulty – right clicks within Chrome, for example, result in the Chrome popup window rather than any context-sensitive menus for JustProto itself. It wouldn’t be fair to criticism JustProto for this, however, as it’s a limitation that applies to all web-applications but I felt that because the interface is just so, well, slick, I kept forgetting that it was a web-app at all. – John Clark wrote reviewing JustProto.We took his words very seriously and decided to make a change. After all, people are creatures of habit ;) That is why, from now on, right clicking on the workbench or elements will show a brand new context-sensitive menu!

Also, when you click on any of the elements, the properties tab on the right will show up automatically. Small but significant improvement – saves two clicks before changing the element’s properties. :)

Feature Two – Grouping

You build this amazing wireframe, there’s a gallery there with 10 pictures. After you set it up, when everything’s ready, you need to resize the images to fit 4 new ones. And now what? Resize of all elements is long and can set you back. Resize one and then delete the rest and copy/paste? I don’t think so! From now on, the problem is gone. Grouping option just arrived to the scene! :) Select elements you need, group them and then resize and move everything the way you need it and how you like it. You can find the Group/Ungroup Options in the new Context-Sensitive Menu.

Feature Three – Fade To Gray

If you want to keep focused on the functionalities of the project and not on its outlook this is The Feature for you! It sometimes happens with the clients – showing them the wireframe is one endless series of questions like: “Why this button is light orange, it should be big and screaming red, and this blue line should be two pixels to the left…” And all the UX stuff is non-existing. Crashing into User Experience Iceberg happens a lot – see presentation by Trevor Van Gorp. Fade To Gray lets you… well… fade to gray everything that takes the attention away from UX and interactions of the wireframe.

Feature Four – Border Radius and Shadow

We added two new properties to the properties tab – Border Radius and Shadow. From now on, if you need shadow and rounded edges in your wireframe’s elements – no problem! Just select the element, set up shadow and border radius you want and need ET VOILA!

Also, a little tip: thanks to border radius you can now add a new shape to the wireframe – circle. Just play with the properties :)

We hope new features will help you make your work even easier and faster than before :) To try out new the new stuff login to your account or create new one.

New and improved Text Editor now in JustProto!

As part of a new JustProto version, we improved the text editor. Next to standard formatting options now you have available a few new ones. What options exactly? Take a look at the picture. Below the image, you’ll find a brief description of each new option.

Paste as plain text – this option helps you when when you want to add a tex full of links – without those links. While using previous editor you had to remove all links manually and that took some time. Now just select the Paste as plain text option and paste your linked text there – after you confirm all links will be automatically removed. Simpler and faster, right? :)

Paste – sometimes you need to paste the text with links. To do so just click on Paste, copy the text there, confirm et voila! :)

Find – sometimes it happens that the text you write is very long and you want to find one exact word in it. To find it faster use Find and type your chosen word there. It’ll be highlited in the editor window.

Find and replace – this option lets you to find an exact word and replace it with some other word chosen by you.

Clear formatting – when you highlight formated text and click this option all the formatting will be removed and set do default.

Add / remove link – this option gives you the chance to link a piece of text to another webpage somewhere on the web. Previous text editor didn’t have such an option – you had to add another text block to link it as the whole text was one big link. Now you can choose a certain part of the text and link it. Or unlink it using the Remove link option..

Select special character – gives you all kinds of special characters that you can add to your text: accents, umlauts or fractions.

Login to JustProto and check out new options!

Chat or refining communication once again.

Soon JustProto’s getting new feature – chat:)

Thanks to chat all collaborators will have the chance to talk over the project in JustProto without using any other chatlike solutions. Chat history will be saved in JustProto so users gain access to conversations – even if they go out of town – directly in the web browser. Thanks to Chat option new users and clients will also have the chance to follow older conversations to check what’s going on with the project. Pretty cool, isn’t it? ;)

Prototype your world using JustProto!

Wireframe Madness! App Tourney — Round 4

JustProto wins 4th round of the Wireframe Madness App Tourney!

