Tag Archive / user experience

• An End of An Era…That I Didn’t Notice

  A Final Message From the Board (IxDA) – https://ixda.org/a-final-message-from-the-board/

  Good-bye. 🙁

• I’m Here…Again.

  I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth—change in the sense of renewal.

  James Baldwin – Letter from a Region in My Mind (1962)

  I’m a front-end developer.
  I will never work in an engineering team again.

  @iwilsonjr (3:06 AM · Oct 11, 2022) – https://twitter.com/iwilsonjr/status/1369817620741033984

• The Long Game

  The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
  – H. G. Wells

  I’m marking a special anniversary today.

  And all this started because I loved Vancouver.

  After my first visit in August 2008, I decided to plan another trip. Somehow, I found a conference that I hadn’t heard about called IxDA Interaction 09. Never knew anything about interaction design nor was it my first concern. All wanted was to get back to the city again. But instead, I learned from all the talks and people about interaction design.

  That was not only an introduction to interaction design. It was a gateway to me learning about user experience design and later information architecture.

  I decided to return the following year for Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia. At that conference, I attended the lecture Designing for the Web in the World by designer Timo Arnall.

  That and his film Wireless in the World a year earlier really influenced me. This is where re-evaluated my work as a front-end developer, viewing my work as dealing with information and not just coding.

  And after years of conferences, events, reading and self-study, I ended up working with an excellent UX team at CQ Roll Call and now the growing team at FiscalNote.

  And all this because I want another trip to Vancouver… 🙂

• The Last Five Years

  A response I gave to Heydon Pickering‏ (@heydonworks) on Twitter:

  I think about this as "Engineering is about solving problems. Design is about solving the right problems."

  @iwilsonjr (2:24 PM · Dec 12, 2018) – https://twitter.com/iwilsonjr/status/1072935333329887233

• The State of Front-End Development in 2017 (…well, at least, my version of it…)

  A response I gave to Roger Johansson‏ (@rogerjohansson) on Twitter (please read through the whole thread):

  From my view, it seems that front-end development has split into two camps: one web-focused, one app-focused.

  @iwilsonjr (6:20 PM · Jul 8, 2017) – https://twitter.com/iwilsonjr/status/883812973730570244

• Future Imperfect

  As I’m writing this, it’s a rainy morning in Vancouver, Canada. Nothing new. Spending time with friends that I don’t see but once a year near my birthday. In this case, I’m here to attend the IA Summit conference this week. This is my first non-US conference since IxDA Interaction 13 in Toronto.

  Looking back at that conference there were a number of things that stood out. A number of them became influential years later. One of them was a short lecture by a designer named Nate Archer called “Beyond Responsive”.

  Nate Archer: Beyond Responsive from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

  Well, four years later, those words seem prescient right now. The world has been filled with all sorts of devices that we access the web. More than just the trio of phone/tablet/desktop. Basically, any device that has access to the web is an access point – from watches to 4000K TVs. But there is another way of looking at this. Instead of “devices”, let us consider going in the direction of “inputs”. Responsive design appeared not just with mobile devices but devices which are also touch-enabled. Now, mobile devices are as ubiquitous as any household device, front-end developers like myself have to deal with coding for interactions that take place on touchpad as much (or even more) than mouse/keyboard. (Though we could be doing a better job at the keyboard then we are currently doing.)

  [Note: touch-enabled devices are not necessary phones/tables and doing feature support for touch is still a bit tricky]

  In some respects, the beautiful lie of responsive design is that the constraints are visual, via breakpoints and media queries? But what if those constraints aren’t visual. CSS has hidden artifacts describing inputs – media types. If one would look at the specs (https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/media.html#media-types), the following types are supported:

  screen, print, speech/aural, handheld, tty, etc.

  Screen is the most familiar with print/speech following. But there’s tty? From the spec, tty refers to devices like terminals and teletypes. The later was a telecommunication device that has long since disappeared with the advent of email. But back in the day, it was considered important enough to be considered in the W3C CSS spec. Now think about the future. Someday, will we may consider mouse/keyboard interactions as obsolete as teletype?

  Now, we are seeing the advent of AI interfaces – sophisticated interfaces that allow access to the same information like we do with mouse/keyboard and touch.

  Which comes back to the conference I’m attending, IA Summit. This year’s topic is artificial intelligence and information architecture. The main job of a front-end developer is building interfaces for acquiring information. Obviously, things will change in the next couple of years. But change into what?

• The Secret Life of Forms

  

  Slides – http://www.slideshare.net/IvanWilson3/the-secret-life-of-form-67435952
  Lecture – https://cssdevconf2016.sched.com/event/7Q0d/the-secret-life-of-forms-secretforms

  One of the highlights of the year was lecturing for the first time at a conference. In this case, CSS Dev Conference at San Antonio, TX. Basically, I decided to take some advice and take a chance. After sending my proposal, I was shocked and thrilled to be selected via anonymous vote in July.

  Of course, getting the talk ready was even harder than the waiting. It took months of writing and editing and practice. But I was able to get it together and delivered it a small audience at the conference on October 17, 2016. This talk was about UX, coding, and forms. However, it was peppered with things that I’ve done during the last ten years.

  I also want to thank the other speakers at the conference in helping me not only relax but also giving me advice for speaking not just for the first time but also their experiences in giving lectures as well.

  And finally, I want to thank Christopher Schmitt, Ari Stiles, and Elizabeth Moore in helping me make my first-time experience as a lecturer a wonderful and memorable one. It means so much when for years I was attendee, to be not only speaking but giving back to the community that I respect.

  Thank you all 🙂