Related
My app will look like this: two people enter a chat or something else in a page and have a skype name or Gtalk. Is it possible to make an anchor to call a voice client from the web page? Is there a flash fallback for this?
I know the skype: prefix that actually doesn't work for me in Ubuntu, but should work for Windows users.
I primarily target PCs & macs, but supporting mobile platforms with a solution will be nice.
For Downvoters: any comments why you do this? Please bother to explain me the obvious thing that I don't know and make this question.
Your question is much too complex. Instead of answering it, which would take several pages, the person might as well write the application him/herself and sell it.
You have to divide your problem in tiny bits, and have a question for each one.
You could at least start with looking at gTalk API and Skype API to see what you need yourself.
I was wondering, how does a web designer/developer start out in his buisness with nothing to show (in the sense of a portfolio,) and only his word to show he does good work? How are those people supposed to get buisness?
If you don't have a portfolio and want business, it is best to make your own site look incredible. Show people what you can do with your own site. Once your site is incredible, network with companies in your area, friends, family and offer your services cheap if they'll let you use their site as a portfolio example.
Once your portfolio is up, referrals should be coming in and folks seeing your site should be even more interested.
EDIT Per Martin's request, when you build your own site, please don't grab a run of the mill template like every other web developer out there. If you do take a template, make it yours, modify the heck out of it.
The best thing you can do for an empty portfolio is personal projects. I was hired for my first job out of college because I had created a website for my personal business. I was able to show that I had talent because I was in charge the entire site. You shouldn't ever rely on "your word" to get you jobs.
If you need ideas for a personal project, you can see if any friends/family need help, but that can be limiting. Still, it's another project to put in your portfolio to help you get more professional work.
I'd also recommend reading up on online articles dealing with starting a business. Some recommended reading:
alistapart.com/articles/startingabusiness/
alistapart.com/articles/business1/
freelanceswitch.com/general/101-essential-freelancing-resources/
Start by doing projects for people you know and work to create a small selection of work that reflects your current skill set. At the beginning, you may find that your talents are evolving so rapidly that your previous work doesn't reflect your current abilities — that's fine. Try to create a narrative on your portfolio site that shows people your progress and how each piece of work has built on the next.
Your portfolio site should demonstrate both technical and aesthetic skills. If you're an artist or industrial designer, you want your site to fade to the background and push your work forwards. Being a web designer means that your actual site is as important as the work featured on it. Your code should be clean and organized (you don't need to be a standardista, but be tidy).
If there's one skill you should really have before you start to work for clients, it's a sense of typography. You don't want to contribute to the ever-expanding world of poorly set websites.
Good luck.
I completely agree with all of the above - if you can demonstrate your capabilities with some sample work, that will count for far more than a resume in the end. Most of my work has come through people seeing my other work, not knowing my employment history.
Get yourself a domain, build a bunch of sample home pages, create a bunch of sub directories on your site. Make one for a small business, then maybe e-commerce, then maybe a blog, make a few different example scenarios of the types of sites that you would likely be asked to do, I have seen some people design mock home pages in Photoshop and just show them all as clickable JPEGS, that can be quick yes, although I recommend using all live pages on your site to show what interactive things you can do. Up to you, depending how quick you want it up and how important it is to you. I was paid $2500 to make this blog by a guy who was just completely web illiterate. I didn't quote that price mind you, he offered it to me out of nowhere after looking at a gallery of WP templates I had up as "possible" themes for a customer's blog. Sometimes, you are just in the right place at the right time. Best of luck to you.
Do side projects and see if you can build friends' websites (for free, or if they'll pay you, cool). Do whatever you can to demonstrate your abilities. Building a personal site doesn't hurt either.
I'd recommend making an online portfolio, if not to display past projects at least to post your resume and basically a cover letter. You can get a lot of free css templates if you're not comfortable with designing your own.
I'm building a site for my wife and a friend of mine from high school. If you're not getting work, its just the economy. I've been looking for work since March. It's tough.
Just keep at it, and it'll pay off.
You need to create a professional looking site. If you are a developer I also suggest that you start a small open source project (or a big one if you are so inclinded). It doesn't have to be any thing major...a widget or library. Something useful for people to play with. On your website show examples of your work. If you have no examples then sign up for accounts on getafreelancer.com, elance.com, scriptlance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com and any of the other freelance style sites. Build up your portfolio by doing cheap work...but not work that is cheap! Create a resume and post it somewhere for google to find. Create a linkedin, facebook, and myspace account. Make it easy for people to find you and for people to find your work. Write about the things that you are interested in either by way of a personal blog or by posting articles to a site that already gets lots of traffic. Speak at small user groups or conferences to get your name out.
