Neuromanticsnot quite writing, not quite nothing

A good week, i think, but this is late posted. Product dev churns onwards, I’m up to other projects too so those took priority this week a bit.

It’s simple wireframing of standardised ‘bricks’ (chunks of content, navigation elements, components, plugins, widgets, whatever) to use on a wide range of websites built using Wordpress. Not dull exactly, but just stuff that needs doing.

On Thursday I attended the Music 4.5 conference, which was a mashup of music biz and tech startups. Full coverage here. It was really good, decent line up and well organised. Techcrunch had a Pitch segment there, which was interesting.

One startup in particular caught my eye, Decibel who are aiming to create a metadata service, offering much more depth than the standard Gracenote artist/genre/year/album dataset. A big undertaking, but properly researched, maintained and API’d could be extremely useful to build advanced discovery services and connective tissue for music content.

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Not the usual weeknote this week, seeing as I’ve only been able to do a couple of days of work. Monday was a hospital visit to check up following my heart valve replacement at the end of 2008. All is good, with dramatic remodeling of my heart so far resulting in a halving of the size of my distorted right ventricle. So yay that.

Wednesday and thursday not so great, some noro-type stomach bug I guess – short but unpleasant, hey ho.

So inbetween those things I’ve been looking at the amazing work and possibilities opened up for us on our future products by Processing.js which by all accounts is a marvel. More here http://processingjs.org

Considering we want to mash up high-end music experiences with all sorts of metadata, this might be a very tasty visual layer to add a degree of richness. Plus being completely open we can have a kind of developer API to all our products right off the bat. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Hoping next week is a bit more normal – I’m actually in London overnight Thursday 18th too, so it might be nice to catch up with some people in the hoxton ‘hood.

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It’s been a good week so far, if busy and a little fragmented. I’m due to be getting a chunky bit of design completed describing the main elements of the project I’m working on. I did a sprint last week to so an applied example to a specific product, now I’m wireframing up a generic “enhanced” product with very broad visual cues of how it could be presented. I don’t think we’re going to be massively tough enforcing the presentation layer but it’s good to have a strong vanilla framework to fall back on in cases where time or resources get squeezed.

We have a product suite which this stuff falls into the top end of, so another little task is to better define visual language across this suite – product labels that can describe the scope and depth of the experience while feeling solid when presented together, each one dipping into a bag of icons describing specific features. This is primarily a graphics job, and I’m probably not the best person to do it but do need to get an hour to write the brief.

Also on my plate is a much pared down homepage for the main company site, which isn’t as big a deal as you may imagine. What we end up doing with it may surprise a few people by it’s simplicity but it makes sense. And it will be very very clean as I’m hoping to base it on the excellent Basic Maths theme by Khoi Vinh which should also condense development time significantly.

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First week back at work and I’m snowed in, along with what sounds like half the country. Still, it cuts down on meetings and focus is going to be priceless this week. My orderly scheme of Think – Plan – Do has been upended by needs of the business, so rather than orderly functional workings flowing into wireframes and then into a few polished screens I’m working in a much more finished level, revisiting and iterating as I go as we need to show some solid stuff next week in LA.

Part of me hates doing things this way round, but the other half really likes diving in, getting my hands dirty with some pixels. Luckily I had a good few weeks to let the idea really percolate in my brain, so I’m not stumped and changing things round is quick. It’ll come out looking good, and this first iteration as a whole might need lots changing before we take a run at a full production project. However, the benefit of everyone involved being able to finally see something long talked about is clear – excitement, it builds!

The wider economy must be warming up, so I’ve had to update my linkedin profile with a job title – it’s a contract but extremely full-time right now. Future gigs are always considered, but that’ll be later in the year thanks.

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Last weeks note didn’t get done, too busy, bad pod. Must make time for the weeknote. So this will be a double issue, much like the TV Times you get for the holidays, but with less classic movies.

My clickable flash ‘thing’ has gone over well, so I’ve gone into detailed wireframes around clever login mechanisms. Clever in that we’re trying to be frictionless so we have to work a bit harder on our end, utilising Facebook connect as our first choice, falling back to openID and ‘classic’ email/passwords.

I’d used FB as a login feature on Tioti.com (2007) when it was still a neat, new way of handling that. We used a FB app, but the process remains similar – it’s seamless and secure for the user (we don’t hold a password) while we can use their social graph to improve the experience.

I’ve been working up much prettier user interface elements now that features are settling down too, so things are starting to pick up a bit of gloss, which is painstaking but always enjoyable.

This sub-project will be live Jan 24th, and my portion is almost over. The next chunk technically should have been first, it being the “lofty grand vision” but product release schedules have to be navigated.  Plus, jumping in and doing a semi-skimmed implementation has been instructive both to the parameters of the wider project as well as the realities within the business.

It’ll be a busy, but very exciting new year I think.

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