From the category archives:

Web Design

Advice for Creating a Top-Notch Web Developer Resume – Interview with Kimberly Blessing

by Bill Cullifer on April 20, 2012

Advice for Creating a Top-Notch Web Developer Resume - Interview with Kimberly Blessing Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

According to Kimberly Blessing, Web developer, author and principle at Kimmie Corp, your resume format should work to highlight your strengths. The chronological resume, perhaps the most traditional format, fails in this regard. A functional resume does a much better job of highlighting your experience in a specific role, but most web developers are good at more than one thing. I suggest mixing aspects of the two formats, organizing them in a way that makes sense for you and your strengths — then you’ll have a resume that stands out.

A special shout to Kimberly and her blog for the interview and the following content.

Here are the general sections found in a great web developer resume. With the exception of the first two, the rest can be ordered and/or further broken out according to your needs.

Objective: If you’re searching for a job, you ought to know what you’re seeking! Customize your objective, as needed, when replying to job postings. (Note: If you’re not actively seeking a job, but still want to have a resume posted online, it’s okay to omit this section.)

Summary of Qualifications: It’s a cheesy headline, perhaps, and all too often the summary is filled with buzzwords — but I have read really compelling summaries that made me want to know more about a candidate. Focus on describing your strengths and what you contribute to an organization.

Skills: This is where the keywords and buzzwords will start showing up. That’s okay: you’ll back them up with evidence in the other sections. You can subdivide this section in any number of ways: Technical vs. Soft Skills, Front-End vs. Back-End Skills, Design vs. Development Skills, etc.

Professional Accomplishments: Here you can include project accomplishments, awards, public speaking engagements, publishing credits, or descriptions of really awesome things you’ve accomplished. Like the Skills section, you can also break these out separately.

Work Experience: If you’ve done any combination of full-time work, freelancing, and volunteering, this is the most generic title you can use for your work history. Some people like to break out their professional experience from other work, but I think that can undermine the importance of having taken on freelance or volunteer work. If you list accomplishments for each job in this section, don’t repeat them elsewhere, and vice versa.

Education: I don’t like to see this section missing from a resume. Haven’t gone to college? That’s okay. Be proud of what schooling you have made it through and list it here. Oh, and that includes training programs, conferences — anything you’ve forked out money for that you’ve learned something from!

Required Information

If your resume were to consist of only two things, it should be these:

Contact Information: You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but I have seen resumes where developers didn’t list a phone number, email address, or personal web site (more on that below). In my opinion, it’s a waste of space to display your full home address, especially if you are looking to relocate. No one’s going to snail-mail you an invitation to interview, so city and state will suffice. HR will collect the rest of your contact information later.
URLs: I wish I could tell you exactly how many of those ~500 resumes didn’t include a single URL… but my gut says that at least half didn’t feature even a personal web site URL. Seriously? If you’re a web developer, you should have some URLs to share. If you’re brand-new to the field, put some of your school projects online. If you’ve only ever done intranet-type work, get permission to copy parts of the code and make it available, or create other projects of your own to demonstrate your skills. If you’re serious about getting a web development job, you need this.

On the flip side, don’t waste space on these bits of information: references (or the phrase, “References available upon request”), GPA, salary requirements, or personal information (except if you have hobbies that would be of interest to another geek and would increase the likelihood of getting invited in for an interview).

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my resume have to fit on to one or two pages? No, I don’t think that it does. However, I think it’s nice if a resume is so well edited and structured that, when printed, it fits to exactly one or two pages (one page if you’re young, recently out of school, or switching careers; otherwise two pages). However, if you truly have so much awesomeness to report, then, by all means, go on! If you’re really that super-duper, I’m sure I’ll want to know all about it.

Does one resume fit all jobs? NO! Don’t be afraid to tweak your resume format or content to the job you’re applying for. In fact, if you have diverse enough skills and interests (design vs. development) you should probably have completely separate resumes for these purposes.

I am graduating soon and don’t have much web development experience. What can I do to beef-up my resume? Use the “Objective” area to make it clear that you’re looking for an entry-level position. Highlight your strengths in the “Summary of Qualifications” area and place the “Education” section next, so it’s clear you’re just coming out of school. List your technical skills, as well as any soft skills that you can support with extra-curricular or volunteer work. If you have been active in a tech community or have attended technical or web conferences, list those.