Why to use JustProto? (according to the tournament results)

Customize interface with company logo
Auto save
Nice set of social icons, iab standard ads, and iphone/ipad/android tools
Collaboration and co-edit ability
Allows Components page templates
Simple prototyping ability
Rulers and grid with pixel increments
Easy edit of size, shape, color, border, etc of any item through properties tab

Wish us luck in next rounds! ;)

See the Tourney.

Lock it! New feature allowing locking and unlocking elements.

How many times were you annoyed by the fact your perfectly placed elements moved accidentally? Or the cat sat on the keyboard and your work just went to hell? If that made you “go bananas” – here’s the solution: we present new
JustProto element property – Lock/Unlock!

From now on you can block certain elements using the Lock/Unlock option in the top bar over your workbench.

Blocked elements can’t be added to selection or moved. If you press delete or want to cut blocked elements you’ll be asked for confirmation. You can still copy blocked elements – all the properties will remain the same for both elements, except the copy won’t be blocked.

Every blocked element will have a tooltip with the name of the element and a small padlock. You may find it useful, especially while making more complex prototypes.

Try it on your prototypes!

Building strategy while designing

IDEO is one of the largest and most important American design and consulting companies. Starting from the industrial design and interaction design (one of the founders was Bill Modgidge) IDEO has extended its consulting services and fell under strategic competence of consulting companies like McKinsey.

What differs IDEO from the others is approach based on using the same tools while designing products, such as user’s observation,analysis of use context, prototyping and iterative process for developing business strategy and marketing.
How design thinking can help building strategy?

Typical tools for strategists such as Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides don’t favor creativity and good communication (as we know, PowerPoint is an evil ;) – seriously, it was responsible for the disaster of the space shuttle Columbia and its use has been banned by NASA.) You can’t properly rethink the whole project if it’s vision is contained in short passwords. PowerPoint slides are boring, and words can be understood differently. Strategy formulated and presented in this way, is trapped in ambiguous abstractions, difficult to clarify and evaluate.

According to IDEO, preparing strategic prototypes is much better solution. Prototype is not the right project, but it is only the presentation of vision engaging emotions and imagination (built to think). The human mind needs to confront some real object or a story to develop an idea and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Prototype can be a mockup of the product, it also can be a comic strip or film, which shows the use of the service in narrative form. An example of such prototype is concept presentation of future web browser Aurora, prepared by Adaptive Path, another company which integrates designing with strategic consulting.

In his article “Strategy by Design” the head of IDEO, Tim Brow, outlines the elements of creating a strategy. At the beginning: hit the Streets. This process of creating a strategy needs to be “human-centered”. To gather interesting insights it’s important to spend some time with consumers, watching their behaviors, personally test the products and services, get know the „user-experience” on which we can often build the whole strategy.

The next step is prototyping:

Design thinking is by nature a process of prototyping. When you are on a promising idea, build it. The prototype is usually a drawing, model, or a video describing the product, system or service. We build these models very fast, they are strict and not very elegant, but they work. The aim is not to create approximations of the finished product, or process, the aim is to gather feedback that will help us resolve the problem. In a sense, we build to think.

When you start rapidly prototype, you begin to build a strategy. Doing this at very beginning of the cycle of innovation, allows you to release the most precious things in your organization: human intuition. When you sit down with team of experienced employees and show them prototypes of products and services that you want to implement within two years, you will learn whether they have an intuitive feeling that you are going in the right direction. It is enlightening trial-and-error method: Observe the world, pattern recognition and behavior, generate ideas, collect feedback, repeat the process and improve project until you are going to be ready to put product on the market.

Prototype tells the story. Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluation process – it generates feedback, which allows you to put the amendments on the fly – and is the process of telling stories. This is the way of visual presentation and experiencing every strategy. – Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO.

JustProto would like to send special thanks to Maciej Lipiec, who gave authorization for publishing this article. You can find original version of this post written by Maciej on his User Experience Blog – http://uxdesign.pl/

Let’s communicate! Part 1

It’s not a secret that our business success highly depends on our communication skills.