There is a lot you can do it is just a matter of how badly you want to succeed. Programming or designing is just as much a business as selling physical products. It is all about how much you saturate a given space with good words about your services. Marketing!
I'm a non-developer building a simple Access 2003 database for an NGO that works in developing countries. I would like to provide in-app help (what certain fields mean, for example) in a number of forms and on the switchboard. I'm not sure about the best way to do this - not just on a technical standpoint but to increase user-friendliness. The users are usually using MS Access for the very fist time, and have only basic computer use knowledge.
I don't want to cram the forms with help text, so I'm thinking of adding little question mark buttons that pop up a separate form with just help text. Is that wise?
I've also noticed a Help Context ID property, but it looks complicated (I'm looking for something as simple as possible to implement, so that the help text can be edited as easily as possible by others in the future). I think this is where I'd start if this were the way to go: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=209843
This may need to be translated, etc, so again, the simpler the better.
Thanks!
I've built such a system using tables and forms in the FE. You can get an idea by reviewing some of the screen shots at http://www.granitefleet.com/ScreenShots/index.htm I only created general help describing processes where something on a setup form can affect this form. So the user will know where to ge to change something around.
If you haven't built your forms yet, put that information in the table design, using each field's Description. That will propagate through your forms, and will be displayed on the Status Bar whenever a user click in that field.
If your forms are already done, use the [Status Bar Text] and/or the [ControlTip Text] property of your controls.
Just train your users or write once that they should read the Status bar if they need more explanation.
KISS (keep it simple and simple)
Great question. I think the real solution to reducing the amount of work that you need to do is to work really hard on having a simple, clean UI. In the real world there are very few people who have the patience or inclination to read the manual or search the contextual help even in the face of being stuck.
I know this is slightly off topic from the question but if you look at this website for example it keeps the number of things you can do on anyone 'screen' down to the minimum and everything has a tool tip (ControlTip Text in msaccess). Even if site this was in Japanese, I thin i could navigate around it fairly easily and that is because of its simplicity. (I couldn't answer any questions though :P)
Jakob Neilsen has a great site on usability
" I think the real solution to reducing the amount of work that you need to do is to work really hard on having a simple, clean UI. In the
real world there are very few people who have the patience or
inclination to read the man*emphasized text*ual or search the
contextual help even in the face of being stuck.*
Regarding this, it really depends on the application. It is overly simplistic to assume that every application can have all the information it needs to be operated just by having a simple clean UI, especially if in the name of being simple, there are alot of useful features that are not included. In certain complex applications, people will simply need to have patience and read the information available or they will waste a lot of time guessing. It is better to have have information at the press of a button than have them asking for it once they figured out that they are wasting time figuring it out with no help. I agree that many apps are way more complicated than they need to be.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
For instance, customers that we're creating web sites for, request things like:
all links should open in a new window
put custom 'Back' button on every
page while there is a working
browser's equivalent
make some part of the text blinking etc.
Of course I tell them it's wrong, but is there some nice list of bad things to have from a respected source that I can point them to?
Become that respected source. Seriously: if your clients are showing reluctance to take your advice directly, compose documents that illustrate good and bad user interface design and publish it on your website. You gain three things from this:
You become more knowledgeable about the why of bad and good design. Having to think through something to compose it into a document is more helpful than many give it credit for.
If this is publicly published, you probably will get feedback about your ideas. Throw away the bad suggestions and integrate the good, and you become better at your craft.
You have the source for these discussions in a presentable format, yet you retain all your personal branding. If you include examples and demos of the good and bad, most people can see why you advocate for your ideas.
EDIT: epotter is dead on as far as the "buck stops here" aspect of interacting with a client. If your documents can show why irritating a user is a loss of revenue in the long run, it is unlikely you will have much push-back. On the other hand, if your personal preferences includes UI designs that don't help with retention... stop doing that. (I recall the days of "CSS Only, No Tables" designers before CSS had matured: they insisted on forcing their designs on clients, even though in some browsers they didn't render well. While a cause is admirable, you work for the client not a cause.)