I’m switching careers. I’ve taken some web design and development courses and done some small projects. How do I reflect all of this in my resume? First, don’t hide the fact that you’re switching careers! Your prior experience, even if in a completely different industry, has (hopefully) taught you how to deal with people and has helped you understand your strengths. Start your resume with an “Objective” statement that spells out your desire to move into web development. Then list your skills, training and experience with the web so far before providing your employment history and other educational details. Highlight any experience that translates across industries, but otherwise keep the non-web details short.

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3 Keys To Making Giant Leaps In Web Product Development – Interview with Robert Hoekman, Jr

by Bill Cullifer on March 29, 2012

According to an article written by Robert Hoekman, Jr., user experience specialist, author and principal at Miskeeto.com there’s nothing wrong with improving an existing design. But if you’re interested in UX design and designing a truly innovative product, listen and read on.

In this 10 minute interview, I talk with Robert about the walk-aways for Web professionals including his thoughts on how to “stop making problem-solving your end goal. Don’t just solve the problem; solve it in a way that leaves your customers astounded and your competition dumbfounded.” I also talk to him about his heartfelt experiences as a Web professional rock star and his new book entitled “Big Deal: On Being Famous to Almost No One” that is available as an ebook at Amazon.com

3 Keys To Making Giant Leaps In Web Product Development - Interview with Robert Hoekman, Jr Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technology designers shout the famous Einstein quote with the same frequency and urgency that a puppy relieves itself on your favorite rug: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” But how frequently do they actually achieve this noble ambition? Almost never.

Of course, the problem with Einstein’s quote is not in the words used to craft it, but in its application. Tech designers, almost as a rule, and without even thinking about it, use what they know now as the starting line for their designs. Good design, after all, comes from incremental improvements based on old standards. But there’s a catch: On rare occasions, a disruptive design comes along that establishes a paradigm so far beyond the current that competitors spend the next year with their jaws on the floor, struggling to catch up, and that kind of design doesn’t come from incremental improvement; it comes from an outright assault on the status quo. This is no time to be shy, or tame. If you want a great design, you have to go Samuel Jackson on the thing. “Part of the problem is that the tech has outpaced our thinking.”

Smartphones, if you’ll recall, were downright awful until the iPhone set the new standard. Prior to that seismic event, the Motorola RAZR was the best-selling cell phone. Using the web on that thing was almost as confounding as making a phone call. The iPhone’s biggest innovation wasn’t in the aesthetic, the hardware, or even the introduction of the app model (though both certainly played a part). Its biggest innovation was its extreme degree of usability, plain and simple. The phone represented an advance in usability significant enough to be considered a re-imagining by customers and the media. The product was so much more usable by all accounts than others on the market that all Apple had to do to make it fly off the shelf was show a disembodied hand using it to do all the same things we struggled with on every other phone. It took the competition well over a year to produce something that even compared.

[As Hoekman points out, the real innovation starts at your 11th idea, not your first.]

Apple’s iOS devices may be among the most advanced pieces of engineering in history, but that isn’t their purpose. Their purpose is to be among the most usable pieces of personal tech in history. iOS is arguably the most approachable computing platform ever invented, and the extreme degree of usability it offers is the reason every parent in America right now has a story about a three-year-old who picked it up and intuited its use. And although Apple is certainly playing catch-up now on a variety of features (such as wireless delta updates, something other phones had for months prior to iOS 5), it set the bar, and that bar has made the company billions of dollars.

The lesson to be learned here: Good design may come from small steps, but important design comes from giant leaps.

So what’s stopping us?

Part of the problem is that the technology, which tech companies have more than proven can now handle impossible things, has outpaced our thinking. We’re still thinking in clicks when the tech is giving us gestures. We’re still tying our users to desktop computers when the tech enables us to go wherever our users go. What will push personal tech into the future now is figuring out how people will use all that computing power. Once and for all, we need to stop making technology usable and start making usable technology. The goal can no longer be merely to improve peoples’ experiences with technology; it must now be to use technology to change their experiences in life.

It’s the plainest message, the most explainable scope, the most intuitive usage model, the most appealing aesthetic, and the clearest purpose that compose a design of superior usability. It’s when these things are at their absolute finest and working in concert that a user’s experience is truly great. And it’s the person who becomes giddy in the face of such a challenge that stands the best shot at realizing a product, or even a feature, that matters as much.
“Design criteria help you envision a product that pushes the boundaries.”
If you’re such a person, here are a few mantras to consider tattooing on your forehead:
1. Stop designing solutions

Creating a Flickr knock-off to address users who want to organize photos is a solution. Creating Flickr in the first place? That wasn’t about solving a problem. That was about reinventing the act of photo-sharing to create something that had global reach and could be used by the masses.

