RailsConfEurope: Design on Rails for Usability
First session I followed today was a session called Design on Rails for Usability by Christian Lupp of codedifferent.
Christian is a designer and talked about the concepts and worflow of designing (or in his words, solving a ‘wicket problem’). Nice to hear the perspective of a designer on Rails. He also had some nice advice for us developers. Might be useful in working with the designers at the company I work for:
- if there are two equal solutions .. take the easier / simpler one (Okcham’s Razor). You could try to reduce funtionalities until your customer thinks the application is missing something. Then, go one step back.
- designers should learn more about the possibilities of Rails, Javascript etc. so they new what is possible when designing the interaction. They should also take a more central role in interaction style.
- developers should learn more about interaction design!
- make your webapp accesible (not only so that everyone can use your app, but also for SEO and performance reasons)
Accessibility can be reached by:
- separating html, css and behaviors (JS / LowPro)
- repeat structures by DRY – recognizable patterns (like chapters, pagenumbers, footnotes, footers / headers in a book). Layouts and partials of Rails are really useful here.
- validate inputs and give feedback
- give feedback with Rails flash messages
- don’t let the user wait .. keep him busy! (“Schiphol problem” – users prefer to walk 10 minutes and pick-up their bags immediately over walking 2 minutes and wait for 8 minutes for their bag). Search form example: search form, extra search proces (e.g. ask how results should be sorted etc. to keep user busy), then show results! If you can’t do that, at least give some feedback (e.g. search will take some time).
