After more than a decade, one of my longest clients, the Lancaster Education Foundation, is moving into WordPress. That means the staff members can now update the site themselves.

I actually made the proposal to use WordPress to manage their contents a few years ago, but they hesitated to do so. Recently they hired a new, young director and she’s quite web savvy. Not only we migrated the content over, we also integrated the blog so she could use the platform to communicate.

The template is based on Twenty Twelve, which looks almost the same as my original design a few years ago, with many details polished and modified. Sass is such a useful tool for changing and compressing CSS without touching the default style.

My biggest accomplishment for this project is to finally handing the key over to the owner for updates.

For the second project of my Advanced Web Design class, I am going to build a simple web app that target jazz aficionados, fans or anyone who appreciates jazz music. The concept is to challenge the player to see if he could recognize a tune in ten second.

The functionality is straightforward. A player taps on the clip to play the music than guesses the name of the tune and who played it. Then he could tap on the answer button to check if his guess is correct. To play another tune, he simply taps on the button that would load up another clip. The game could also be played more than one player. Everyone can make his own guess.

Even though the class project only required a prototype, I am going to build out the app using jQuery Mobile framework. To make the app fun and easy to use, I am keep the interface very simple. There will only be three components: the audio clip, an answer button and a reload button. The audio clips will be loaded randomly; therefore; I would need a simple PHP script and text file to store the data. Another approach would be to use WordPress as a backend management, but that might be unnecessary for the purpose of this project. I am, however, considering developing this concept further and making it into an app that could be placed on Apple or Android app store.

As for the name, I am calling it “Jazzapp.”

Cùng lúc Nguyên Khang, Đức Tuấn và Quang Dũng đã ra mắt album của ba nhạc sĩ. Nguyên Khang hát dòng nhạc Anh Bằng qua Trái Tim Ngoan. Đức Tuấn hát tình khúc Trần Thái Nguyên qua Bài Tình Ca Đêm. Còn Quang Dũng thì hát Tình Ca Phạm Duy.

Trong ba, phần hòa âm nổi bật nhất là CD Quang Dung. Về chất giọng thì Quang Dũng vẫn ấm và đẹp. Tuy nhiên Quang Dũng đã không còn chất lôi cuốn như trước. Vả lại Quang Dũng cũng chẳng đổi mới cách hát nên nghe cũng chẳng gì gợi được sự chú ý. Trong mười tình ca, Quang Dũng chỉ đổi phong cách một lần trong “Đố Ai” vì bài này có mang âm hưởng dân ca.

Phần hòa âm trong Bài Tình Ca Đêm tuy không dở nhưng cũng không nổi trội. Khuyết điểm lớn nhất là chẳng có gì ăn khớp. Đường ai nấy đi, lời và nhạc không quyện vào nhau. Tuy Đức Tuấn đã giảm đi nét điệu khá nhiều, lối hát của Đức Tuấn vẫn không êm tai. Đức Tuấn giường như đã tập trung hết tất cả kỹ thuật chỉ để được hát một cách tự do và trôi chảy nhưng cách hát của Đức Tuấn vẫn còn bị gò bó.

Khác với Đức Tuấn và Quang Dũng, Nguyên Khang hát rất tự nhiên và lối phát âm không làm người nghe khó chịu. Tuy nhiên phần hòa âm của các nhạc sĩ Asia thì chán mòn. Nghe dòng nhạc Anh Bằng qua lối hòa âm của Trúc Hồ, Sỹ Đan và Vũ Tuấn Đức như xem phim Groundhog Day. Dường như “Mai Tôi Đi” chẳng bao giờ ra đi; “Anh Còn Nợ Em” chẳng bao giờ trả hết; và “Anh Còn Yêu Em” chẳng bao giờ chấm dứt. Trong album, chỉ có “Dù Nắng Có Mong Manh” là mới một tí nhờ Mai Thanh Sơn đưa vào vài note blues dương cầm.

