“Our ability to innovate reliably and effectively is largely due to our insistence that our creative consultants work in pairs.”

I want to share an answer with you.

Question: “Is it better to create your own CMS or to use Drupal when we have to implement a lot of self-made applications?”

Answer: “I think it’s oversimplifying the answer to say Drupal saves work or time (or to say doesn’t). Sure, Drupal can get you up and running with a website quickly, and probably with 90% of the functionality you need with core and contributed modules. But your website will probably look and behave like 90% of websites out there. That can be ok. But I have often found that making simple changes or customisations in Drupal can take far longer than they would in a well documented/understood PHP application built around a code library or framework. Add to that the time you need to dedicate to testing and applying security updates to core and modules and your access to knowledgable Drupal resources – you will have a lot more to consider in making your choice.

I think Drupal is a powerful framework, and I use it for many projects. But here are a number of caveats to using Drupal that I have come across in the last few years of using it. These mostly apply to developers who are capable of programming and developing advanced functionality, and for whom the choice of a bespoke CMS or Drupal is a real feasible possibility. If you are not a developer, or don’t have access to developer resources, you need a ready-to-go CMS like Drupal or WordPress.

• If you want your site to be different, the developing the remaining 10% functionality can be a hellish journey for developers using Drupal. Custom module development for Drupal is not for the light hearted. It involves developing with a level of abstraction from native PHP and bending modules and core functionality that is in some parts poorly documented, and in others goes against best practices you may have learned as a developer. Drupal does things its own way, and the sooner you learn that, the sooner you will be closer to productive with it. If you take this path, developers, get to know the hook system and the theming system.
• Customising Themes (Drupal’s presentation layer) can feel unreasonably complex to the front end web developer or web designer that is used to a more transparent and simple system. Combine core themes with the good contributed modules like Panels and Views and it gets really messy for front end developers who are used to clean and semantic code. Lots of divs. I have often come across developers’ work on a project that has in frustration hacked around Drupal’s logic to get the desired result in the time available. One has to ask, why use Drupal if all you’re doing is spending more time getting around the way it does stuff?
• Customising contributed Modules is difficult as there is often no way to extend functionality the way you can with a more object-oriented architecture. This can be a real frustration when you just want to alter a module slightly for your own purposes, and not break maintainability from the contributing 3rd party for security releases an updates.
• Drupal can be difficult for developers to maintain, migrate or deploy as much of the functionality is often a combination of untraceable checkbox configurations in the admin interface of the website. As I understand it, this is core to Drupal’s goals – to allow people to make websites without having to touch code – but the result is it can to great lengths to ‘protect’ the user from code, making it difficult to manage interfaces where a quick line of code qould do it. It’s hard for developers to work like this, as it feels like your hands are tied. The lack of traceability of work and code mentioned above can be mitigated using CTools Exportables – which some modules support. There are also contributed modules like Features that assist in deployment. It’s all a different way of thinking when you are used to deploying from a branch of your repos. I find using a development instance of Drupal and using these tools to export to a build instance is the best solution for this.
• Generally, someone with technical capacity is required to manage and set up the more complex aspects of a Drupal application (Views, CCK, Panels, Nodequeue, etc are all good Modules, but are difficult for the average admin/editorial user to grasp). Often this job will fall to a web developer and in my experience this can result in frustrated and unhappy developers who would prefer to be coding than ticking a combination of checkboxes.
• Drupal (like any system) requires maintenance. There are security updates for core and contributed modules released regularly. Applying these to your live site can be risky and time consuming.

Obviously the more you know your tools, the better you can use them. If you are a proficient developer and you have some bespoke requirements, or prefer to be hands-on with code – write your own code, follow good practices and document it well. If your site fits into the 90% generic category, use Drupal (or similar) and extend it where necessary. If you want a bespoke Drupal site, you can get to know how its code works (it is open and extendible after all), but be prepared for learning a whole new dialect of PHP.

If you are not a developer, and have access to technical resources make the decision in collaboration with those resources. You will want them to be happy creating your product. A happy developer is more likely to be productive.

If you have few technical resources, recognise the limitations of what you are going to be able to do and use Drupal or similar.”

To see this answer, visit: http://qr.ae/cK53

Delightful design

Left a trail of stuff I have tagged, starred, etc.

Analog vs digital

Visible – invisible Remember – forget find – search own – access

Analog = or Digital = and

Digital Extends into the services we use. Analogue is The Palpable stack

Digital is a phantom pile. Still a presence to it that burns cycles to my brain There is a latent potential in this collection of stars.

It’s valuable to have stuff. In one place. They can co-mingle.

Commonplace books used by gentlemen of past. The book becomes stamped with your personality.

“Curation is authorship.” – Paul saffo Produce and consume in the same act.

