Tag: apps

Prototyping in the browser

When you are design­ing a web site or web app I think you should pro­to­type in the brows­er. Why? You might as well ask why pro­to­type at all. Answer: To enable con­tin­u­ous test­ing and refine­ment of your design. Since you are design­ing for the web it makes sense to do this test­ing and refine­ment with an arte­fact com­posed of the web’s material.

There are many ways to do pro­to­typ­ing. A com­mon way is to make wire­frames and then make them ‘click­able’. But when I am design­ing a web site or a web app and I get to the point where it is time to do wire­frames I often pre­fer to go straight to the browser. 

Before this step I have sketched out all the screens on paper of course. I have done mul­ti­ple sketch­es of each page. I’ve had them cri­tiqued by team mem­bers and I have reworked them. 

Drawing pictures of web pages

But then I open my draw­ing pro­gram—Sketch, in my case—and my heart sinks. Not because Sketch sucks. Sketch is great. But it some­how feels wrong to draw pic­tures of web pages on my screen. I find it cum­ber­some. My draw­ing pro­gram does not behave like a brows­er. That is to say in stead of defin­ing a bunch of rules for ele­ments and hav­ing the brows­er fig­ure out how to ren­der them on a page togeth­er I need to fol­low those rules myself in my head as I put each ele­ment in its place.

And don’t get me start­ed on how wire­frames are sup­posed to be with­out visu­al design. That is non­sense. If you are using con­trast, rep­e­ti­tion, align­ment and prox­im­i­ty, you are doing lay­out. That is visu­al design. I can’t stand wire­frames with a bad visu­al hierarchy.

If I per­se­vere, and I have a set of wire­frames in my draw­ing pro­gram, they are sta­t­ic. I can’t use them. I then need to export them to some oth­er often clunky pro­gram to make the pic­tures click­able. Which always results in a poor resem­blance of the actu­al expe­ri­ence. (I use Mar­vel. It’s okay but it is hard­ly a joy to use. For mobile apps I still use it, for web sites I pre­fer not to.)

Prototyping in the browser

When I pro­to­type in the brows­er I don’t have to deal with these issues. I am doing lay­out in a way that is native to the medi­um. And once I have some pages set up they are imme­di­ate­ly usable. So I can hand it to some­one, a team mem­ber or a test par­tic­i­pant, and let them play with it.

That is why, for web sites and web apps, I skip wire­frames alto­geth­er and pro­to­type in the brows­er. I do not know how com­mon this is in the indus­try nowa­days. So I thought I would share my approach here. It may be of use to some. 

It used to be the case that it was quite a bit of has­sle to get up and run­ning with a brows­er pro­to­type so nat­u­ral­ly open­ing a draw­ing pack­age seemed more attrac­tive. Not so any­more. Tools have come a long way. Case in point: My set­up nowa­days involves zero screw­ing around on the com­mand line.

CodeKit

The core of it is a paid-for Mac app called CodeK­it, a so-called task man­ag­er. It allows you to install a front-end devel­op­ment frame­work I like called Zurb Foun­da­tion with a cou­ple of clicks and has a built in web serv­er so you can play with your pro­to­type on any device on your local net­work. As you make changes to the code of your pro­to­type it gets auto­mat­i­cal­ly updat­ed on all your devices. No more man­u­al refresh­ing. Saves a huge amount of time.

I know you can do most of what CodeK­it does for you with stuff like Grunt but that involves tedious con­fig­u­ra­tion and work­ing the com­mand line. This is fine when you’re a devel­op­er, but not fine when you are a design­er. I want to be up and run­ning as fast as pos­si­ble. CodeK­it allows me to do that and has some oth­er fea­tures built in that are ide­al for pro­to­typ­ing which I will talk about more below. Long sto­ry short: CodeK­it has saved me a huge amount of time and is well worth the money.

