Neuromanticsnot quite writing, not quite nothing

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.

Tweet this!

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.

Tweet this!

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.

Tweet this!

(Sitting here typing in my 10 year old Razorfish – Las Vegas ‘99 T-shirt, my how little things have changed)

Pummeling possible interfaces into life is the fun part. The end of last week and most of this I’ve been imagining a couple of directions to explore that lets us accommodate all sorts of content possibilities for premium music products. Awesome you might think, but fiddlier than you’d expect.

When the basics are understood, I like to sketch up things really roughly on screen – scanned scribbles, generic iconography and the odd touch to give things life. For experiences that are inherently interactive (rather than, say presentational or informational) It often makes sense to throw these together into something clickable in flash, just to get the feel of the piece. It’s a bit of a straw-man in many respects – the trick is to keep everything extremely disposable, so no one gets attached to any execution at this stage.

There should be a roughly skinned straw-prototype to click around by the end of this week for the first product. I expect it full of holes and glue, but ideal to rip up and refine, rinse and repeat.

Also this week, I finally got round to trying the iPhone scrabble Words With Friends. It is good, the ‘barely playing’ pacing (if you want) is very interesting. It is also very good fun. Recommended.

Tweet this!

Good start to the week, PlinkArt won the Education/Reference category in the Android Developer Competition, with a well deserved $100,000 prize! Nice work chaps!

The app is now available outside of the weird restrictions of the competition now – grab it off the Android Marketplace for free. I understand it will be available for other mobile platforms at some point too.

This week I started Project Tuneful too which I think I can safely (ie. vaguely) describe as a hybrid media/service/UX design job for a record company. After getting immersed in the brief it’s now becoming clear it is going to be quite hard. That’s good, time for a bit of a stretch I reckon.

Most importantly, it’s going to be very real. Actual product on the shelves, early next year. Slightly terrifying. One other thing, a startup I did a little design for in May and STILL hasn’t paid is also integrated into the project – should be an interesting meeting.

Tweet this!

Awaiting formal timing and pricing from Danny for Project Bookworm, I’ve made a start on the design because I think I might get a bit busy.

At least that was the plan. Meeting the Project Tuneful client last week was very positive, they seem to have a plan to make buying access to additional content and experiences desirable. It should run across a collection of services, mostly third-party to begin with, and needs a unified, brilliant interface to delight these premium-level customers. I start next week, so in London more often than recently.

On another, er, note I bought a new toy I’m hoping to use in anger for the first time on this next gig. A smart pen, which might just have become a mature technology finally – I remember seeing one at Jones’ place in Helsinki and that was years ago. But then again, that was a tiny slice of nordic future (I seem to remember a Roomba there too!) so these things take time.

Tweet this!

(they’re all at it, so I’m going to try it…)

Back from @mik3yb’s stag and barely able to think, I completed the last changes to some

reworking of admin interface screens of the Project Mango user research platform and delivered layered photoshop files. A difficult project by being rearranging existing webUI parts into a more usable whole without starting from fundamentals.

Project Bookworm remains about to start, basic outline wireframe and scope being more tightly defined to stop feature creep. To work well, it should be as simple as possible I feel. Extra fluff would be best added when the destination has been proven.

Project Tuneful is working out as UX for a digital boxset prototype, framework and live job. It remains elusive in the background – we shall see.

Which means ducking out of another gig, partly because it was going to be struggle to fit in quality time for the first sub-project and partly because it wasn’t quite pushing my buttons. The scope seems limited at this point, so meaningful changes would be unlikely, more deckchair rearranging.

On the horizon, voting in the Android Developer Competition ends next week – download and vote for Plink Art - it’s brilliant.

Tweet this!