Always try and show them how it will cost them money. For example, if they are going to do something that annoys the user, they will have less traffic which will lead to less revenue.
For better or worse, dollars always speak the loudest.
First, don't tell them it's wrong.
They may take it personally.
Instead, understand the need they are trying to fill, then suggest alternatives that don't include the bad behavior. Mock all the alternatives up and point out the good and bad of each one. Let them choose. As long as you have a good alternative, and sufficiently pointed out the faults of the bad implementation, then they generally come around to your point of view.
In other words, act like a designer. When a customer says, "I want green text on a red background," you don't immediately tell them that 10% of the world's males cannot read that, you first need to understand why. "Well, it's Christmas," then you can suggest alternate themes to give the site a festive feel without the design error. As long as the mockups you suggest are better than theirs then they will generally acquiesce.
Not because they made an error, but because you saw their real need and improved on their idea.
If they're adamant after that, though, do the work - don't spend your time trying to convince them the error of their design sense, it's a waste of resources.
Educate them over the long term, but if it takes you an hour to convince them not to make a change, that's one hour you could have spent improving your relationship with customers who treat you as designers rather than web-monkeys.
-Adam
I've had to play a semi-sales role at time with web projects and I have to stress how important it is to keep the customer happy.
Nevertheless, I completely agree with you that you are obligated to say something in the name of giving them what they want. I always found that the best approach is to start by agreeing with them (in principal at least). You could say,
"I completely agree with you that this
text is very important to your users.
Many testers that I've worked with
have strongly preferred using this
font/graphic/color to call out
critical text. Unfortunately, some
users associate flashing text with ads
and avoid it"
I find that this approach lets them know that you
Understand what they want
Appreciate their motivations and suggestions
Only want to help
One last word of advice, if after the gentle nudging, they don't get the point, consider doing two quick mock-ups. (their idea and yours). If that doesn't work, then just give them what they want. In the end, they pays the bills and if they really want an ugly site (assuming you can't afford to turn away business on aesthetic grounds) just give them the site.
Good luck and take deep breaths!
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox has been an invaluable source of common-sense usability advice for me for many years. Here's something he wrote way back in 1996 that still applies today:
The BACK feature is an absolutely
essential safety net that gives users
the confidence to navigate freely in
the knowledge that they can always get
back to firm ground. We have known
from some of the earliest studies of
user navigation behaviorthat BACK is
the second-most used navigation
feature in Web browsers (after the
simple "click on a link to follow it"
action). Thus, breaking the BACK
button is no less than a usability
catastrophe.
And here are the first two of his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 1999:
Breaking or Slowing Down the Back Button
The Back button is the lifeline
of the Web user and the second-most
used navigation feature (after
following hypertext links). Users
happily know that they can try
anything on the Web and always be
saved by a click or two on Back to
return them to familiar territory.
Except, of course, for those sites
that break Back by committing one of
these design sins:
opening a new browser window (see mistake #2)
using an immediate redirect: every time the user clicks Back, the
browser returns to a page that bounces the user forward to the undesired location
prevents caching such that the Back navigation requires a fresh trip
to the server; all hypertext navigation should be sub-second and
this goes double for backtracking
Opening New Browser Windows
Opening up new browser windows is like a
vacuum cleaner sales person who starts
a visit by emptying an ash tray on the
customer's carpet. Don't pollute my
screen with any more windows, thanks
(particularly since current operating
systems have miserable window
management). If I want a new window, I
will open it myself!
Designers open new browser windows on
the theory that it keeps users on
their site. But even disregarding the
user-hostile message implied in taking
over the user's machine, the strategy
is self-defeating since it disables
the Back button which is the normal
way users return to previous sites.
Users often don't notice that a new
window has opened, especially if they
are using a small monitor where the
windows are maximized to fill up the
screen. So a user who tries to return
to the origin will be confused by a
grayed out Back button.
These aren't crazy newfangled ideas, they're decade-old guidelines based on hard research. You'd need a really, really, really good excuse to repeat a decade-old mistake.
Find examples of actual pages that do this and show them. Here's a good place to find some.