As we were leaving the mall, I put Dan’s jacket on for him and my wife put on Dao’s. As we headed toward the door, she asked me where’s her jacket than complained, “Where am I on the list? Am I even on the list anymore?” I replied, “Of course you’re on the list. You’re always on my ‘to-do’ list.”

New York Times‘ Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele report:

The Web, it should be said, is still a marvelous place for public debate. But when it comes to reading and understanding news stories online — like this one, for example — the medium can have a surprisingly potent effect on the message. Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place.

Shutting down the comment section makes this site much less dramatic.

These past few weeks, my typical day goes something like this: Get up. Take Cu Dan to grandma. Go to work. Go to class until 7 PM. Go home. Put Dan to bed. Take a bath. Play with Dao for a bit. Jump back on the laptop around 10 PM until 2 or 3 in the morning.

Between work, school and freelance projects, I have been living and breathing in WordPress. All of a sudden, I am getting all kind of WordPress inquiries. I am going to be extremely busy in the next few weeks as well.

The following verbatim notes are from Building Mobile Experiences by Frank Bentley and Edward Barrett.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The mobile device, more than any other recent invention, is drastically changing the ways in which we interact with each other and with our cities.

[A] mobile experience is everything that happens to a person once they learn about a new application.

The mobile phone is the ideal platform for rich, contextual experiences.

Chapter 2: The User-Centered Design Process Applied to Mobile

Context sensing. Media capture. Social connecting. The mobile experience is defined by these uniques and fluid integrated process.

A powerfully useful mobile device allows a person to take advantage of the necessary and sufficient elements of that physically situated experience: location, time, visual and auditory characteristics, all that is apparent to our sensory apparatus—as well as data of physical states not immediately apprehensible.

[A] powerfully useful application will connect you to other people to share facets of a contextually embedded experience—a real-time, instantaneous connected, or lagged, asynchronous interactions depending on the context.

The mobile user-centered design process builds from real-world observation and experience to ideation, design, build and test.

Design Methods: Good design for mobile services is critical to the ultimate usability of the final solution.

Rapid Prototyping: Quickly creating functional prototypes to test the new experience in the world is a key way that we can quickly identify which are likely to be successful in real-world use.

Chapter 3: Discovering What to Build

General Research: How does one get from a space of interest to a list of potential solutions?

Designing from observations of joy and celebration can create new concepts that are fun to build off of the best of our interactions with the world.

Logging interactions and communication can help researchers to better understand current behavior and use these findings to inspire new solutions that are tied to real users’ lives.

Other research includes: home tour/field visits, task analysis, semi-structured interviews, recruiting users, conducting research, affinity analysis and discount methods.

Chapter 4: Rapid Interactive Prototyping

Because we want to quickly evaluate a new experience, our prototypes tend to be made rapidly to test a specific aspect of a concept with users.

Build the experience, not the technology: Because early prototypes are often focus on answering research questions about how a new system will fit into the lives of our participants, the prototypes that we build are often not engineered in the way that a commercial offerring would be.

Build it sturdy (enough) means avoiding the use of new or untested technology at this stage of research unless it is critical to the research questions that need to be answered.

The most important part of building and testing a rapid prototype of a mobile system is to get out of the lab and into the world.

Chapter 5: Using Specific Mobile Technologies

Understanding technology constraints is a critical step in the mobile design process. Often, designers who come from nontechnical backgrounds do not know the full implications of some of their design choices. When this occurs, the end-user experience frequently suffers.

Chapter 6: Mobile Interaction Design

Modeling: A high-level concept model is often the first step of a new mobile design, long before anything begins to be committed to a screen.

The main objective of the modeling is to help the designer think about the goals of the system in new ways, so completing multiple conceptual models can often help in understanding the full scope of a new concept.

Structure and Flow: User flows demonstrate users’ possible movements through time: how they initiate a process, how they complete it, and what path they take.

Interface Design Principles: The ultimate goal of any interaction design project is to make something that is usable for a wide variety of potential users.