Stop making problem-solving your end goal. Don’t just solve the problem; solve it in a way that leaves your customers astounded and your competition dumbfounded.

Achieving this means developing a strong product vision and making sure everyone knows it by heart, and writing up a set of design criteria–specific, actionable guidelines that describe the eventual experience of using the design–that help you envision a product that pushes the boundaries established by your competitors (and likely even yourself). Setting up those criteria isn’t about laying out what you know is possible, but laying out what you want. The proof will be in the execution, of course, but great execution starts here.

2. Start at number 11

Make incremental improvements and you get a design that’s incrementally better; make significant improvements and you get a design that’s important. Never accept the first idea you have–or even the tenth. Start with number 11. Whether done through back-of-the-napkin sketches, wireframes, blueprints, or engineering schematics, keep designing wilder ideas until you’ve reached so far into the abyss you’re not sure the thing is actually possible. Most of the time, it is–you just haven’t yet pushed your team far enough to discover they can accomplish it. Technology is no longer a serious limitation for most products. The only thing stopping you is your desire and willingness to push yourself and your team toward something more extreme than you previously thought possible.

3. Extreme usability is the goal

Usable products are those more convenient than the current alternatives (including your own), which is to say they’re more understandable, more approachable, more accessible, often (but certainly not always) cheaper, and frequently more beautiful. Touchscreens made using the web more convenient than on older smartphones. Contextual virtual keyboards made data entry (an email address, for example) more convenient than on a tactile keyboard. Video streaming made face-to-face meetings more convenient than driving to and from an office. These are not solutions; they’re the product of the pursuit of extreme convenience.

Regardless of whether you aim for advanced technology, make it a priority to aim for advanced usability. Your new end goal should be to design things more usable than anyone has ever imagined–than even you imagined. Don’t bother with anything less.

The best version of the same old thing isn’t the best version of anything. So forget what you know. Design like what you’re doing has never been done before and it’s up to you to become the person who sets the standard.

Look far enough and hard enough, and you just might.

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User Interface Design – Collaging: Getting Answers to the Questions You Don’t Know to Ask

by Bill Cullifer on November 17, 2011

User Interface Design – Collaging: Getting Answers to the Questions You Don’t Know to Ask interview with Kyle Soucy

When conducting user research, we all know asking the right questions is just as important as how you ask them, but how do you even know what questions to ask? What if the discussion topic is extremely personal and private? How do you get a complete stranger to open up to you? There is a better way to conduct an in-depth interview and it doesn’t involve using a clipboard. Just imagine what you could discover if the participant’s answers weren’t limited to a predetermined set of questions.

In this five minute interview with Kyle Soucy, founding principal of Usable Interface, Kyle will explain the history of collaging and other projective techniques, what you can learn from it, how to conduct it, and how to analyze the findings.

User Interface Design - Collaging: Getting Answers to the Questions You Don’t Know to Ask Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Collaging is a needs-elicitation technique where users randomly select images to represent how they feel about a specific topic. Users then explain the reason they chose each image to the moderator. The collage becomes an instrument for participants to express the needs that they might not otherwise have been able to articulate. This information allows us to better understand the user’s world and how to design for it.

Kyle Soucy is the founding principal of Usable Interface ((www.usableinterface.com), an independent consulting company specializing in product usability and user-centered design. Her clients have ranged in industries from pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer to publishing powerhouses like McGraw-Hill. She has created intuitive interfaces for a variety of different products, everything from web sites to touch screen devices.

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Closing the Gap between Design and Web Development – Interview with Chris Converse

by Bill Cullifer on November 3, 2011

Closing the Gap between Design and Web Development – Bring Your Design to Life Interview with Chris Converse, Author, Web Designer and Principle at Chris Converse Design

Closing the Gap between Design and Web Development - Interview with Chris Converse Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“A sizable gap between exists between the Print Design and Web Development side of the house” says Chris Converse, principle at Chris Converse Design. In this six minute interview Chris shares his perspective on:

• Steps to close the gap
• How to improve workflow between design and Web development
• Ideas and principles for incorporating HTML and CSS for print designers
• A step by step best practice to render and optimize your design in multiple browsers
• About his book “Bring Your Web Design to Life: Creating Rich Media Websites with Adobe Creative Suite” available at PeachPit Press will be sure to please any experienced developer that works with traditional print and newbie Web designers

Chris in his own words:

In working with design companies and advertising agencies around the world, we at Codify Design Studio noticed a common gap in the web design workflow—a gap between designers and developers, and the creation of the HTML and CSS necessary to bring that design to life within a browser. This gap in the workflow results in aspects of the designer’s vision being unrealized in the final design represented in a web browser.

