Are YOU relevant?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about relevancy in design, and prioritizing features ect. Today I am asking the question, are you relevant? Are you keeping yourself up to date on current trends/products/softwares/skills ect. in your industry? And even more, do you know which skills will take you where you want to go?

To remain relevant you must take a small timeout regularly to do a mini-evaluation of what you are doing, where you are going, and what you need to get there. But more than that, doing a major evaluation, say, once every six months, is also a good idea. While you are at it, dust off your resume, and check it for relevancy and accuracy.

Just something to think about….

Whats going on in DFW this week…

This is a very busy week for professional social networking! There are several events going on this week- check them out!

• DFW Joomla Users Group Meetup- (Monday October 13th; 7pm)This meetup group meets bi-monthly to discuss all things Joomla! This month the meeting will be held at Obzeet. This meetup is free, but they ask that you purchase dinner from the restaurant in exchange for their free hosting generosity.
• Dallas Interactive Marketing and Internet SEO/SEM Meetup- (Tuesday October 14th; 7pm) This month the meeting will be held at the High Tech Bar at the INFOMART. Last Month the meeting focus was Search Engine Optimization, and there is yet to be a specific topic listed for this month’s meeting, but it’s bound to be interesting.
• DFW Visual Communications Meeting- (Wednesday October 15th; 11am) This working lunch costs $35 for non-members, discusses Quark XPress 8 and takes place at Olmstead-Kirk Paper Company.
• DFW SEM Meeting- (Wednesday October 15th; 7pm) The meeting topic is TBD, and takes place at the Reniasance Dallas.
• Presidential Debates- (Wednesday October 15th; 8pm) I know this is not a social networking event, and may not even be informative, but I thought I’d throw it in here anyway
• Refresh Dallas- (Thursday October 16th; 7pm) This is one of my favorite area social networking groups! This month’s meeting is presented by Aaron Hursman, and will cover effective Dashboard Design. It is sponsored and hosted by the folks at Ackerman McQueen.
• DFW FlexCamp- (Friday October 17th; 9am) Special Day Camp just for everything Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, hosted at the Marriott at Legacy Town Center.
• DFW Adobe Users Group- (Saturday October 18th; 11am) This month the meeting topic is everything CS4! Yay! The meeting will be at Nerdbooks.

I hope to see a few of you out and about this week!

Love what you do, do what you love

At the STC Meeting this week Rich Maggiani spoke on discovering your inherent skills. Most of us are not as fortunate to be able to do our discovering during a 6 month hiatus in Hawai’i like Rich did but the concept is still the same.

Rich’s plan includes a few simply stated steps:

• List your life stages/time frames (can be overlapping- ie. worked while going to school)
• From your chronological list of life stages determine your defining accomplishments
• List the skills that each accomplishment required by major and minor skills
• Break those skills into larger skill sets or groups and determine whether they are skills you acquired/inherent and whether you enjoy the activity

Be warned: although Rich’s plan is pretty simply stated, the concept requires deep reflection.

Rich’s plan is ultimately a great way to determine what it is you like to do, and what skills you need to work on to get to do the things you love the most. It also helps you to see what the driving factors are in your life- why do you like traveling? Is it the discovery? The adventure?

Very nice Rich, thank you for encouraging us all to do a bit of reflection!

Maintianing Relevance…

I heard a quote recounted by Garrett Dimon at a recent Refresh Dallas meeting:

If everything is important, then, nothing is.

This is the most relevant golden nugget of knowledge bestowed me as of late. The sentiment is relevant in many places, but is especially relevant in product/application/website design.

Prioritizing features is a must to ensure your user understands that one thing is important over another thing. For example, color coding items in a list of messages by severity, allows the user to sift through the things that require immediate attention, and leave the lesser important stuff to deal with later. Users need this prioritization and direction.

Before beginning development on any type of project you must know the projects goals, whether they be to make waves in your industry, to track bugs, to get people to buy your product, to monitor web traffic, to display your talents or to perform usability testing. Design your product, to do one thing and do it well, and prioritize its features so that it gives the user direction. Convoluting the goals of the product/application/website will only create a less usable and more clunky product.

For example, Adobe has perfected this sentiment with PhotoShop, Illustrator and FireWorks. PhotoShop’s purpose is to edit photos, while Illustrator is fantastic at creating vector graphics, and then there is FireWorks, whose purpose is to create phenomenal web graphics. Each product does their job, and does it beautiful, but what would happend, if these products were morphed into one large, clunky, and difficult to use product? People would probably move on to an easier program that just did what they needed it to do.

There are many other such examples- not to be cliche, but Apple does a great job of this, and Microsoft does not. Microsoft tries to make everyone happy all the time, rather than making simple, easy to use programs that do exactly what the person needs them to do and nothing more.

Instead of conquering a market giant, know your limitations and develop a complementary product, that adds value to the products people are already using. Value added products are usually more welcome faces on the market that competing products, which consumers/users have to wade between to find the right fit. Just something to think about….