Chapter 7: Usability Evaluation

Mobile usability is more than just the ability to navigate from screen to screen and understand the prompts, icons, and flow of an application.

If a user cannot get the information she needs in the ten or twenty seconds she has while waiting for a bus or a train, your system might not be the first one she turns to. Or if the phone keeps going to sleep while a user is in the middle of another task such as cooking, he might not have a clean hand to wake it back up and find the next step in the recipe.

Chapter 8: Field Testing

Four basic criteria for testing prototypes:

1. Recruit social groups (people who already know each other) when testing social social technologies instead of asking strangers to act as if they know each other.
2. Put the technology in the field: ask people to take it home, to work, and all of the places in between and use it as they would if they were not in a study.
3. Make sure the participant needs to carry only one mobile device.
4. Select data collection techniques that allow us to come as close as possible to “being there.”

Chapter 9: Distributing Mobile Applications: Putting It All Together

Beta Releases: Before an application is released to potential audience of millions of users through an app store, it is usually beneficial to run a trial in some small scale.

A beta release is often intended to identify any final major bugs in the system with the help of a reasonable number of new users or to collect usage data on a late version of a system to help plan for scaling the final solution.

Scalability: Design for scalability needs to be an early part of the system design.

Instrumentation can help to discover features that are the most popular, discover where paths through the application are not optimal for tasks that users are performing most frequently, and identifying areas that can be improved or might need better prompts or labels.

Upgrades: Once an application is launched, it often needs to be maintained and updated. As new releases are made, users often face the choice of upgrading or not. In most cases, old versions need to be supported indefinitely as many users choose not to upgrade.

Chapter 10: Conclusion

Reaching thousands or millions of users and affecting the way they live their lives and interact with the people and places that are most important to them can be the greatest reward for traveling down this convoluted path of building a mobile experience.

Forewarn, do not watch this clip if you have a light heart. It’s a video clip of a woman beating a toddler senselessly. The kid looks about the same age as my baby boy. How could a kid that young could tick off a woman that much is way beyond my comprehension. My heart simply stops to such human-less behavior. Kids at his age deserves loving and caring, not beating.

Yesterday Dao pooped and pointed me to the toilet, “Daddy, daddy, look! They are floating just like boats. Sailing boats in the deep far sea.” I was like, “Wow son. That’s some really poetic description of your poop.”

We were at my sister-in-law’s house and Dao wanted to watch TV. I told him, “You have to ask bac (uncle) Ky because it’s his house.” He responded, “No, it’s not bac Ky’s house. It’s bac (aunt) Tram’s house.” I couldn’t agree more.

Lil Dan started baby talk as well. The other day he was playing with my iPhone 5. He kept pushing the home button and activated Siri. Then he said something that made Siri responded, “I don’t know what you mean.” Can’t blame Siri though.

One of the nice things about have kids is that I would never run out of blogging materials. A conversation with them would spark a blog post. I wish I have more time to write down all the hilarious things they do and say.

Last night at Refresh DC event, some of the team members who are responsible for the redesign of USA Today online shared their design, development and implementation process. With the relaunch their goal is to set the industry-wide benchmark for online news. They moved completely away from the heavy-ad trend to focus on the users. They ditched web site and gear toward web app.

They went through many revisions to incorporate more video, media and gallery into the design. They wanted to offer a much richer experience for the users, especially for tablet readers. The relaunch was striking in design, but facing negative criticisms. The users who come to USA Today don’t want rich media, gallery or large photos. They just want to read the content. The team is now working on the next release to focus on creating a true reading experience.

Some of the front-end technical challenges they presented were also useful. I am a bit surprised that they are not using any preprocessor to manage CSS. Given that they are using many new elements of CSS3 animation, a preprocessor would help them tremendously with just vendor prefixes. One of the reasons they stay away from using preprocessor was that they don’t want to produce too much nested selectors. I disagree completely because they don’t have to create nested selectors if they don’t want to. A preprocessor like Sass doesn’t make them do anything they don’t want to.