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19
Apr 10
The week just passed in a blur of events. We reviewed our prototype, which may be held in a little too much reverence. I see why – we aren’t a technology company, doing things like this looks risky or weird. It might have been better to spin it in music-speak, something like “working out some riffs” or “cutting a 4 track demo” perhaps. Anyway, it needs some changes, and additions, which will mostly be flat photoshop mockups pasted into ‘dumb’ pages I think. It was quite a chunk of work, and I didn’t finish until Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, a volcano erupted and clogged our skies with ash stopping flights. No problem thought I, not going anywhere. I’d ordered a brand new Macbook Pro on Tuesday but a little dealy wasn’t a problem. And then my current laptop went *poof* and properly died. Arrgh! Suddenly the efficencies of mass transit and globalisation becomes quite important.
It’s now Monday evening finishing this post, still no sign of where UPS may actually have my package (maybe Cologne, maybe Shanghai) and tentative signs of flights resuming. Getting work done if fine (ancient G5 tower to the rescue) but I’m a lot less portable. Work is at a very specific desk. Laptops, I realise, are ace.
design — 1 comment
12
Apr 10
So, that was a bit of a gap in weeknotes, my apologies. The weeks before the dev/fort were mostly quiet, like a coiling spring. The 10 days from Good Friday onwards were spent at a remote location in a big house near Inverness with a team of quite exceptional talents doing a mammoth sprint. A two day ideation generated something like 800 postit notes, whittled down to about 60 ‘groups’ and finally a couple dozen priorities. After a day or two exploration on things we knew we’d need (fundamental UI concepts like a timeline, a music player) and generating some data robust enough to hang it all off, we started building. And building.
At the end of the week, exhausted, we had a Thing. And the Thing was really good, exactly what we needed at this point (arguably a bit earlier…) that stands opposed to the glitzy video demos I’d previously completed by myself. They now look very thin indeed. This Thing on the other hand while not perfect by any means is deep, has layers and extracts attention from you in a good way – you gladly hand attention over. I played with it for 10 minutes at the end of the week, it was compelling – I want to spend more time with it and explore more, enjoy more of the artist we built it for. Rough edges aside, that is the response we want to illicit, so I think a success.
Now, sleep.
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26
Mar 10
This week I had a day off across the middle of the week, it was great and I had a haircut. Work either side of the midweek is more calm before the storm, our monster offsite prototyping sprint over Easter.
We want to have layers of data visualisations as additional content or even as interfaces to the mainstreams of content. I’d been putting together examples I liked, and received two glorious books to add to this. Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless Data Flow. Really nice.
A little userflow doc I sketched together straddled 3 pages, almost without thinking I added three dots, centred to the bottom of each, one filled the others in outline. UI style pagination signalling in print – seemed completely natural.
I like it, will use it again. As we use screens for more and more of our reading, it seems entirely reasonable to translate the visual cues from the screen and apply them to ‘legacy formats’ like paper.
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19
Mar 10
I didn’t do a weeknote last week. It got to Friday and I was a blank: weeknote block. Last week we had a big release, the second with an ‘extra feature’ product so I should have plenty to talk about except… except I don’t. Because we didn’t do it. It was a special case, with much more work than usual handled by the artist and their own design agency. We only saw it the day of release and while it wasn’t terrible by any means, it was a bit disappointing. Good album tho, so hey.
This week has been revisiting early work. Recording our process doing a couple of ‘lite’ products with third-parties seemed like a good idea, so I’ve been drawing up wireframes and layout advice for future product teams to shortcut what worked for us.
I’m also revisiting the iconography I quickly put together at the start of the project. We’ve had a little feedback now, and spending a bit longer drawing a better “suite” of icons seems like good time spent ahead of our upcoming dev/fort powered prototype week.
More about that, another time, but I’m quite excited about it.
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08
Mar 10
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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26
Feb 10
Patchy week, far too much time consumed doing tiny, but multiple, changes to a couple of sites. There’s a convoluted approval process for some release-projects here, so progress can be slow and frustrating, even with modern workflows like Basecamp (about which i’ll write about in the future). Between bits of that, I’m making slow but steady progress exploring mobile UX angles of our embryonic ‘digital deluxe’ project, now codenamed Lava. Ongoing…
A site I sketched out a month or so ago is live, the revised EMI.com – this is based on the Basic Maths wordpress theme, with some tweaks and custom plugins. For such a big name, it’s quite a pared down site, basically a release blog, artist roster, press releases, that kind of thing.