In my seminars, I ask designers to raise their hands if they would be willing to send only artwork files to their commercial printers, and let the prepress men do the layout work instead of them. No designer raises his or her hand. Just as print designers are responsible for bringing their designs to the press, web designers should be responsible to bring their designs to the browser.

To help designers transition to web design, I’ve written and designed Bring Your Web Design to Life: Creating Rich Media Websites with Adobe Creative Suite. and its available at Peachpit Press. This unique video series and reference guide starts form the very beginning and teaches designers step-by-step how to bring their web design to the browser. You’ll start with a design comp in Photoshop, click on the slicing tool, and get to work creating the assets we need for your web layout.

“We combine graphic design with the technologies necessary to achieve communication goals across various media.”

We designed and developed the Project Rome site to reflect aspects of the software’s interface, while also adhering to requests to integrate social media and online forum discussions into the design. The homepage also features an xml-driven interactive carousel highlighting various features of this new product.

About Chris Converse

Chris is graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in graphic design. He began his career in print, designing and preparing digital files for commercial offset printing. Chris has spent the last 15 years studying and applying design and interface principles to technology. His work spans various distribution media (CD-ROMs, web sites, and interactive DVDs) and applies many authoring media and techniques (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, image optimization, motion graphics, Flash, Director, Shockwave, sound engineering, digital video compression, PHP, and ASP). Chris has a passion for and a commitment to conceiving, creating, and delivering the best possible user experience, regardless of the medium.

More information about Chris can be found on his website at:
http://codifydesign.com

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Battling Bureaucracy – Overcoming Challenges and Techniques Interview with Paul Boag, Headscape

by Bill Cullifer on October 24, 2011

Battling Bureaucracy – Overcoming Challenges and Techniques for Launching a Web Project – Interview with Paul Boag, Headscape

Battling Bureaucracy – Overcoming Challenges and Techniques Interview with Paul Boag, Headscape Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Whether you work as part of an in-house Web team for a large or small organization or solo as a freelance Web professional you will appreciate this five minute interview with Paul Boag, founder of UK Web design agency Headscape, author of the Website Owners Manual and host of award-winning Web design podcast Boagworld.

Battling Bureaucracy
View more presentations from Paul Boag

Paul shares his perspective and techniques for hitting and battling organizational bureaucracy when launching a Web project for large and small organizations:

Issues include:

* Departmental feuds
* Uninformed decision-makers
* Committees
* Endless scope creep
* Glacially slow progress

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Adobe MAX Keynote Day 1 – Interview with Janine Warner, Digital Family

by Bill Cullifer on October 5, 2011

Adobe MAX Keynote Day 1 – Interview and Event Summary with Janine Warner, Author and Web Designer at DigitalFamily.com

Adobe promised to unleash some creativity at the annual event for Web designers, developers and business pro’s and they delivered. To get a perspective for what the first day’s event meant for Web professionals, I sat down with Janine Warner, Author and Web designer at DigitalFamily.com. Janine, is an excellent communicator and provides key insights on the value proposition and job opportunities for Web professionals.

The day one keynote explored some of the latest technology trends and how they are impacting Adobe tools and solutions.

Highlights of the keynote:

- The major announcement was the unveiling of Adobe® Creative Cloud, a new initiative from the company that redefines the content creation process. Over time, Adobe Creative Cloud will become a focal point for the worldwide creative community, where creative professionals can access desktop and tablet applications and essential creative services, as well as share their best work.

- As part of this exciting announcement, MAX attendees will receive a complimentary year of an Adobe Creative Cloud membership.* The membership is expected to start in the first half of 2012 and coincide with the availability of Adobe Creative Cloud. MAX attendees will be contacted early next week with more details. *Certain limitations may apply.