Missing one key thing with digital. The architecture of serendipity. Have to find the content in a book. A YouTube hole does this.

Architecture of arrangement.

Curation. Find and collect. On the web we are missing arrangement. Need to take a second pass to make a narrative experience.

Tools are optimising for getting things in.

Stars can be constellations. Connecting separate things, creating a shape and imbuing it with a meaning.

Som big design decisions – reassess how we sort stuff.

Searching vs finding for old or new stuff

How do we arrange things spatially? Linear blocky layout is limiting.

The properties of digital. Infinitely mutable.

how we move through time

Content can timeshift. Eg. Instapaper. Postpones. It’s aspirational. Instapaper is a time machine. It goes both ways. Future and past.

There are enough footprints that we can bubble it up and bring it to the present.

See. Photojojo.

media supported.

We need to be multi media See the NY Library Biblion iPad app.

Why not Biblion my own collection too?

Ancient Greeks used the flattened surface of the sky to tell and overlay stories. Can we do the same with our collections of stars?

Here is some of what she covered:

empathy

We are trying to be connected to the materials we design.

She tells the story of her children going through a hospital experience, and how that made her really want to make a difference to medical interfaces.

Connected experiences

Connections between things, devices and lifestyles and products for creating change in behaviour.

Connection=meaning, Systematic and connected. Systems are connected things

addiction and fun

We want you to create addictive experiences

How can we evolve back from stooped computer beings to people with open, good posture? Open to real physical interaction, being physical together is being connected. Posture.

Functional, usable, pleasurable.

Understanding people’s rituals is the key to understanding an addictive experience.

devotion

Example of the fun and effortlessness of driving a mini. Mood is so important. Context is everything. Experience, trust. Relates to brand. Human machine communication. Efficiency. Usability.

Challenge is to make machine to human communications fun.

research

Focus groups don’t give accurate information. Observation in context provides more rich understanding of complex things like lifestyle and emotion.

Break down the experience into emotional functional comfort.

beyond usable

We are now at the point that things should at a baseline, function. We have moved up mazlows hierarchy of needs. Usability is covered, we can start thinking about some of the higher values.

sensory engineering

(And this is where it started getting a bit rushed)

Kensei engineering.

People Input sensory and knowledge. Moved Demographics Psychographics Emotional

Contextual interviews

“Deep hanging out” allows researchers to discover emotions.

experience mapping

Identity public private Satisfaction wonder comfort connection Context timeline Understand hidden needs

Kensei Aware, unaware.

We have to understand the spacing in between things and understand connections and lifestyle.

I hope she posts her slides sometime, it was hard to get the last 10 minutes of her talk, but plenty keywords to thing about.

pic: Don Norman’s profile pic on Twitter.

There are some people in our profession who carry a certain gravitas. Don Norman is one of those thinkers and writers who’s ideas and writings have played an active part in the development and creation of many of the things around us, even if we don’t know it. Don Norman’s contributions have raised UX thinking to something closer to philosophy, expose the potential art in our trade, and for me as a technologist, offer insights that provide more meaning to what I do. Don Norman is mostly why I went to dConstruct 2011, to hear him speak on Emotional Design for the World of Objects.

No slides, no bullet points, Don Norman spoke from the stage, told some stories and asked some open questions. Here are a few points that stood out in my notes:

Google: “Google doesn’t understand people… you are the product, advertisers are their clients… are you happy to be their product?“

Lack of standards: Carrying the internet in your pocket. Nice for consumers, hard for developers. Startups and developers need to focus, there are a couple variations of iPhone, many more of Android, variation in tablets will come. More variation, and screens, and gestures and no standards.

On the origins of standards: The story of why we scroll windows the direction we do.Is scrolling about moving text, or about moving the window? Back in the day, Alan Kay and others were copying each other. No one takes responsibility for the decision. But important standards were set in the past, which are now being thrown out with touch interfaces. Established important standards like on the Moving Window for scrolling, Undo, and Interface Feedback. Today it is the norm that there is no discoverability, no Undo, no menus, no feedback.

“All of our things are going to change.”

No standards: it’s “a great challenge“

A continuous User Experience: Forget the old model where applications were independent silos. All devices are now interrelated, and users expect a common theme across platforms and environments. Desktop, mobile, car…

The Patent Wars: Currently it is “almost impossible to write code without violating someone’s patent”. 20 years ago Apple was patenting gestures. Microsoft’s bailout of Apple in the late 90s give them access to these patents.

Integrating into peoples’ loves With iTunes, Apple made it trivial to manage digital music collections. Before you had to be a nerd. Accessories and accessory makers followed the iPod. Amazon has done the same with books with the Kindle.

Systems are really important. Systems are where the future is. Think systems. We need to stop thinking about a sincle website or product.

