petty-dev-rants

[petty-dev-rants]

My Guide for Asking about UI/UX

... Instead of giving my subjective, biased and ultimately worthless opinion about whether or not I think their designs are pretty, I asked them different questions instead. As someone who is judging the usability and usefulness of an app design, I need to understand the bigger picture: 1. Who’s this for? (It’s for doctors, patients and gyms. The app we looked at focused on doctors.) 2. In what situation would they be using it? What mental state? Are they relaxed? Stressed? Do they have time for your app? 3. What do you want them to do? What task do you want them to complete? What problem does it solve for the doctor? 3.1 Tip: If your answer is “Oh, well they can log in and browse this information and kinda get updates from their patients about things and then they’d probably click on X and then maybe do Y”, you haven’t answered the question. I know what the features are but what problem are you solving? What do you make easier for your user? 4. What do you want me, a doctor, to change in my day now that I have your app? How do you design for that? How do you get me to use your app? How do you onboard me and show me the value of it? What’s your selling process? 5. Why would I open the app? When? A notification? I’m a busy doctor would I like to be interrupted? 5.1 Answer from team: “Based on our interviews, they want to be interrupted.” 5.2 My counter argument: “No, based on your interviews, they SAID they want to be interrupted. What people say and what people do are often different things. Did you dig deeper? Did you ask them when they’d like to be interrupted? When they’re with a patient? When they’re doing their rounds in the hospital? When they have their 5 precious minutes during the day when they’re finally able to take some time for themselves? What does it feel like for them to get notifications during these times? How can you simulate it without building an app to validate what works best?” If you’re building something that hasn’t been built before, you need to get as close to your customers as possible. Spend time with them, don’t assume anything, except that what you’ve done, what you understand and what you think is wrong and needs to be validated. Don’t spend all your time stuck at the 31st floor of your nice office building when your customers are all the way down on the ground floor. The moral? Going back to the first workshop UXMNL did with Patti and Kristin in 2014: UX reaches beyond the screen. It’s not just what happens with the user interface. It’s what happens before, after and during. How does it make me feel? I know you have a pretty app but that’s not the point. Anyone can design a pretty app but have you taken the time to understand the wider picture, to empathize with the person you’re designing for to bridge the gaps and truly solve a problem? All that stuff is UX. UX is hard and requires a lot of thinking, iterating, mental effort, comfort with ambiguity and seeing the world with fresh eyes (vuja de - see video below). Action points for the team I met: 1. Forget the visual attractiveness of the design cos it’s not important right now. Focus on the problem you’re solving, prioritize the features. 2. Think about the gaps and revise how you’re doing the interviews from “What do you think of this design?” to exploring the underlying question, asking why 5 times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys 3. Watch Steve Krug’s usability testing presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8 4. Watch Vuja De https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7LBSDQ14eA ... I literally copy pasted and edited this post to those that I need.

[petty-dev-rants]

So far, so good.

Its been a fortnight since I've been with my previous company. And its been fucking great. I can't emphasize enough how I'm glad to NOT be a part of their journey to whatever road they pursue. I wish them good luck in their conquest. I've been learning ReactJS and friends since that time, and I'm halfway there. I just need to learn 3 more fucking libraries (yeah, thats the Javascript life). But for the most part. I've only missed my coworkers. Other than that, nothing.

[petty-dev-rants]

Ahhh, the life.

Its been day 2 since I've enjoyed my resignation. And I've already finished 2 Assassin's Creed games. Now I'm studying React. Already getting used to the components and life cycle. Its like I have to pause the tutorial because I have to write the class component first so I can follow along to what he's saying. I'm gonna finish this and componetize the front end (platf0rm) before I start another game.

[petty-dev-rants]

Can Component

I can now basically create react components with only the render method. But also some many things. I can set the default props and default state of the component, I can write in ES6 classes which I can write those React.createClass to ..extends React.Component (I'm not gonna dive into Higher order functions of JS just yet, because if I did, it'll be a hell of a lot longer to create React components.) Anyways, by friday I'll be coding the mockup that I've done. And hope for the best. Why? Because I think the group that Im collaborating in is irritated by my part of the project which is not updated as frequently as theirs are.

[petty-dev-rants]

Develop in feature increments. Each feature is its own branch. Have a release branch you merge your features into. Your feature merges should always be one commit. You only merge when all your tests are passing on your feature branch.

Anon

[petty-dev-rants]

The boss I hate, finally, isn't coming back.

Finally, the title says it all. That Viet mother lovin' boss is not coming back. To think that I have to endure his decisions long before I resign to this company. He's not that bad actually, just bad enough to think that he thinks high of himself. Don't get me wrong, his decisions were informed, but not informed enough. He's like a leader who only wants to be informed by sources he has no problem with. Take for instance, me. I am a web developer here. But I work on the digital marketing department doing SEO. I have knowledge with SEO enough to know that the site should here to Google's guidelines (site should be fast, site should minimize css & js, etc.) but do not know link building, keywords and the "marketing" aspects of SEO. Google keeps on saying that webmasters should create content for users, which in turn your site will rank higher on Google Search Results page yada yada yada. Now take note, create content for users. Now this mother lover is the opposite. We should create content for the Googlebot (the computer program Google created to check your site). Which I think is full of shit. To think that we are marketing only for googlebot and not for the user is insanely not the purpose of SEO. We keep on trying to convince him that he is wrong. But what can we do, he thinks high of himself (wanna know why? The company begged him to stay.) He gets angry when we do not follow his instructions (but proposed an alternative) and when we just follow him with no suggestions or any participation in their discussion whatsoever. Flipped, isn't he? Tl;dr, he is gone. I can now wait out my days so I can finally file in my resignation letter and rest. I already hoarded learning material enough for months and (hopefully go after startups, or even better, create a startup myself.) Goodluck to me.

[petty-dev-rants]

Tbqh, i havent had much problem with the bosses these past few days. Huh. Great for a fucking first post.