Okay so on with the show. Yes, this whole pro­to­typ­ing in the brows­er thing involves ‘cod­ing’. But hon­est­ly, if you can’t write some HTML and CSS you real­ly shouldn’t be doing design for the web in the first place. I don’t care if you con­sid­er your­self a UX design­er and some­how above all this low­ly tech­ni­cal stuff. You are not. Nobody is say­ing you should become a fron­tend devel­op­er but you need to have an acquain­tance with the mate­ri­als your prod­uct is made of. Fol­low a few cours­es on Codecadamy or some­thing. There real­ly isn’t an excuse any­more these days for not know­ing this stuff. If you want to lev­el up, learn SASS.

Zurb Foundation

I like Zurb Foun­da­tion because it offers a coher­ent and com­pre­hen­sive library of ele­ments which cov­ers almost all the com­mon pat­terns found in web sites and apps. It offers a grid and some default typog­ra­phy styles as well. All of it doesn’t look flashy at all which is how I like it when I am pro­to­typ­ing. A pro­to­type at this stage does not require per­son­al­i­ty yet. Just a clear visu­al hier­ar­chy. Work­ing with Foun­da­tion is almost like play­ing with LEGO. You just click togeth­er the stuff you need. It’s pain­less and looks and works great.

I hard­ly do any styling but the few changes I do want to make I can eas­i­ly add to Foundation’s app.scss using SASS. I usu­al­ly have a few styles in there for tweak­ing some mar­gins on par­tic­u­lar ele­ments, for exam­ple a foot­er. But I try to focus on the struc­ture and behav­iour of my pages and for that I am most­ly doing HTML. 

GitHub

Test­ing local­ly I already men­tioned. For that, CodeK­it has you cov­ered. Of course, you want to be able to share your pro­to­type with oth­ers. For this I like to use GitHub and their Pages fea­ture. Once again, using their desk­top client, this involves zero com­mand line work. You just add the fold­er with your CodeK­it project as a new repos­i­to­ry and sync it with GitHub. Then you need to add a branch named ‘gh-pages’ and do ‘update from mas­ter’. Presto, your pro­to­type is now on the web for any­one with the URL to see and use. Per­fect if you’re work­ing in a dis­trib­uted team. 

Don’t be intim­i­dat­ed by using GitHub. Their on-board­ing is pret­ty impres­sive nowa­days. You’ll be up and run­ning in no time. Using ver­sion con­trol, even if it is just you work­ing on the pro­to­type, adds some much need­ed struc­ture and con­trol over changes. And when you are col­lab­o­rat­ing on your pro­to­type with team mem­bers it is indispensable. 

But in most cas­es I am the only one build­ing the pro­to­type so I just work on the mas­ter branch and once every while I update the gh-pages branch from mas­ter and sync it and I am done. If you use Slack you can add a GitHub bot to a chan­nel and have your team mem­bers receive an auto­mat­ic update every time you change the prototype. 

The Kit Language

If your project is of any size beyond the very small you will like­ly have repeat­ing ele­ments in your design. Head­ers, foot­ers, recur­ring wid­gets and so on. CodeK­it has recent­ly added sup­port for some­thing called the Kit Lan­guage. This adds sup­port for imports and vari­ables to reg­u­lar HTML. It is absolute­ly great for pro­to­typ­ing. For each repeat­ing ele­ment you cre­ate a ‘par­tial’ and import it wher­ev­er you need it. Vari­ables are great for chang­ing the con­tents of such repeat­ing ele­ments. CodeK­it com­piles it all into plain sta­t­ic HTML for you so your pro­to­type runs anywhere.

The Kit Lan­guage real­ly was the miss­ing piece of the puz­zle for me. With it in place I am very com­fort­able rec­om­mend­ing this way of work­ing to anyone.

So that’s my set­up: CodeK­it, Zurb Foun­da­tion and GitHub. Togeth­er they make for a very pleas­ant and pro­duc­tive way to do pro­to­typ­ing in the brows­er. I don’t imag­ine myself going back to draw­ing pic­tures of web pages any­time soon.

Writing for conversational user interfaces

Last year at Hub­bub we worked on two projects fea­tur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion­al user inter­face. I thought I would share a few notes on how we did the writ­ing for them. Because for con­ver­sa­tion­al user inter­faces a large part of the design is in the writing. 

