16th March 2009

SXSW - Fourth Day round up

Unfortunately after waking up early, quickly showering, grabbing breakfast and thinking about a taxi we realised there weren't any good opening talks today. So instead we hung back at the hotel for a bit and went in later.

Ultimate showdown of content management destiny
Wireframes for the Wicked
2009 WaSP Annual Meeting
Great Boo's Up

Ultimate showdown of content management destiny

Joomla vs Wordpress vs Drupal. Each were given the same project - to create a site for use by Community Leadership projects. The task included a lot of functionality that is often found on sites. Such as wiki pages, events, news and granular permissions. It was to be run on shared hosting and creating using free tools within 100 hours.

There was little real insight really provided by the panel itself. However the subsites created are listed below:

CMS Showdown Links

Wireframes for the wicked

Although not directly creating wireframes on a daily basis we sat down in this panel hoping to learn a thing or two.

Wireframes are primarily communication tools however the panel reminded us that they should always be targeted to, and therefore created in consideration to the audience i.e. designers for ideas and critique, how a solution will affect daily activity for business people, an overall approach for upper management and the nitty gritty 'how to implement' for developers.

Wireframes come in a variety of flavours over time, from low to high fidelity and from idea generation to concept selection. Different types can also be classified as displaying Reference Zones (at an abstract level, the areas and major blocks), low fidelity (sketches etc), high fidelity (as much detail as the final output).

Storyboards can be used to communicate intended flows and states. Each storyboard should also contain information about how the flow being described is both entered and exited.

A standalone wireframe should be able to be fully understood without any additional documentation. This is especially true when you consider that in large organisations documents are often passed around, and not necessarily in sequence or all together.

A specification wireframe should be very detailed with sections for Triggers, Content, Actions etc to enable full implementation.

The best thing about this talk were the examples (as always - it's massively beneficial to see the way other people work.

WaSP Meeting

After a general hello and round up there was a focus on education within the industry with reference to Interact.

This was followed up by a speaker from the Adobe Task force (formerly just dealing with dreamweaver, now with the whole suite) who spoke of steps having been taken to deprecate the use of non-standards items in Dreamweaver.

IE8's compatibility mode was also discussed, before we nipped out to make it to the Great British Booze up prep.

Great British Booze Up

Boagworld (Headscape), Clear Left and Naklab got together and hosted the Great British Booze Up. Now in its third year. The Rolling BBC and Top Gear added to the British Vibe and I look forward to the idea of it being there again next year.