Paradoxically, many companies forgot to put those skills on the top of training list. How many project didn’t start because of our account manager / sales representative communication impotence? Probably we won’t ever now (or statistics are so dramatic, that’s better not to know them ). What’s the most important, and how the communication process goes? What we should pay biggest attention to? Who is more communicative – women or men, what are differences between their skills ?

Below, I will try to shed some light on a burning question of communication between company and it’s client, by giving some practical tips and advice.

7 seconds

We sit in a restaurant, drinking nice coffee, waiting for an appointment with client. Finally, we see him coming through restaurant’s doors. We establish an eye contact, and it’s about to shake hands.

This is a time-twinkle, quick and unnoticed. What can happen during this 7 sec time period? You may say “not much”. Researchers from New York University proved that people make eleven decisions about us in the first seven seconds of contact, they estimate our:

education level,
economic level,
perceived creditability and believability,
trustworthiness,
level of sophistication,
sexual identification,
level of success,
political background,
religious background,
ethnic background and
social and professional desirability.

Shocked? Fortunately or unfortunately, perception is everything! First impression is an instinct, fully natural reaction, which can’t be switched off. From verbal and non-verbal signs we get picture strongly colored with emotions which remains and affect on our behaviour in the future.

If we came off badly, nothing is lost – the way we communicate also contributes to the first impression. Let’s make communication happen, and make first (good) impression long lasting one.

The first impression should be consistent with a further course of our conversation.Consistency of the two phases provides itself-confidence. You want the first seven seconds of contact to be positive. Those seven seconds may change the rest of your life, even business one.

In second part you will find few useful hints about conducting successful conversations with client.

Everything is designed

Recently, after Tall Ship Races and famous Heineken Open’er Festival, Gdynia opened city for second edition of Gdynia DesignDays.

The idea of this event was to integrate artists from countries over Baltic Sea, and give them opportunity to present their art-work on exhibitions or sell them in specially arranged containers. You could see there strange and beautiful projects, modern, known and unknown products and innovative items or furniture.

Beside exhibitions, many open conferences and workshops took place. One of them was lecture about open – plan offices issue, given by Małgorzata Grzyb, well-experienced designer and manager at Martel’s planning office. Quick lecture turned into heated dispute where debaters accused open – plan offices to be unsuccessful relict. Małgorzata emphasized their importance in improving the efficiency of every office worker.

What’s all about?

“(…)Open plan is the generic term used in architectural and interior design for any floor plan which makes use of large, open spaces and minimizes the use of small, enclosed rooms such as private offices in which there are no defined property boundaries such as hedges, fences or walls.” (Wikipedia)

Open spaces have a twisted reputation

“Open – plan office is violating human psyche, which effects with serious health problems” – say Australian researchers.

“(…)In 90 per cent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open – plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover. The high level of noise causes employees to lose concentration, leading to low productivity” – says researcher Dr Vinesh Oommen from the Queensland University of Technology’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation.

Another problem of open spaces is their lack of privacy. Everyone can see what we are doing on the computer at the moment, hear our private phone conversations – this leads workers to depression and insecurity. According to evolution, every human has right to have his own territory – even at work. Employees also fear that their labor and effort, put in work, won’t be noticeable by employer.

From physical side, “working in an open-plan office could contribute to higher blood pressure”, Dr Oommen said, and an increased risk of illnesses as bugs such as the influenza virus were more swiftly passed around.

Any positives?

Open space gives a perfect opportunity to improve communication and information flow, so solving various problems and issues can be faster and more efficient. What’s more, workers form higher level can easily share experience with those who are lower in career hierarchy.

Open – plan offices are conductive for cementing interpersonal relationships or creating own identity above the others (as a leader, coordinator etc.) Individual work is now in background, open space put teamwork on the top. It’s also a good training in working and behaving in large group. Psychology thesis says (mere exposition effect), that the more often we tend to see particular people, the more we like them. Open spaces favors building positive bonds? Yes, but only when one has an opportunity to choose between contacting or avoiding it.