At the moment, there aren’t real­ly that many tools well suit­ed for doing this. Twine comes to mind but it is real­ly more focused on pub­lish­ing as opposed to author­ing. So while we were work­ing on these projects we just grabbed what­ev­er we were famil­iar with and felt would get the job done. 

I actu­al­ly think there is an oppor­tu­ni­ty here. If this con­ver­sa­tion­al ui thing takes off design­ers would ben­e­fit a lot from bet­ter tools to sketch and pro­to­type them. After all this is the only way to fig­ure out if a con­ver­sa­tion­al user inter­face is suit­able for a par­tic­u­lar project. In the words of Bill Bux­ton:

“Every­thing is best for some­thing and worst for some­thing else.”

Okay so below are my notes. The two projects are KOKORO (a code­name) and Free Birds. We have yet to pub­lish exten­sive­ly on both, so a quick descrip­tion is in order.

KOKORO is a dig­i­tal coach for teenagers to help them man­age and improve their men­tal health. It is cur­rent­ly a pro­to­type mobile web app not pub­licly avail­able. (The engine we built to dri­ve it is avail­able on GitHub, though.)

Free Birds (Vri­je Vogels in Dutch) is a game about civ­il lib­er­ties for fam­i­lies vis­it­ing a war and resis­tance muse­um in the Nether­lands. It is a loca­tion-based iOS app cur­rent­ly avail­able on the Dutch app store and playable in Air­borne Muse­um Harten­stein in Oosterbeek.

For KOKORO we used Gingko to write the con­ver­sa­tion branch­es. This is good enough for a pro­to­type but it becomes unwieldy at scale. And any­way you don’t want to be lim­it­ed to a tree struc­ture. You want to at least be able to loop back to a par­ent branch, some­thing that isn’t sup­port­ed by Gingko. And maybe you don’t want to use the branch­ing pat­tern at all.

Free Birds’s sto­ry has a very lin­ear struc­ture. So in this case we just wrote our con­ver­sa­tions in Quip with some basic rules for for­mat­ting, not unlike a screenplay. 

In Free Birds play­er choic­es ‘colour’ the events that come imme­di­ate­ly after, but the path stays the same.

This approach was inspired by the Walk­ing Dead games. Those are super clever at giv­ing play­ers a sense of agency with­out the need for sprawl­ing sto­ry trees. I remem­ber see­ing the cre­ators present this strat­e­gy at PRACTICE and some­thing clicked for me. The impor­tant point is, choic­es don’t have to branch out to dif­fer­ent direc­tions to feel meaningful.

KOKORO’s choic­es did have to lead to dif­fer­ent paths so we had to build a tree struc­ture. But we also kept track of things a user says. This allows the app to “learn” about the user. Sub­se­quent seg­ments of the con­ver­sa­tion are adapt­ed based on this learn­ing. This allows for more flex­i­bil­i­ty and it scales bet­ter. A sec­tion of a con­ver­sa­tion has var­i­ous states between which we switch depend­ing on what a user has said in the past. 

We did some­thing sim­i­lar in Free Birds but used it to a far more lim­it­ed degree, real­ly just to once again colour cer­tain pieces of dia­logue. This is already enough to give a play­er a sense of agency.

As you can see, it’s all far from rock­et surgery but you can get sur­pris­ing­ly good results just by stick­ing to these sim­ple pat­terns. If I were to inves­ti­gate more advanced strate­gies I would look into NLP for input and pro­ce­dur­al gen­er­a­tion for out­put. Who knows, maybe I will get to work on a project involv­ing those things some time in the future.

Ledoliel is a companion/dating toy for iOS, involv­ing strange pro­ce­dur­al crea­tures and their bizarre cus­toms, where you must try and fig­ure out what top­ics they might want to dis­cuss, gift they might want to receive and places they may like to be touched — based on their cryp­tic attributes.

One app store review reads “Don’t buy / This game is weird”. Which I agree with but for the part “don’t”.

(via Ledoliel on the App Store on iTunes)