If you show them the examples, and instead of being awed by the suckyness and changing their minds, the clients say, "Yeah! That's exactly what I want!", then make them sign a nondisclosure contract saying they'll never tell anyone who designed their web site. :)
You have to explain "why". It's not enough to tell them something is "wrong" (and in these cases, it's not so much "wrong" as it is a "bad idea")
Most people respond well to logic and reason. If you can make a reasoned argument for why doing something a certain way is a bad idea, they'll usually bow down to your experience and knowledge.
useit.com is an excellent resource for usability arguments
but you're probably wasting your time. Either do it their way ("the customer is always right") or walk away - arguing is unlikely to improve the situation unless you can demonstrate a significant monetary gain from not doing it their way, which you probably cannot do given the issues you listed.
if your name will be on the site, i'd politely walk away
Show them some articles on sites like http://useit.com which has some empirical studies on how adherence to web standard practices increases usability and so therefore user satisfaction and so therefore profit.
Ask them what results they're after. "Have all links open in a new window" is a statement of solution. Solutions are your job, the client's job is to state objectives.
Start with this: "Oh, you'd like links to open in a new window. Tell me more about why you want that - I'd like to explore with you whether there are alternate ways of getting the same results."
Perhaps continue with this: "Also, I might point your attention to other consequences of opening all links in a new window - consequences you might not have considered, and which perhaps you wouldn't like."
Suggested reading: Dale Emery's articles on resistance.
At the simplest, try to explain them each of it in a user understandable manner.
e.g. Blinking text is an old style thing not supported by all browsers
Not sure why "back" can be a problem. But put your viewpoint.
It's always convincing if you demonstrate to the user that his design is unconventional or wrong by showing a list of very well known websites that he would "respect" and pointing out how they don't do X. Your customer will probably want his site to be like the big players' web sites.
If he still insists that his weird design makes sense you could say: "yes, I agree that sounds like a good idea in theory, but the fact is that users are simply unaccustomed to X and would walk away from your website if it diverges too widely from the standard way of doing things".
IOW, when all else fails, use fear.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
With customers (of any type), the best you can do is inform them of their choices, and why they are not the best ones and then leave it. If it's really bad, require sign-off stating that they find that design acceptable. Do you want to be 'right' or do you want to get something into the customer's hands that works?
If it completely impedes a working solution, then (and only then) should you stand on principle, but beware you have very few (if any) of these 'stands', so use them wisely. Be prepared to walk away.
Paul.
Unless there is a compelling business case NOT to do it (and I'm not sure this is the case with any of your examples) then if the customer is adamant DO IT! They are paying for it after all. They can always find someone else who will do it if you won't!
While designing my site I am constantly faced with the issue of whether its ok to TAKE ideas and designs from other sites. In some cases there is no distinction in certain aspects. Is there anything ethically wrong with this? Is this expected in the design programming community?
Depends on how much you 'steal'.
Code
If you're ripping off the whole design, then its a bit dodgy. If you like (for example) the Stack Overflow concept of voting up stuff, then steal the concept and use it in a different manner. If you want to know how say the orange highlighting of the up-voted items works, then look at the code. But don't do both and steal both the concept and the design, you'll just create a clone.
Due to the way different web browsers treat CSS and the like, there are often only a very few limited ways to do a particular thing (3-column layouts, etc.). It seems fair enough to blatantly copy in these cases where there is a common way of doing things. Where its something unique, and there's many ways of doing it, it seems a bit more off to blatantly copy.
Graphics
Ripping off graphics - not so okay. Images have been around a lot longer than code so copyright law, etc. probably suits them better. If nothing else you have to contend with possible watermarks or other metadata to identify the original source. It's very easy to check for image stealing, less so for code within a larger block.
I'm a coder, not a designer so what I tend to do is borrow graphics that I like just while mocking up my web-app for internal use. Does that seem fair? I'll change them for newly-designed or paid-for ones before going live. At least that's the idea, though it could be far too easy to forget and use them by accident.
That's the way it works in the newspaper world (well it used to, not sure now with the advent of this there Internet thang): You download as many graphics as you can bother waiting to come over your 57.6k modem; you only pay for the ones you actually publish.
Oh, this is a hard question.
On the one hand stealing is wrong, on the other hand you are obliged to save you employer money by solving a task quickly.
My only advice is:
If it feels wrong in your gut, you probably stole too much.
I think most designers and developers draw a distinction between 'creative inspiration' derived from someone else's work and blatant plagiarism.
I wouldn't think twice about peeking under the hood to see how someone had done a particularly nifty javascript effect, or implemented a tricky piece of css elegantly, but I'd find it distasteful to blatantly cut and paste that same code for use in my own development.