- The introduction of Adobe Touch Apps, a new family of intuitive touch screen applications designed for Android™ tablets and Apple iPad that enable anyone to explore ideas and present their creativity anytime, anywhere. Inspired by the Creative Suite, these stunning new apps bring professional-level creativity to millions of tablet users. Learn more about the first six exciting new apps today:

Adobe Collage
Adobe Debut
Adobe Ideas
Adobe Kuler®
Adobe Photoshop® Touch
Adobe Proto

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Adobe MAX – Interview with Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc.

by Bill Cullifer on September 8, 2011

Adobe MAX - Interview with Ben Forta. Adobe Systems Inc. Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Adobe Max 2011 LA – Interview with Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems

Sponsored by the Adobe Systems, Inc. the Adobe MAX conference is one event and perhaps the only event that I know of that successfully combines a strong element of design, technology and business for its attendees. To explore what Adobe has is in store for this years Adobe Max LA conference scheduled for October, 2011, I reached out to interview Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist.

In this six minute interview, I asked Ben if he had any buzz that he could share surrounding this years event. I also asked him to share his thoughts regarding just how effective the mixing of the content ranging from creative, development and business is for the event and its diverse group of attendees.

“The days of being a silo with a single product or single technology are over. If you are building websites and using instruments HTML, CSS such as JavaScript, and backend, may be is not enough. You are going to be talking everything from Ajax to Flash to Flex to all technologies as well. If you are a designer, then you will more be faced on the coding also, you know that’s the reason we put scripting in your Flash with that’s the reason there is so much buzz around, around products like you know the preview of Edge right now, which lets designers to do, to start doing some animation, before it wasn’t really possible. And yeah the necessity for developers, designers for all players in this space to broaden their skills sets, understand to other source work, understand the work flow integration, process has become very, very compelling, really critical, really important and so you know, we actually don’t see that if people come to Max anymore who sign up for all the ColdFusion sessions, or all the Flex sessions and that’s it.”
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems.

Attn: WebProfessionals.org Members: Use the Adobe MAX discount coupon code WOW011 on the Adobe Max registration page and save BIG bucks.

Transcript:

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: I am on the phone with Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems with a great history, ColdFusion and Flex, good afternoon Ben and thanks for being to the interview.

Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Hi Bill, good to talk to you, thanks for having me.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: I appreciate that Ben, you obviously have been around this space for number of years going back to Macromedia and Allerier days with ColdFusion, great pleasure to talk to you today and I have a couple of questions for you about Adobe Max.

Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Ah, Max my favorite topic, go for it.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah, I appreciate that, so any buzz that you can share with us regarding to this year’s Max?

Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Well, a little, well I can’t tell you, just, I think it will be a lot of you know really interesting product announcements, some don’t knows that will well completely roll people, if you think of a scene of, I suppose Adobe Max before, there are interesting real surprises this year. So now I can’t tell you any specifics about any of those but I think it is probably worth noting that if you look at Max for the last few years, we have a history of showing very compelling stuff, going back several years ago, when we first showed this sneaker feature that got a standing ovation from the audience, then Adobe is coming with the new [indiscernible] [00:01:15] in Photoshop probably released to couple years ago when we first showed that its own features, started working with flash and plug, so then we ended up on an iPad and then last year with that of TV. So every year we’re showing very compelling things that’s of unexpected and help revolutionize the space really push the platform forward.

I think you will be very, very excited about what we have installed this year. So, you know I think previous years, we had two very compelling key notes, we are working them right now, we have our sneaks’ session that we do Tuesday evening every year and I am looking for the summer sneaks content right now as well. It was very, very cool content.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: With that in mind, I have a question for you so, because this event has an element of technology force, it has an element of creative, because it is creative medium and it has a heavy development conference, in other words it’s one of the events that I know of, one of the only events that I know of kind of combines the element of art, technology and business and so with that in mind, curious to know as a technology evangelist, how do you think that mix the overall development community and how does that work for the overall creative community?

Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : That’s a good question, and you’ve obviously been attending Max for a long time, if you ask that question because that’s probably the metamorphosis that Max went through amidst [indiscernible] [00:02:33] over a decade ago when it was a very much of single product above all the conference and it’s a lot along the way. It is, it isn’t very much those mixes, in fact you know when you look at the content, we divide them into, into three very high level tracks for the developers, designers, and then the vision track which is more the, the higher level of the case studying history, business opportunities, kind of a less technical law, industry trends and things. So we do try to console those, I think it’s really important because the days are being a silo with a single product or so with technology over. If you are building websites and using instruments such as JavaScript, and backend, backend may be is not enough. You are going to be talking everything from Ajax to Flash to Flex to all technologies as well. If you are a designer, then you will more be faced on the coding also, you know that’s the reason we put scripting in your Flash with [indiscernible] [00:03:22] that’s the reason there is so much buzz around, around products like you know the preview of Edge right now, which lets designers to do, to start doing some animation, before it wasn’t really possible.