On the another hand, for employer open – plan offices mean lower cost of arranging working place and much more control under employees and their work.

How to arrange working space for web developers?

Agile Development philosophy promotes dividing room into two quarters – one for those who want to work individualy – providing them an ability for privacy – and the other – for those who are working in groups.

Agile also suggests that working in pairs is a perfect working condition for web developers. Employees may initially criticize moving to open – plan office, but after few months they will appreciate benefits of working together.

Teasley Stephanie made a research about putting web developers together (in the experiment researchers use term “radical collocation” ). Teasley proved that this procedure has a good influence on employees efficiency.

“(…) Our study of six teams that experienced radical collocation showed that in this setting they produced remarkable productivity improvements. Although the teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits of having people at hand, both for coordination, problem solving and learning.“(Rapid Software Development Through Team Collocation, Teasley S., Covi L., Krishnan M.S.,Olson J.)

Looking for compromise

Forcing people to work in a team or open – plan office is not good idea, it may result with escaping team or quitting job in general. It’s good to discuss possible removal to open – plan office with every team member. During the discussion we should take into consideration every opinion, fear of our employees and point costs / gainings of such move.

Are open – plan offices better than private, little territories? This is a question which every employer should take under individual consideration. What about working in such open – plan office ? :)

Bibliography:

Let's talk about prototyping

Let’s talk about prototyping

While working as a programmer many times I had to guess what client thinks about. Unfortunately, the specification does not reflect the reality of how the functions should work. This causes lots of problems. First of all, it triggers multiple adjustments, as the customer’s vision is completely different from the vision of the developer.

Fortunately there is a way to improve creating applications and avoid unnecessary (and sometimes time-consuming) amendments. This method is called prototyping.

Prototypes enable showing a vision of how various features and the whole application will look like. They allow the client to set everything as he wants it in the initial phase, and facilitate the subsequent stages of the creation of the site.

I had the opportunity to create a service using the guidelines provided in the prototype. I must admit that supplied the prototype has proved extremely useful and significantly accelerated creation of applications for a simple reason – no unnecessary questions were asked as well as multiple amendments were avoided.

As prototypes are so useful what are the ways of their creation? There are several methods, each radically different from another. Each has some advantages and disadvantages, will take a look at them.

PowerPoint – the use of presentation.

It was one of methods used at our company.

The service sketch is created in an application for creating presentations. It’s strange, but effective. It turns out that a lot of people use this prototyping method.

You can guess the process of creating a prototype in such application looks like. Despite its apparent simplicity and ease of use this method has a significant disadvantage – every time you need to send the resulting file to the client so that they can watch it. Moreover if the prototype needs amendments you must repeat the entire cycle.

Sheet of paper – the traditional way.

IMHO the most funny way to do it. The entire prototype is sketched on a sheet(s) of paper. Do I need to explain how this method seems to be ridiculous for several reasons? The smallest error in the prototype requires recreating it anew. On top of that, sending such a model to a client is quite problem.

Surprisingly Corel used to create paper prototypes, which later were used to test usability. On YouTube you can find a video presenting such a test. I believe that after watching this film there’s no need to mention the deficiencies of such method.

JustProto.com – a new approach to prototyping!

I am proud to introduce on my blog the product in creation of which I had the opportunity to participate. I am talking about justproto.com – tool for online prototyping.

What are the main advantages of our solution? First of all: simplicity. Everything we do is simple because we do not want our users to spend hours learning our tool. Everything has to be intuitive no time lost on getting to know the new environment.

What’s more? Prototypes developed in JustProto are interactive. This means that you can create prototype with dynamic links between the pages.

The online prototype it is available from everywhere, without installing any additional applications.

One of the most important advantages is the creating of a online HTML prototype preview. You simply give your client the link and he will be able to keep track of changes made in the prototype just with refreshing the screen.

If you are interested in prototypes try JustProto now!