I'm not learning anything by just grabbing and reusing - although I think it's fairly standard to have the same code to hand as a rough scaffold from which to explore my own way of implementation. I think that's the way a lot of people work.
I am a web developer, not a designer. As such, I have a sense of taste, but not the ability to come up with something wholly on my own. As a matter of ethics, everything commercial or with the expectation of serious traffic that I do, I will hire a designer. They need to eat too, and there is something wrong with making money off of others work and not compensating them for it.
If it is small, personal, or an internal throwaway type thing, I will rip off things like color scheme and/or layout. Technically you could say this is stealing, but I think of it more as "imitation being the sincerest form of flattery" thing. I don't feel that bad about it since there isn't really any money to be made in it.
I think its ok to steal ideas, but not to steal code.
This is how a lot of design is accomplished. Except it's obscured by lots of lifts, not a single wholesale lift.
Stealing resources (graphics, code) is not really OK if they're not specifically marked as free/open/creative-commons/etc. Stealing design and layout is a bit sketchy if you're just xeroxing the same layout using your own code -- using someone else's design as a starting point is one thing, but don't just recreate their design verbatim. Stealing snippets of code for specific bits of functionality is fine (IMHO) since even if you grabbed a reference manual to learn it from scratch you'd end up with the same thing. (Think: javascript for changing an button image on mouse-hover)
Having said all that, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Don't steal resources, but using other sites as "influence" should be OK. Or, if in doubt, ask the owner of the site you intend to use as reference/influence.
It's almost like everyone answering this question forgot what it was like to work with web pages between 1995 and 2002 or so. Stealing was a way of life for tons of designers during that period. The key was, and still is, to take only what you need, and to make sure that you understand it well enough to make it from scratch the next time. Who knows, you might improve something in the process.
There's an old saying I was once told: Good designers create. Great designers steal.
That said however, you should never blatantly rip off code if you can avoid it. Look at it, understand it, rewrite it (or improve it, if possible; even if it's only something like using what you find are better variable names) but never just copy and paste. Same goes for layouts; take the layout and modify it to suit your needs - it might end up looking similar (look at all of the Basecamp-style clones out there as far as UI goes) and that's no big deal at all; plenty of sites look similar. The key is to go into the situation looking for inspiration and not some code to yoink. If you can use the code as-is or with little modification then you really have no problems, but it shouldn't be your intention to find someone else's code and rip it off.
It's a sliding scale. Borrowing just an idea is one thing, if you're incorporating it into the rest of your existing design, not just wholesale copying an idea. Snagging a idea for a design element is fine, copying a whole design exactly is not. As you borrow more and more of a design, it gets into the not acceptable category. Copying directly is also another factor. If you see something you like and reimplement it for yourself, that is typically fine. But doing a direct copy of code, images, or css not so much.
For the most part, ideas are fine to take and implement. If people couldn't take existing ideas and expand them or re-implement them, we'd never have gotten out of the dark ages.
If you feel the need to steal code because you can't code HTML/CSS well or don't have an eye for design, steal from a place that explicitly permits you to use their design/code, like OSWD. In general, stealing HTML is fine, but ripping off CSS wholesale is a no-no. Just because you can easily view the CSS source doesn't mean that it's ok to just copy and paste it.
Don't steal graphics, period. Especially things like photos and logos and icons. If you need that sort of thing, purchase stock photography or take your own photos.
When in doubt, ask the owner of the site.
Stealing code or designs is immoral and in some cases illegal.
Taking inspiration or copying functionality is less of a problem. For example, at some point in time someone realized that putting a "Forgot Password?" link next to all login forms is a good idea, now everyone does it. It's not theft it's just replicating a good idea.
I'm not a web developer, but I might have some insight that will help as well. My team has created several applications that have served as the starting point for other applications delivered to various customers.
The successful derivatives were those in which the developers took the time to learn the architecture and why things were the way they were. They then took the more crusty parts and rewrote them and in general expanded and improved the architecture.
Invariably, when a team simply took the existing project and tried to 'brand it' or copy it for a customer without actually figuring out the systems, they either created poor implementations of the extensions or had the project fail outright.
I realize this is a bit off the main topic of the ethical issues address by others here just fine, but my bottom line is that pure theft usually costs you more time than it saves.