Embracing Technology for Better Experiences

Posted on October 19, 2013 at 12:39 pm

In the start there has been a concept. And the speculation was formless and void, and it needed such a lot to be forged right into a real project. And the entire strategists, creatives, designers, project managers and techies were moving over the skin of it and spoke already different languages.

The thin line between excitement and disaster

Embracing technology for better experiences Image by Amir Hadjihabib

You already know the tale. It’s a few downslope, leading from an excellent idea to a mediocre end result. It’s about misunderstanding and never checking feasibility. It’s about not putting the entire parts together, and attempting to push a round peg right into a square hole.

The ideas are much valuable but always must be confronted with constraints. What does an concept should be completed? Is it even feasible? On the earth of digital projects, different factors have to be considered. The sort of, and perhaps the obvious one, is technology.

You should check if the project is possible at various stages – not just on the very beginning, but additionally during production. As a matter of fact, all of us in a digital project should know and understand a little bit what people do. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But reality says that every of the groups are inclined to pull one of the decisions within project towards them. My UX is more important than your visual design. My visual design is more important than your code. My code is more important than your UX.

Technology is a pivot here. It doesn’t matter what, it’s always a two-faced jack: a rock-solid foundation for the project and an impassable limitation. Looking to leap over this limitation may be fatal for a project. In other words – which you could break some UX and visible design rules, but you won’t turn a screen display into mirror or increase the throughput of the mobile link the top user has access to. Period.

In the dominion of the blind the only-eyed are kings

You don’t should be a one-man army. It’s enough to grasp the fundamentals and “feel” the restrictions. Just know the bounds and also you are the king. a great web designer does know some CSS and understands how the fluid grids work to supply responsiveness for a website. This information lets him to create designs which can be more feasible to implement and are still creative. Good UX designer, whilst, knows the technological constraints enough to not design something that simply won’t work. Front end developers and programmers ought to know the way to regulate the technology to satisfy both requirements of the user experience design and visible design. It gets much more tricky in case you ought to fit the budget, obviously.

This is why it is advisable adjust. This is because both basic and correct knowledge of the technology is so important. It always manifests in having a robust team of people that understand technology. You’re the trigger, you raise the flag, they do the remainder on their dedicated field. Simple.

Anticipating technology

Embracing technology for better experiences Image by Michael Spitz

Anticipating technology is most often knowing the limitations and getting the foremost from the projects within these. The limitations come from various sources – both user- and server side. It’s good to anticipate the location performance, considering what kind, from what sources and what kind of data an interface might want to load, and what server side or javascript operations must be performed inside the background. In accordance with this sense, you ought to suggest patterns that can work properly inside the (statistically) standard environment. Sometimes you simply must think server-wise, at other times you want to leave your desk (well, no less than: mentally) and do not forget that real users don’t use rocket-speed, 27” machines and the performance in their machines is significantly lower.

Of course, there are rational limits for adapting to user-side constraints. You won’t make everyone happy, you are able to only make happy the reasonable, statistical majority. But even then you definitely can use graceful degradation for the remainder of them. It’s another great way to provide the optimal level of awesomeness, simply by slightly decreasing experiences for older browsers and slower machines.

Making everyone happy is a wrong direction to head. While it’s, obviously, tempting, the price of implementing it versus the genuine profit, either for users or for business owner of the project, may be unjustifiable. I remember one interesting case with providing users to upload some very specific file format (actually: a host of formats) to the server and perform very demanding transformations at the server-side. Providing it’ll want a significant increase of the project costs, only to fulfill a small selection of users (like: 0.2% of them). There isn’t a business justification to this.

Planning technology

Planning technology goes beyond the limitations. Sometimes, the strategic, functional and (what turns to be primary on the end) business requirements of the project need extra power. Without it, you won’t be capable of reach the predicted return at the investment. Once you must comply with the technology users have of their hands, you are able to do the most efficient valuable to construct high-efficiency solutions at the server side, building thin-client interfaces in place of pushing your complete responsibility at the end-user machine.

Using data warehouses is one in all such situations. If a project should manipulate on high amounts of knowledge, you should be conscious about that on the very stage of UX design. You won’t manage to provide efficient patterns for data manipulation and presentation without it. You don’t should be very specific about it – all it’s good to do is raising a flag on the very starting to let everyone know and watch for the suitable people to leap in and to the remainder. After all , because it will not be your field, sometimes you will be wrong, but it is a matter to be checked by techies.

One of discussions i’ve once participated in, regarded displaying result of video search from multiple video-hosting services. While a majority of these displayed the effects almost instantly, the alternative ones API returned results with a substantial delay. Because the search engine idea was to display the hunt results which are most relevant to the quest query, and there has been a time limitation in receiving the complete list of videos from the whole sources, it might only be done on the cost of either of those: the effects accuracy or delay. That is an example of situation, where UX must adapt to technology.

When it involves planning technology, costs are involved. Sometimes heavy. This can be a pity when it seems in spite of everything which you cannot afford a far better technology inside the given budget, nevertheless it happens sometimes. In these situations it’s worthwhile to go lean, even perhaps the MVP way and stay on the level of providing the most effective you could. But, well, it’s worth looking to convince the boss, that the investment is critical, anyway

Keeping track at the implementation

Embracing technology for better experiences Image by Jip

UX design is ready designing experiences, not only interactions or wireframes. As such, it doesn’t end with the last view designed, be it wireframe or graphic design. Keeping track at the implementation itself is essential as it’s the instant the designed interactions actually come to live.

It often happens that something goes wrong on the phase of implementation. The designed patterns aren’t implemented properly and the ultimate product is way from what you may have designed. Assuming that you’ve got done your best anticipating and planning proper technology, this could not happen or a minimum of the impact of it would be minimal (it is where nothing describes the location better than the ole’ good tree project image – just google it).

Of course, situations happen, that you’re not ready to predict everything and it is crucial to regulate the UX idea at the fly. This aspect, however, gets minimized when your knowledge of technology is higher.

Sometimes, however, you could, especially when the project crew implements something that does work, but would not provide proper experience for the user. Take responsive images to illustrate. You are able to take care of them either inside the browser (which, for users on mobile link means much more data to download, leading to lower page loads and – finally – lower conversion of the location). But there’s also feasible to give this responsiveness on server side, preparing scaled versions of the pictures at the fly and serving these rather than their big brothers.

Getting inspired by technology

Technology, as already mentioned, can not be only regarded as constraint, it’s also very inspiring. Even at an excessively basic level, it could actually result in designing better interfaces. For this reason a regular dose of Wired, WDL, TechCrunch or The Verge is so important. You learn new things, or even for those who don’t – you at the very least get responsive to these and this results in new ideas of using the recent technologies and, therefore, designing better experiences.

So read plenty. And ask so much.

“Why don’t we use that, i’ve examine it somewhere?”

Surely, why not?

Some quick and practical tips:

Keep track on technology – you don’t must be a tech guru, a basic knowledge is fair enough to trace usability problems on the very beginning, find new possibilities and are available up with new, better ideas.
Try to work with those who have general knowledge concerning the technological aspects of the project, whether it isn’t their main field.
Do a feasibility check on the stages of ideation, UX design and graphic design.
Think budget-wise. Discover which changes can provide your project a lift that justifies additional investments.
Check if during implementation things go into the proper direction. If necessary, adjust your strategy, UX and design to handle technological constraints that seem during production.