One of the challenges of user experience and interaction design is deciding how to convey your designs to others, whether to clients or to designers and developers. What is obvious to a UX practitioner isn’t necessarily obvious to those in other fields, and UX documentation’s purpose is to communicate the UX design to everyone, not just the UX designer.
UX documentation is not yet standardised in the industry, but there are certain types of visualisation methods that have become commonplace, the most well-known being site maps, wireframes, user journeys and process flows. These aren’t the only methods available, however, and they may not always be appropriate to all circumstances.
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods provides a good reference to various methods, grouping them into the categories of data visualisation, strategy visualisation, information visualisation, metaphor visualisation, concept visualisation and compount visulation. It also indicates whether the methods are process or structure visualisation, whether they include an overview, detail or both, and whether they illustrate divergent or convertent thinking. Mousing over each method makes an example pop up.
I downloaded the Firefox 3.1 beta this morning to test some newly supported features. One that caught my eye was the css selector @font-face, which allows firefox to display different fonts to the default web fonts. This could mean no more sIFR!!
Out of curiosity, I decided to test this new feature in Safari, IE6 and 7. It worked in Safari….and….IE6! Unfortunately IE7 doesn’t support Open Type (OTF) or True Type (TTF) fonts, so you have to download this nifty bit of software called WEFT to convert it to an Embedded Open Type (EOT) Font. I’ve tried for hours to make it work using this tutorial. But I’ve had no luck whatsoever!
Here is my mini tutorial to use @font-face in Firefox 3.1 beta, IE6 and Safari:
replacing “font” with a font of your choice. Remember to change .otf to .ttf if you’re using a True Type font. Or replace it with .eot if you managed to convert your font! Place the desired font in the same folder as the html file and open it up in your browser. Good luck!
these amazing videos by Sydney based Keith Loutit. They are time lapse video that have been tweaked to look like scale models using a similar method to Tilt Shift. Having been inspired, I tried the effect out for myself on an old 60’s picture of Picadilly Circus….
Today the inspiration contained a man called Andre Michelle (Top) showing how he created sound waves using code.
Then another man called Jonathan Harris (Bottom) demonstrated how he came to collecting statistics on the way the blogging world feels.
The last day has had some very technical moments, whilst being top and tailed with some motion graphics and heavily conceptual work. Also some really good prizes were given away during the closing ceremonies, including a copy of the new Adobe CS4 Suite and a ticket and travel to Flash on the beach Miami next year.
Keep and eye out for a more in depth post on the most inspiring speakers.
The best speakers of the day
Andre Michelle - Adobe made some noise!
Rob Chiu - “Intentionally left blank”
Mario Klingemann - Here be Pixels
Jonathan Harris - The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure
This video, made for a Radiohead competition, is what Robet Hodgin used to wow the crowd in the Tuesday evening inspired session.There were many people doing mind blowing sessions yesterday. In one session Joa Ebert demonstrated his technical skills by showing how he went about creating some of the amazing flash app Audiotools, he went into the major problems that the team had when building this, and how they hacked flash player into making this app that a lot of people thought couldn’t be done.Inspiring people on Tuesday
Jeremy Thorp - Emergence
Joa Ebert - Audiotool’s Private Parts
Everyone in the Live Jam
GMUNK (Bradley Grosh) - GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9
Hoss Gifford - Abstract Narrative
Robert Hodgin - The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life.