And yeah the necessity for developers, designers for all players in this space to broaden their skills sets, understand to other source work, understand the work flow integration, process has become very, very compelling, really critical, really important and so you know, we actually don’t see that if people come to Max anymore who sign up for all the ColdFusion sessions, or all the Flex sessions and that’s it. They will do cross knit, do mix and there is a lot of crossovers below that and that’s good, it’s important, we try to solve and complete into one story. We want people to read our story you know they should come to learn for, it’s people who will come to Max for one particular thing but always we want to expose them to a broader variety of expanded options, so we can realize just what they can be doing and what we want them to built.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah, actually that’s a great summary of that, I appreciate that and thanks, I think that’s what is so valuable about Adobe Max is that it brings all of those elements together with a strong emphasis on business right at the end of the day, you know that’s great to be a savvy developer, terrific, creative, artistic designer, but at the end of the day there is a strong business element to all of the great stuff that we do right?

Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Yeah, and we actually see that in, even our content as well in Max, so if you go back years ago, the keynotes were, let’s talk about what to improve, let’s talk about what to do in ColdFusion, every product by product centric and look at about what we’ve done on the last few things that quite a bit and the keynotes and the big messaging is very much driven about what problem you are trying to solve hence with the recognition that, you know your business need, hence the problem you are addressing is going to likely necessitate a variety of products, a variety of technologies all working nicely together, and so you have the, we have done a big shift away from the very product silo centric thing to, to business problems and business solutions and helping developers and designers actually address real problems and become a very successful in doing so. So yeah that is entirely inline with how we position Max now a days.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: That’s what important one, right at the end of the day we want not only you know developers to think like designers and designers to think like developers but at the end of the day, we also want them to start working better together right, it’s all whole work flow environment?

Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Yep, absolutely.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah, excellent, well I think that’s a terrific summary on that, I appreciate, so we look forward to seeing you when in October, what date, Ben?

Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Yeah, I will tell you, it’s going to be Los Angeles, registration is still open, and it’s really fun, it’s going to be, hopefully we expect this to be our biggest Max hits. We have lot’s of very surprises in store, some of the pre-conference sessions are actually already sold out, but there is still [indiscernible] [00:06:05] Max itself you haven’t attended go to max.adobe.com and you can register right away. You know there is two days, we have two days of keynotes, we have the big special party that would be, even more special this year I can promise you. On the second night we have the sneaks, we have the Max awards, sessions, this year we have greatly expanded the “Bring Your Own Device” sessions that became popular over the last couple of years where [indiscernible] [00:06:31] bring their own devices, so you are up, and books and pretty complex scenarios and so yeah it’s everything Max has always been just bigger, more of its, more people and more products, more technologies and whole of more fun as well, so if you haven’t signed up yet, I’d love to see you there. Go to max.

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Mobile JavaScript – Interview with Christopher Schmitt

by Bill Cullifer on September 4, 2011

Mobile JavaScript – Interview with Christopher Schmitt Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mobile JavaScript – Interview with Christopher Schmitt

Mobile JavaScript – Interview with Christopher Schmitt, Heatvision.com
The Mobile web is growing eight times faster than the desktops and Smartphone sales will surpass PC sales in 2012 says Christopher Schmitt at Heatvision.com

In this eighteen minute interview with Christopher Schmitt, author, Web standards advocate, designer and principle at Heatvision.com, a small new media publishing and design firm from Austin, TX, Christopher shares his thoughts and perspectives on the mobile JavaScript frameworks, mobile design and mobile best practices.

We also discuss his thoughts on why Markup and Scripting is important for Web Designers, some of the takeaways from a upcoming HTML5 Cookbook he is collaborating on and a totally online Mobile JS Summit that he has planned complete with discounts for WOW members as well as a number of other events that he has planned.

I continue to be amazed and impressed with just how incredibly intelligent and down to earth Web professionals like Christopher Schmitt are and I’d like to give him, his co-authors and his collaborators on the following events for Web professionals. It’s a great time to be a Web pro and I’d highly recommend that you learn more about Christopher and his support for the Web professional community.

