It is day 3 of the SharePoint 2009 conference, and I neglected to mention that we have 11 people from Habañero in Vegas right now! You can follow all our updates and news from the conference on our new blog: http://www.habaneros.com/blog.
Or if you prefer shorter updates, follow @HabaneroConsult on twitter! Let us know if you have questions, or things you want to know and I will try to find the answer for you as well.
This blog has been on a bit of a summer hiatus, but we are starting to trickle back (finally!) To ease back into things, here are some tidbits from this past summer:
Look for more design insights, project updates and general commentary in the fall!
Actually, this is one I am proud to have. I have been awarded my Professional Membership in the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada!
I’ve been a practicing designer for ten years now, and I finally decided to join the organization. It was an interesting process, as I had to prepare a portfolio of my work, along with an explanation of the strategies and considerations that formed the designs. I think the most unnerving part was knowing my work would be reviewed by my peers in the GDC on strategy, typography, use of imagery, implementation and presentation, and that I had to score well to become a member. I feel honoured to be recognized by my peers as a professional practitioner, and I am excited to be part of a supportive, creative community.
I’m pretty impressed so far with the open communication I have experienced within the organization, and I’m looking forward to getting out to the events to meet more of the community and share ideas. Above all, I can only hope this will help improve my work and to deliver more excellent value to our clients.
Yesterday, I attended an online webinar put on by VizThinkU entitled Visual Note-taking 101. The speakers/sketchers were a wonderfully talented bunch including Austin Kleon, Sunni Brown and Mike Rohde and moderated by Dave Gray (XPLANE). The format was informal and took us through a variety of techniques around visual thinking over a joyous 3-hours. Check out some of the great sketches from the session by Austin (included below with permission – thanks Austin!).
Some take-aways from the session:
Drawing is pictures and words together in space. Visual thinking is comprised of drawings, to which we add words to fine-tune meaning and then we can arrange and juxtapose to create connections. Interestingly, the wireframes we Information Architects produce are comprised of the same elements and all are critical to someone understanding our work.
Everyone can draw. You just need to learn the basics. Using Dave Gray’s visual alphabet it really isn’t hard to draw most things. The basics include the following: a point, a line, a circle, a square and a triangle (you can extend this as well a bit with a rectangle and a swirl).
Many clients like to say they can’t draw and I think this is a great way to show them they can and get them involved in sketching out ideas and their user experience. I’ve been using this same technique with my son over the past few months and it’s amazing to see how quickly kids can learn to draw using these principles.
Build a symbol library and vocabulary. Each of the presenters yesterday had a toolkit of things they use regularly. Austin has a particular way of drawing clouds and the sun; Sunni breaks her drawings into sections with dividers to make things easier to digest; while Mike uses typography and design basics (layout, size, color, shading) to show importance on the page. All of these are elements they can use quickly and easily and pull from their toolkit as needed. I see this as similar to the modular thinking and frameworks based work many IA’s and developers are now using to speed up work.
Start where you like. Austin likes to start in the middle and work his way out, Sunni tends to start top left of her paper (usually adding a title, the company logo, etc.), while Mike starts where it feels best to begin. All were valid approaches and changing up where you start sketching may help shift how you approach your work.
Listening when sketching is a fine art. Some tips from the session included:
There were also some great books referenced during the webinar worth checking out:
Happy visual thinking!
Funny title, I know. But sometimes you have to choose a funny name to make waves. Let me tell you about a little internal project that has changed the way we work together, in delightful ways.
A while back, I told you about our experiments in agile design, how we were applying agile methodologies in working groups to get results faster. Our working group was tasked to find a better way to explain our UE process to the organization and our clients. We felt that the nuances were getting lost in translation, and perhaps a few tools would help our colleagues in those conversations that count. We envisioned a master spreadsheet, complete with every UE task known to man, subdivided by roles and wired with rates, so our project managers could have a way to devise estimates. We also envisioned a Tuftesque super graphic that would explain the dance of roles, tasks and deliverables; a veritable work of art that would leave no one in question of our process. It was that easy, right?
Our hypothesis soon began to generate more questions than answers. Although the master spreadsheet is useful, it does cause headaches for us that are more visually inclined. It also lent to creating rigid, waterfall processes, which gave no room for flexibility and creativity. How is this helpful for team members? Also, how were we going to create that super graphic? Our process changes from project to project, so how could one graphic and spreadsheet explain it all? Perhaps we should create multiple graphics for types of projects? How do we get to those frameworks?
These questions led to some interesting answers. To come up with the diagram prototypes, we decided to write the tasks on bits of paper and try some configurations on a tabletop. We quickly jumped to creating permanent magnets to be used on the magnetic white board, on which project specific notes could be written quickly. Reuse, recycle, recreate! Plans of Steel, no less!
We’ve been using the H Pack internally now for a few months, and we have seen some great successes:
We are always adding more tasks and deliverables to the H Pack as each team uses it. It continues to become a richer source of knowledge at Habañero. And it gives us time to spend time together working, which can be a whole lot of fun!
