I don’t attend a ton of large conferences each year. I attend local events, but when I dedicate a few consecutive days to a larger event, I want to make it count. You may do the same—feeling like you only get one shot to attend a conference and learn all you can. Here are some tips I’ve learned for how to make the most out of these unique opportunities.
The Digital Project Management (DPM) community is experiencing something for the first time that has become old hat for the web design and development communities – open dialogue and the sharing of ideas. In the past couple years we’ve been able to tap into a growing number of open forums and online DPM communities (check out this article by the illustrious Brett Harned).
2014 has been a year of big change for Happy Cog. We’ve had more than a year’s worth of adventures packed into a short 12 months. One thing that remains a constant, however, is our team’s continual quest to explore and hone our roles; process; project structure; and approach to clients, partners, and coworkers. Cognition serves as our way of documenting and sharing our thoughts and discoveries with the world.
As the year winds down it’s time to take stock of 2014. Turning over a new year provides us with the opportunity to reflect and look forward. The web is an ever-evolving platform with new technology, techniques, and paradigms taking hold all the time. I’m excited about the direction the web has taken in 2014 and have learned a lot over the past year. That said, here are some highlights of these developments in the past year.
A few months ago I was asked to assist leading some moderated qualitative usability testing sessions. I’ll be honest: I had little-to-no experience speaking with users, so at the start of the project I didn’t feel like I was fully equipped for the task. The idea of being in a room with someone I didn’t know for an hour and guiding them through a handful of scenarios to validate our design didn’t sound as good as one of my typical design days. However, I knew it would be a good learning experience and said I’d help out.
On almost all projects at Happy Cog, there is usually one design lead who oversees the work from the initial concept to the QA’d, browser-tested, final product. Other designers may step in to help with production or provide guidance, but for the most part, one designer owns it.
For my first driving lesson my father took me to the empty elementary school parking lot across the street from my house on a Saturday afternoon. He drove over, parked the car, switched seats with me, then instructed me to drive.
We’ve been on a big manners kick in my house lately. We’re talking about chewing with your mouth closed, not interrupting others when they are speaking, not hitting or pushing (duh?), and the importance of the age old “magic words.”
We’ve been on the Sass bandwagon here at Happy Cog for quite some time. It’s become an essential integration into our workflow. Sass’ power manifests in many ways. It makes it easier to maintain our code, it enables a modular architecture, and it helps us scale our CSS. There is a problem, though. I’m sure you all have been there.
I recently came off a huge project in which I was responsible for front-end code that had me knee-deep in a singular codebase for seven, count ’em, seven months. ’Twas fun—no complaints. In fact, I really enjoyed the work, but when I found out the next project in the pipeline was a one-page marketing microsite with a quick turnaround time, I got super excited for the learning/implementing opportunity a project of this scale provided.
No matter the client, FAQs are often a topic of conversation during many site redesigns. Maybe they are legacy content and deemed a new requirement for the get-go. Maybe stakeholders raise them as a potential solution during the course of the engagement. Sometimes, they even creep up on us (unplanned) after launch.
When I started working at Happy Cog three years ago, deliverables fell neatly into two categories: design or code. In the design category, there was another clear division: UX design (wireframes) or graphic design (page comps). But then RWD came in and threw a spoke in the wheel. Since JPEGs only show a fraction of a responsive website, we needed to figure out new ways to communicate the design to move the project forward. We introduced HTML prototyping to replace traditional wireframes, and the lines between UX, graphic design, and front-end development blurred.
insights