Archive for the 'Work' Category

Smarter / shorter working

Posted
by
Alastair
on October 17, 2008
in Life, News and Work
. 0 Comments

I really dig those business / tech / web / software gurus at 37signals. I like their products (I use Backpack and Basecamp daily) and I like their blog (Signal vs Noise is one of my favourite RSS subs).

About three months ago I embarked on one of 37signals’ workplace experiments: the 4-day work week. At London College of Fashion, I’m lucky enough to be able to take advantage of a flexible working scheme, whereby an employee can work his 40 weekly hours around the 5 available working days. I’ve been working 4-day weeks, 10-hour days, from 8.30am to 6.30pm.

It’s awesome, because it means:

  • Your work becomes something you knuckle down to for a 4-day burst. You can approach it as a block of time and separate it from your 3 days off, and you start to think of your job less as something that basically dominates your life, and more as a temporary activity that you’re going to focus on and get satisfaction from. 
  • Long weekends. Sundays are so much more spacious with a free Monday to follow; alternatively, they can be truly guilt-free if you used your Friday for domestic admin. 4-day weekend trips now don’t require taking annual leave.
  • More time for freelance web projects - this may seem self-defeating if it means I’m doing more work, but really it’s about the ratio of focussed, proactive working vs wasted, bored time ‘at work’.
  • More time for biking.

Well, great, but from LCF’s point of view, am I getting as much done? Yes, here’s why:

  • Longer days mean more hours to really get your teeth into a project. My most productive work arises not from grazing on different bits of tasks but from focussing on a single task exclusively until completion.
  • I’m on average fresher and more energised (or at least more committed) during 4 days than I am during 5. I can see the carrot of the weekend dangling clearer than the 5-dayers, I’m incentivised. 
  • I get early nights during the work part of my week and save parties for the weekend - hey, I’ve got the time! 

Jason Fried makes a useful point though - that by adopting this schedule you’re not necessarily talking about cramming as much work into a shorter time. In fact, you’re looking for better, smarter, but shorter working.

Jotta

Posted
by
Alastair
on September 25, 2008
in News, Web and Work
. 0 Comments

A quick shout out to Jotta (formerly Fifzine), the creative arts portfolio website that has recently relaunched. I like the new design: it’s certainly more navigable, and the lightbox widget seems to work well. Generally though I think Jotta are OK because they’ve featured one of my photographs on the home page! 

However… I could do with more ways to browse other profiles - that big ‘advanced search’ box in Explore feels at odds with the idea of browsing freely. This is something we in the University of the Arts London web team thought a lot about when designing Showtime. We modelled the site on FFFound, because we liked the way you can casually browse without having to think of search criteria or narrow your search in advance. 

I’d also like to see Jotta plugging in to some APIs - Flickr and Linkedin for example - to lift it above being ‘just another (closed) network’…

dConstruct08: prototyping workshop

Posted
by
Alastair
on September 4, 2008
in News, Web and Work
. 0 Comments
Photo: Andy Budd

Photo: Andy Budd

On the train back from a workshop in Brighton for dConstruct, a programme of events and a conference hosted by design agency Clearleft. The theme of this year’s dConstruct is “Designing the Social Web” - and my workshop was Wireframing 2.0: Designing for Definition.

Wireframing isn’t a design technique I’ve personally used before (although I get the idea), so I was keen to learn more. Or rather, from what I’d been reading online about designers debunking old-style ‘grey box’ wireframing in these days of AJAX and complex, multi-state user interactions, I was keen to know what methodology I should be adopting in its place.

Rich Rutter and James Box from Clearleft presented the differences between wireframing and the approach they preferred - interactive prototyping. Prototyping is essentially building a clickable website, using HTML, CSS and Javascript (mainly in the shape of jQuery or another Javascript library), that closely resembles the layout of the final design, but with the minimum of visual adornment. A key stage in the web design process, prototypes follow on from the early stages of brainstorming and basic sketches (Clearleft’s mantra is ‘Identify > List > Cluster > Sketch’).

Prototyping expressly dispenses with the model of:

  1. visual design (in Photoshop and pdf)
  2. development
  3. user testing
  4. delivery

Naturally, flat visual layouts are often reshuffled and reconfigured during development; testing, again, frequently throws up surprises. The logical way to build a website is through a series of iterative prototypes, that puts user experience (or ‘UX’) at the core, instead of shoehorning it in later; users can feel the way the site behaves, and feed back on their experience of it, before any visual design decisions are made. Prototyping also ideally draws input from both designers and developers, as opposed to having a rather cagey back-and-forth relationship between the two.

So - I’m sold. Hand me the stickies. I’m particularly chuffed that Clearleft have provided a zip file of the prototyping code framework they presented. If you’re a UX-er you’ll be interested in their Polypage tool, developed in collaboration with Rails developers New Bamboo, that allows prototypers to manipulate user states (e.g. logged in vs logged out) by adding classes to their HTML elements.

All Flickr photos tagged dConstruct08.