* Mobile JS Summit – http://mobilejssummit.com/
* Accessibility Summit – http://a11ysummit.com/
* UX Web Summit – http://uxwebsummit.com/

Discount code for Mobile JS Summit 20WOW (Good for 20% off, and good for all three events)

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Demystifying HTML5 – Interview with Bruce Lawson, Opera

by Bill Cullifer on August 18, 2011

Demystifying HTML5 – Interview with Bruce Lawson, Author, Web standards advocate and evangelist at Opera

Suddenly, everyone’s talking about HTML5, and ready or not, you need to get acquainted with this powerful new development in web and application design says Bruce. Some of its new features are already being implemented by existing browsers, and much more is around the corner.

In this seven minute interview with Bruce Lawson, author, Web standards advocate and evangelist at Opera, Bruce shares his thoughts and perspectives on HTML5 as well as some takeaways from his HTML5 book for Web professionals.

Demystifying HTML5 – Interview with Bruce Lawson, Opera Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A special shout out to Bruce Lawson for the interview and his time. Bruce is a down to earth guy and we would like to thank him publicly for all that he does to support Web professionals and the Web professional community at large.

Here’s an intro to his book as well as a few links to check out.

HTML5 Book Lawson

Written by developers who have been using the new language for the past year in their work, this book shows you how to start adapting the language now to realize its benefits on today’s browsers. Rather than being just an academic investigation, it concentrates on the practical—the problems HTML5 can solve for you right away.

By following the book’s hands-on HTML5 code examples you’ll learn:
•new semantics and structures to help your site become richer and more accessible
•how to apply the most important JavaScript APIs that are already implemented
•the uses of native multimedia for video and audio
•techniques for drawing lines, fills, gradients, images and text with canvas
•how to build more intelligent web forms
•implementation of new storage options and web databases
•how geolocation works with HTML5 in both web and mobile applications

All the code from this book (and more) is available at www.introducinghtml5.com

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Beyond Usability – Interview with Kelly Goto, gotomedia

by Bill Cullifer on August 11, 2011

Beyond Usability – Interview with Kelly Goto, gotomedia Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Beyond Usability: Emotion as the New User Experience with Kelly Goto, principal of gotomedia, LLC San Francisco, CA

Today’s connected experiences are no longer limited to a single laptop or mobile device. High expectations and dwindling patience have pushed customer demands to a new level.

In this fourteen minute interview with Kelly Goto, author, blogger and principal at GotoMedia based in San Francisco, CA, Kelly shares insights about “design ethnography” and tips to rethink your design and research approach and gain insight into the needs and desires of your customer in a truly contextual manner.

We also talk about the importance of understanding “Markup and Scripting” for Web designers and how members of her team are most effective as “left brain and right brain” Web professionals.

According to Wikipedia, Ethnography (from Greek ethnos = folk/people and grapho = to write) is “the science of contextualization” often used in the field of social sciences—particularly in anthropology, in some branches of sociology,[2] and in historical science—that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture. It is often employed for gathering empirical data on human societies and cultures. Data collection is often done through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Ethnography aims to describe the nature of those who are studied (i.e. to describe a people, an ethnos) through writing. In the biological sciences, this type of study might be called a “field study” or a “case report,” both of which are used as common synonyms for “ethnography”.

Data collection methods

One of the most common methods for collecting data in an ethnographic study is direct, first-hand observation of daily participation. This can include participant observation. Another common method is interviewing, which may include conversation with different levels of form and can involve small talk to long interviews. A particular approach to transcribing interview data might be genealogical method. This is a set of procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent and marriage using diagrams and symbols. Questionnaires can be used to aid the discovery of local beliefs and perceptions and in the case of longitudinal research, where there is continuous long-term study of an area or site, they can act as valid instrument for measuring changes in the individuals or groups studied. Traditionally, the ethnographer focuses attention on a community, selecting knowledgeable informants who know well the activities of the community. These informants are typically asked to identify other informants who represent the community, often using chain sampling. This process is often effective in revealing common cultural common denominators connected to the topic being studied. Ethnography relies greatly on up-close, personal experience. Participation, rather than just observation, is one of the keys to this process. Ethnography is very useful in social research.
Differences across disciplines

The ethnographic method is used across a range of different disciplines, primarily by anthropologists but also frequently by sociologists. Cultural studies, economics, social work, education, ethnomusicology, folklore, geography, history, linguistics, communication studies, performance studies, advertising, psychology, usability and criminology are other fields which have made use of ethnography.