So, first things first, develop a list of features, cross some off, and re-assess, repeat until you have a product, that does the exact thing it was designed to do, and leave the extras, to other products, who also do exactly what they were designed to do and nothing more. And, design your product to give users visual directions within the product.

Agile Development

I recently attended a Society for Technical Communications meeting where Kathryn Poe and Matt Stringfellow spoke about Agile Development. Kathryn and her Matt did a great job explaining how Agile development can impact those of us a the end of the waterfall, this is what I took away from their informational speech: 

Agile Development allows us writers, and software documentation specialists to have roleswithin product development- especially in the realm of software development, rather than below or after development roles. 

Documenting, writing Q.A. and developing basic marketing slicks or website text after a product is completed puts us in a bind. We are the last straw to getting a product to market, and as such in this role we are under the waterfall of the product deadline. If the development team falls short of meeting a deadline, whose time are they eating up? Most likely the person who’s job is put into the perspective of “just checking a checkbox”, or whose job is last on the to-do-list. The product documentation ends up being done in 2 weeks, for a product that took 2 years to develop- not cool!

I learned from a recent DFW-STC meeting, that Agile development allows the writers, documentation specialists, Q,A. people, and marketers alike to over come the waterfall effect that always seems to happen in a development schedule. 

The key, it seems to overcoming such an obstacle, is to document, while the product is being developed, by breaking up the development cycle into chunks. By developing one feature at a time until it is finished (feature has been bug tested, wired up with the GUI, documented, Q.A.’d - finished) you can come out from under the development schedule and join it. Developing in this manner is supposed to help keep the team afloat as well, by encouraging the meeting of shorter more concise deadlines, as opposed to only thinking about the end- that huge looming deadline 2 years in the future, (or however long) that the entire product is supposed to be configured. 

This type of development it seems, also causes less re-working, and re-configuring of features, because once a feature is finished it takes a lot more work to re-open it, and start over. It is much more work, and it makes a feature that was only supposed to get 2 weeks of development time, eat up 4. 

All in all, I think Agile is a pretty good option, if you have a development team large enough to work on one feature at a time, and still meet the end product deadline. I’m not sure what happens when you work in a very small development environment.

If you are interested in learning more about Agile Development please check out Agile Alliance the Agile Community Website or the book The Art of Agile Development.

Flash in CS4

Over the past couple of days, I have been soaking up everything I can about the new Adobe CS4 suite. So far I am pretty impressed. 

The new Adobe Flash impressed me a lot. My company has been teetering around the idea of incorporating some awesome flash into our website, but we simply lack the flash manpower/expertise to spend months building a couple of mediocre videos.

Flash for CS4 allows you to eliminate many of the unnecessary steps to animate a symbol image. You used to have to “tween” a symbol image, which required many laborious steps. With the new version of Flash, you simply drag your image in the direction you want it to move, and the motion guides are created for you. Phenomenal!

It sounds like this new version of Flash, will help us to create more stunning video than we had anticipated, and in less time! Fantastic!

Please check out the video on Flash Motion Tweening from Layers Magazine.

Google Chrome

Surely by now you have heard of the new browser- Google Chrome, and if you haven’t it is about time you try it out. I would not make it your preferred browser yet, because although Google boasts that it was able to perform rigorous testing on Chrome before it’s release, it is not without its share of new application bugs. 

The Google browser is definitely trademarked by its Google rather minimalist styling, but does seem to hold some advantages when you look at the technology that is powering it. There is a great comic strip describing the technology Google implemented for Chrome, and why it is supposed to be superior to other, current web browsers. 

Check it out, and see for yourself how you feel about Google’s latest advance to take over the internet industry.

Have you heard of Thermo??

Adobe Thermo, a new product built for designers to work in conjunction with another Adobe product, Flex, is slated to come out this Fall. Thermo is supposed to give designers the ability to create Rich Internet Application UI’s, from a designer perspective, without having knowledge of code. Thermo’s purpose is to allow a designer to apply motion and effects to their artwork to give the developers a better idea of what a specific item is supposed to do.

The hype around Thermo is undeniable, but will it live up to its expectations? One of the biggest concerns about Thermo is its ability to produce clean, useful code. If the code is messy and ill formated, how useful will this be to the development process really?

I guess we will not know a definitive answer to this question until the release of Thermo, slated for later on this year. I will be at the top of the list of those downloading their free trial- until then, we will wait patiently!

Check out a video on the Ajaxian Blog.

Silverback for Usability Testing

While I was perusing Garret Dimon’s blog I came across his article about a new product- Silverback, for usability testing. 

I went to the website and downloaded the free 30 day trial, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was as simple to use as Garrett had described. Silverback allows you to capture screen activity quickly and easily, while using your isight camera to capture the users reactions. There are no fancy edit features or unnecessary bells and whistles, but what you do get is an easy setup- turn it on and hit “new project” and you are ready to go, and a super sleek user interface.

Silverback has been developed specifically for Mac users, which holds its own drawbacks, but all in all, I give Silverback a big high five!

Late Bloomer

Social Media is obviously not a new invention, but I am just now catching up with this trend. 

Sorry to be such a late bloomer!