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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Four basic criteria for testing prototypes:
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.
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.
Mới bước chân vô nhà thì thằng anh mách, “Daddy daddy, em cắn cu Đạo.”
Em Đán hai bữa nay sốt rất cao nên tôi nghỉ làm ở nhà với nó. Hôm nay thấy nó không còn sốt nữa nên dắt nó ra mall chơi. Dạo này tiền đi xe lửa lên đến $8 cho hai người. Lúc trước đi với thằng Đạo chỉ có $5.
Thấy thằng Đán nó cũng thích nên cũng đi. Nhưng rồi nó cứ muốn đi mãi. Thấy xe lửa chạy nó từ trong playground chạy theo sau chân không. Thấy cũng tội nghiệp. Nhờ vậy nên lúc trưa chơi hơn nữa bát chicken noodle soup rồi một bình sữa lớn.
Khoái nhất thằng Đán là cái háo ăn của nó nhưng ngại đi buffet là gì mấy em waitress cứ địa nó hoài. Mấy em nóng ruộc vì cu Đán ăn hơi bị cẩu thả. Con nít mà làm sao tránh được.
Aaron Gilbreath writes:
[T]he more I listened to Davis’s music, the more his approach started to influence my writing style. His solos in “Diane” and “It Could Happen to You” show how measured, uncluttered phrasing increases rather than decreases the impact. Unlike so much fat-cat prose, Davis’s solos didn’t divert from their emotional center by wowing the audience with speed and facility. With less distraction, the force of his music landed more squarely on me.
While Gilbreath writes with Miles, I design with Miles.
Thằng con trai lớn dạo này nói được 60% tiếng Việt. Hôm qua nó khoe ở trường nó “build puzzle all by Đạo self. Đạo hông need help.” Còn đường rầy xe lửa thì “đi up, đi xuống, đi up đi xuống.” Lúc đi tắm nó nói cái bông sen bắn lên như “fountain.” Tôi hỏi nó “Fountain tiếng Việt là gì?” Nó trả lời, “Waterfall.”
Mấy bửa nay cu Đán mọc răng cùng nên suốt rất cao. Hôm nay ở nhà với nó thấy nó ăn, uống, phá như thường. Nhiệt độ thì cũng giảm. Đang như trưa say sưa. Chúc nửa dậy đưa ổng đi chơi.
Hôm qua lúc thay đồ cho cu Đạo thấy nó ốm nhôm nên tôi nói, “Con nhìn giống Phi Châu quá.” Nó trả lời, “No, you are trâu.” Tôi cũng phải khâm phục tiếng Việt của thằng con trai luôn.
Em Đán nhà ta còn ngầu hơn nữa. Lúc trước thì dùng tiếng Anh (“What’s that? What’s that?”). Dạo này sổ tiếng Ấn Độ hay tiếng Miên gì đó nghe chả hiểu. Con hơn ba nhà có phúc.
I interviewed one of my colleagues who is a mother and had taken a few online business courses. She preferred online over onsite classes so that she could be home with her son, especially after work.
She took courses in which she sat through videos and courses in which everyone joined in at a certain time. She likes the latter better because she preferred the interaction with the instructor and other students through webcam. The liveliness of the participation made her learning experience much better than going through videos.
One of her biggest complains was that the interface was way too crowded for her laptop. She had to have too many window browsers open including one for video, one for the lesson, one for class discussions and one for exercise. She wished the design was simpler to let her focus on her main task.
I also interviewed another colleague who took an onsite Linux class. The first class, the instructor walked through the installation process and helped out the students who had trouble. The other student in class could also hop on another student’s computer to help with the installation.
In each lesson, the instructor took the students through the materials. He typed command lines on screen and the students followed along. After that the students would go through the exercise on their own and then moved to the next lesson. Every three lessons, the students would have an assignment to complete for a grade. The assignment based on the lessons the students had learned.
My colleague said the course could have been easily offered online because every task required using the computer. The students could learn at the own paste and they would have more time to troubleshoot their own codes before asking the instructors or other students.
Then again he liked the onsite class because he could meet with other students. They could take a break and connect with each other. The social aspect appealed to him and he wouldn’t think that online classes would offered the same experience.