Having tried to be a flashy ‘music destination’ before without success this makes more sense. Fans head directly to the artist or fansites via search engines. Music discovery happens is many other ways, but (almost) never off a label site, especially a ‘parent’ label covering an incredibly diverse set of sub-brands. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
One last note, the lovely guys at DUB need a great freelance design/ux person to continue some initial redesign work I’d done with them. If you have the relevant skills and sparkle head over and present your wares.
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20
Feb 10
Wow, week flew by and it’s a saturday weeknote.
Good stuff done: a couple of reskinned mockups of our product concept for a couple of rock legends.
Let me explain in english. I built a mockup of a *potential* future product in After Effects. Not having gone through a proper design and prototyping process, it’s an impression of a product rather than anything real. Thing is, it looks nice so we use it to show people (artist management usually) the vision and get them to sign up to a shinier, digitally immersive future.
Luckily, After Effects lets me do a quick reskin per artist fairly quickly now. It’s not progressing the product design, but it is building momentum with People Who Matter, which in turn means we’ll get to build deeper, better products when the time comes.
I’ve started on really working out a mobile version of the above now too, whereas before “mobile” was a couple of boxes and arrows on a diagram, it’ll be nice to see what really fits, what needs folding, and what needs reworking completely. I may be some time.
I also managed to get a few minutes to play with iTunes LP and some HTML5 experiments. The people at ituneslp.net have some great guidance on getting the most of of this platform, usually not using Tunekit and expose a couple of undocumented features like sampling the waveform of the playing audio. I couldn’t get any processing.js to work but that’s more likely my incompetence rather than a major technical hurdle. I did get an opensource asteroids javascript+canvas game to work while playing a suitably themed song, which is immediately 10x more fun than any real iTunes LPs!
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12
Feb 10
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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03
Feb 10
As this week passes it’s apex I’ve just about run out of room for manoeuvre on this iteration of the design. I’ve got some good things going, which we will probably stick with and some things that haven’t worked too well. Luckily some of these elements (UI bits for content manipulation tools) are things I’ve been leaving very basic, so am keen to go deeper on those anyway – a promising idea presented itself while walking the dog no less.
Basic layouts and navigation ideas have begun to blossom into something with a solid basis (referencing the Eamse’s Powers of 10 and Zooming User Interfaces) – implementation needs improving, but there’s definitely something there. Plus I’ve hopefully set the tone of a product that has less hoops to jump through and more cake. (Achievements and rewards vs direction and requests).
All that said, the next run needs to progress quicker and feel much more immersive while remaining, you know, buildable at some point.
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29
Jan 10
Another jam packed week, but quite busy so this will be shorter than usual.
Presented first draft of the design I’ve been working on, wireframes quickly thrown into a deck and a 1 minute UI ‘visual sketch’ which hopefully got across some of the more experiential elements I was hoping to include.
Obviously it’s quite exciting to present new work, but this was tempered with the reality that this is a first draft and it felt it. Response was muted. Clearly there is more work to be done. Things need exploring more, some things need to be made simpler. Some need to go. We’ll be bashing out details this afternoon to take another run at it for a second draft.
During the lull of midweek I popped along to the Toy Fair up the road at Olympia. It was a bit depressing really. I’d previously first visited about 15 years ago, and a few times since, but this seemed to have had the life sucked out of it. No videogames, or interactive things really. Very much ‘old’ toys and very many of those with licensed brands. This year: Toy Story 3, Iron Man 2 the big properties. All a bit lifeless. All a bit constrained by already professionally imagined worlds.
And then there was the launch of the iPad. Literally a blank canvas: lovely, exciting, endless new possibilities. Not least, possibilities for toys. Games, drawing, music, PLAY – all these things should shine on the iPad. I literally cannot wait and have downloaded the iphone SDK to fiddle, maybe even learn some basic app programming skills.