Wordpress or HTML?

I have started encouraging the use of Wordpress as a backend for clients rather than creating a website from scratch.

There are basic issues. It is hard to find a very flexible, customizable theme - and there is a lot of editing that goes into it - but mostly the time consumption comes from finding the correct item to edit. The worst part is having to create multiple posts for things like shopping cart items, instead of having an automated process take care of it. (For some reason I am considering copying and pasting xml data automated.)

It seems the only way to really learn wordpress, is to make themes. I suppose this is true about anything - you just have to jump right in. This still hasn’t taken away the frustration - when I build from scratch I know where everything is and how it works and all that. With Wordpress there are constantly conflicts between this and that, and troubleshooting takes longer. Though perhaps this is just me.

It’s like when you pick up a project that someone else has just been working on and  quit. You have to become familiar with all the nooks, and weird little things they chose to do.

With all that - it is still worth it to be able to deliver a site with a lot of functionally and interactivity - that has a simple wordpress backend that a client can fiddle with. I know there are tons of such services - I tried using Joomla. And perhaps the issue with Joomla I had was that I was picking up another designer/developer’s work - but joomla sucked. There were so many ugly plugins - I kept wanting to go back and plug in some clean JQUERY. Plus the User interface was horrible! The important point here is - if I don’t feel comfortable moving around the system - how lost will a client feel? 

One more note on Joomla: the websites users make in it are ugly. Its true. I dont understand why, but they are. 

What is User Experience Design? and Unicorns.

I keep having the experience of needing to explain what UX is to people. Like, to my parents. Like, every time i see them. 

A friend just called me with a new project: A co-founder or exec is having difficulty communicating her vision to the engineers. She needs a UX person to fill the gap.

This I see as the main effort of UX:  The UX designer takes the vision, looks at the problems, figures out a solution, and illustrates it in such a way that an engineer can build it. Maybe the vision is fleshed out; maybe it still needs to be thought through. The in-between part (between founder and developer) is developed through an understanding of the users, how they want to use a system, what they get out of it, and how to push them (ever so softly) into getting our company results.

There is a lot in that in-between: research about user base, concept mockups, interaction design capabilities, ease of use assessment, strategy, flow charts, information architecture, user interface design (or at least interaction design)…

The UX designer is both a humanist and a technician. An understanding of technology and interaction is crucial, and it helps to know how to develop or at least the philosophy of programming. Though you also need to be a humanist, concerned with what your users want, need, and experience.

The thing I find most important in a UX designer - and perhaps this is true in every field - is curiosity. I was out with a friend the other day and he asked me why I was still “on.” I wanted to understand why the restaurant chose a particular style, and later how my receptors could tell the difference between tickling and pain. We were at a bar having drinks, and at least mentally, I was working. I am always working - the absolute obsession with understanding “why” never turns off. 

It helps me ask questions in my job and try to see through assumptions. Or at least I keep telling myself that. Maybe it just makes going to a bar justified, in that time is not being wasted because I am still working. 

I am completely off point - What I really wanted to cover was this concept of ‘Unicorns.’ (I creep Quora way too much.) 

I constantly receive work emails looking for a jack of all trades - Excellent JS and Frontend! Stupendous UI skills! Master of UX! Loves PHP and Frameworks! 

I understand why a person with all these skills is desirable - and if they are smart and willing, this person can do a great job - BUT - having one party work on all this (assuming that you’ve even found this person) - is going to burn them out, which is a gross  oversight on the part of the employer. Art directors (or whatever startups call them) are essential in designing a good product. Team is essential. You do not want your UI and UX and Dev to be the same person - you want the second set of eyes to catch mistakes. You want that one specialist to be able to specialize on their part. Understandable, we all wear many hats. But ask someone to wear too many and you lose their specialization.

Anonymous asked: Where do you envision you will be in 10 years?

I don’t believe in long term commitments.

While scanning Quora, found this gem:

Timeline UX

Due to the use of time based online experiences - twitter, easily, and now Facebook (others abound) - our sequential reading habits have  changed. Looking at twitter’s stream, top to bottom, recent to oldest, gives information as it is updated, but what is missing is the story, which we are accustomed to seeing top to bottom. 

Heres what i mean - when we read a book, we read into the future, left to right, top to bottom. When we read a stream, we read into the past, top to bottom, left to right. The fundamental difference here is that if i want to follow a story from its start to end (ie twitter hissy fights) - i cannot do this without scanning to back posts and reading up. It makes the twitter narrative unsatisfactory.

The question becomes: why is it difficult to accept narrative as a bottom to top relationship?

Twitter does not have a comfortable story system. The recent Facebook timeline layout has the same issue - though i personally find that i do not want to follow a Facebook narrative. Perhaps it is the gossipy nature of tweets that makes the difference? 

I know a lot of users ( my friends) complain about horizontally scrolling websites - but i believe this is akin to the *dropbox paradigm. A user is new to a system and it therefore feels uncomfortable.

Horizontal scroll works. It is logical. It is fantastic for timeline models. Not to promote self promotion, but nonsociety.com tries to resolve this issue - unsuccessfully, though there is something there. They handle the timeline with the most recent posts first, and the later posts right of them (instead of below). The issue still remains - I want to quickly scan to the beginning of a series. I want to know how the story started. 

I am not saying twitter needs to change - that would be silly. I am saying our relationship to quickly-changing-timeline-content is not a satisfactory experience, and it needs to be examined.

*What the eff Dropbox? I heart you and all, but what is the deal with the totally useless UI change that did not impact UX and instead has frustrated me into not finding the damn share button? The change is pretty, its almost like you guys finally purchased macs for the designers: but this change did not fundamentally impact my experience for the better. The new design itself is too subtle to notice until a feature suddenly cannot be found. A user not finding a feature? Super frustrating. 

As such, I propose that we now address all uncomfortable UX changes as the Dropbox Paradigm.