Where do we as developers and designers fit in? We must create Usability, Pleasure, Beauty, Fun. Emotion and experience. Trying to design a great expience. The total experience

There is one thing that is more important than the experience: the memory. Memory lasts for years. You should design memories. Trinkets, souvenirs, photos.

Some things have no function, but are fun experiences. See the scolling bounce behaviour at the end of a page in Safari vs Firefox’s kadunk at the end of the page. [Is this a Lion thing? I get it in iOS Mobile Safari, but not on the Desktop. But I get the point, playful things are more fun to use]

Android doesn’t have the elegance that iPhone has. “Just more pleasurable.” But there is lots to consider when choosing which to develop for. The Business model, Apple vs android Closed vs open Controlled vs free. Follow customers, they make the choice.

We need to tell stories and build narratives. This doesn’t mean continual accurate success rates. What makes a movie wonderful and a good story is that the is a hero and a challenge, and a defeat, etc narrative curve. Greatest happiness comes after a negative.

The geatest thing we haven’t thought of is time, how it unfolds. Like games. Games can’t succeed continually. You need, as the user, to fail. Look at Angry birds. The physics. You fail but you feel you could have succeeded, if only. It’s addictive. To make something addictive, you need to make things temporal. Up and down.

Memory: “never precisely the same as it was”.

Co-creation is a key part of future design. 3d printers as service. Creating artefacts is accessible. Will become more accessible. Physical devices getting closer Web mobile 3d devices The manufacturing of physical devices is going to change.

Look at Auduino and Android construction kits. Nothing similar available in iOS, by design. Give people the power – that’s when things get interesting.

The rise of Social Networks, Sensors, Powerful Processors and Connectivity are leading to new possibilities in design.

There is real potential in simulation for eductation. The average professionally developed game take $10-$20mill to produce. No-one spends that on edicational systems.

Developing systems, leaving people with memories.

Development of stories going to take a change In games, time wasters are the most popular.

There is real potential to make mobiles exciting. Physical gestures, knobs and haptics. Physical embodiment is really important. We have lost that. It’s coming back.

Tilts, turns. But currently no standards.

Just at the start of the device story application revolution. Are you ready?

The intention economy. Exciting and frightening opportunity.

“Are you ready?“

When I first worked as a contract web developer in the late 90s, the standard issue was PCs for developers, Macs for designers. That’s just how it was for most of my missions, with few exceptions. Personal preference? Bah! To the technical decision makers at the design agencies where I worked (IT departments), providing Macs at all was only a necessary expense to keep the designer prima donnas happy. There were probably other reasons, from developer tools, to network compatibility, but mostly I think it was down to cultural bias of IT departments and developers alike: an affinity to big-number specs. Speed. Capacity. Grrrr.

I had learned to code on a Mac, so although I missed BBEdit on the job, I grew to like Homesite and appreciate the various things I could do with Windows XP. They are just tools after all, and not to be blamed. By 2003 when I set up my own business, I had mostly given up, and kept my iBook for portability, but otherwise I was a PC shop (with a couple Linux servers under my desk). I worked a lot with a designer, and he had a Mac. Every now and then there were some issues with exchanging files and fonts, but mostly we got along fine between our arguments over the necessity for rounded corners and drop shadows.

How times have changed. These days Macbooks seem to be the preferred tool for developers (in the media and design world anyway). Go to any conference or hack day, and you will see fewer HPs or IBMs, and those that you do see are probably running some form of Linux anyway. Apple has provided a great platform for developers, and some great hardware. Good design has won the day, and things have turned around. Or come full circle…

The more Apple-shaped my environment, the more I am niggled by the increasing dependency on a single company’s (or single CEO’s) vision. Sure I have choice. I could, for the sake of diversity and freedom, give up my iPhone for an Android, or switch to Ubuntu Desktop for development. And buy an HP Touchpad (or not, anymore). But the more  software and apps I buy, the less likely I am to change. And anyway, I like my basket of Apples, they are solid, and I use them to great affect daily. But what if they end up a basket of eggs?

In this time of the surging tech wars going on between the major players, our privacy, identity, personal data and creative output as developers are potential pawns in a bigger game, and this question is more and more prevalent to me.

The answer, I think, is to make sure I am collecting tools, not eggs or apples. The real value lies in the open technologies and formats I choose to use to build websites and run my life.  Maybe one day I will be cursing the ubiquity of Ubuntu or some other flavour of openness, but at present, Apple provides the best balance  for me of openness, productivity and enjoyment. Some of these unfortunately require lock-in on a functional level, such as native apps. But where possible I will make sure I am investing in something that is open, portable and adaptable to any of  the changes that lie ahead.

Will it work with markdown?

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