Cultural and social anthropology

Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts which are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronis?aw Malinowski, Ethnologische Excursion in Johore by famous Russian ethnographer and naturalist ( “The moon man”) (1875) Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Naven (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson or “The Lele of the Kasai” (1963) by Mary Douglas. Cultural and social anthropologists today place such a high value on actually doing ethnographic research that ethnology—the comparative synthesis of ethnographic information—is rarely the foundation for a career.[citation needed] The typical ethnography is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the ethnography is common.[8] Ethnographies are also sometimes called “case studies.”[9] Ethnographers study and interpret culture, its universalities and its variations through ethnographic study based on fieldwork. An ethnography is a specific kind of written observational science which provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought. Classic examples are Carol Stack’s All Our Kin, Jean Briggs’ “Never in Anger”, Richard Lee’s “Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers,” Victor Turner’s “Forest of Symbols,” David Maybry-Lewis’ “Akew-Shavante Society,” E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s “The Nuer” and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “Tristes Tropiques”. Iterations of ethnographic representations in the classic, modernist camp include Bartholomew Dean’s recent (2009) contribution, Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia.
Bronis?aw Malinowski among Trobriand tribe

A typical ethnography attempts to be holistic and typically follows an outline to include a brief history of the culture in question, an analysis of the physical geography or terrain inhabited by the people under study, including climate, and often including what biological anthropologists call habitat. Folk notions of botany and zoology are presented as ethnobotany and ethnozoology alongside references from the formal sciences. Material culture, technology and means of subsistence are usually treated next, as they are typically bound up in physical geography and include descriptions of infrastructure. Kinship and social structure (including age grading, peer groups, gender, voluntary associations, clans, moieties, and so forth, if they exist) are typically included. Languages spoken, dialects and the history of language change are another group of standard topics.Practices of childrearing, acculturation and emic views on personality and values usually follow after sections on social structure. Rites, rituals, and other evidence of religion have long been an interest and are sometimes central to ethnographies, especially when conducted in public where visiting anthropologists can see them.[15]

As ethnography developed, anthropologists grew more interested in less tangible aspects of culture, such as values, worldview and what Clifford Geertz termed the “ethos” of the culture. Clifford Geertz’s own fieldwork used elements of a phenomenological approach to fieldwork, tracing not just the doings of people, but the cultural elements themselves. For example, if within a group of people, winking was a communicative gesture, he sought to first determine what kinds of things a wink might mean (it might mean several things). Then, he sought to determine in what contexts winks were used, and whether, as one moved about a region, winks remained meaningful in the same way. In this way, cultural boundaries of communication could be explored, as opposed to using linguistic boundaries or notions about residence. Geertz, while still following something of a traditional ethnographic outline, moved outside that outline to talk about “webs” instead of “outlines”[16] of culture.

Within cultural anthropology, there are several sub-genres of ethnography. Beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing “bio-confessional” ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis, as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (Laura Bohannan). Later “reflexive” ethnographies refined the technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. Famous examples include “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow, The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within the discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial/post-structuralist thought. “Experimental” ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig, Debating Muslims by Michael F. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, A Space on the Side of the Road by Kathleen Stewart, and Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun.
[edit] Sociology

Sociology is another field which prominently features ethnographies. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, with some well-known early examples being Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr.. Some of the influence for this can be traced to the anthropologist Lloyd Warner who was on the Chicago sociology faculty, and to Robert Park’s experience as a journalist. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. Other important ethnographies in the discipline of sociology include Pierre Bourdieu’s work on Algeria and France, Paul Willis’s Learning To Labour on working class youth, and the work of Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier, Loic Wacquant on black America and Glimpses of Madrasa From Africa, 2010 Lai Olurode. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.
[edit] Communication studies

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnographic research methods began to be widely employed by communication scholars. Studies such as Gerry Philipsen’s analysis of cultural communication strategies in a blue-collar, working class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Speaking ‘Like a Man’ in Teamsterville, paved the way for the expansion of ethnographic research in the study of communication.

Scholars of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to analyze communication behaviors, seeking to answer the “why” and “how come” questions of human communication. Often this type of research results in a case study or field study such as an analysis of speech patterns at a protest rally or the way firemen communicate during “down time” at a fire station. Like anthropology scholars, communication scholars often immerse themselves, participate in and/or directly observe the particular social group being studied.

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