Because you can totally assign a random group of people to eat meat for twenty years and see who dies. No ethical problem there, right?

Because there totally was such a thing as grass-fed meat, that people knew and cared about, 20 years ago, that they could control for in 20 years of data.

Because this study is obviously trying to turn people vegan.

While I am fully in support of pastured beef, and meat from happy animals, these arguments irritate the hell out of me for some very specific reasons. Mostly, I’m irritated because these arguments have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL RESEARCH THAT WAS DONE.

First of all, the study looked over the course of 20 years, not a few months, and they found specifically that each INCREASE in red meat consumption, particularly process meats, led to an increase in mortality. For example, they found that people who ate a LOT of red meat or processed meat—think 5 or more meals a week—were also more likely to be smokers, have a high BMI, etc. The researchers even go on to suggest that people cut down on their consumption of these foods—note, NOT eliminate them, NOT become vegetarian—but CUT DOWN ON THE DAILY CONSUMPTION OF STEAK AND BACON—in order to reduce their risk of chronic disease.

In other words, they found that people who eat mostly red meat and processed meats aren’t particularly healthy. That’s a “duh” moment if ever I heard one.

But somehow, this has turned into, for some people, a manifesto against all meat, and for some people who eat grass-fed beef, rather than simply showing the abundant evidence that it’s better for you—IN MODERATE AMOUNTS—than feedlot beef, have to jump on the defensive, and attempt to debunk some very interesting findings.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve spent the last several months deeply absorbed in eating behavior research (and may, in fact, spend several more years studying it), but that kind of nonsense gets me really irritated. Primarily because the media loves to turn scientific research into definitive cause-effect relationships (The LA Times reported something like “All Red Meat can Kill You” as their headline for this article), when the research itself is rarely close to definitive, and always notes an ASSOCIATION, NOT A DIRECT EFFECT.

So, to recap: yes, eating pastured beef is better for you than eating beef that comes from Cattle Death Pens. However, that doesn’t mean that living exclusively on steak, meatballs and bacon will EVER BE GOOD FOR YOU. That’s not an argument against all meat; it’s an argument for intelligent and balanced food consumption. If you’re going to make an argument, make *that* one.

Principal at Proof, @jboogie, jeff@proof-nyc.com

Lean UX is one solution to the Agile problem

• Focus on delivery, not deliverables (build SOMETHING)
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Lean Startup

• Every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question: not “CAN I build it,” but “SHOULD I build it?”
• How do you spend the least amount of time designing/building the wrong thing?

• Steps:
• Formulate concept and create minimum level of fidelity to communicate and validate
• Validate internally: stakeholders, developers, other designers, etc.
• Prototype: get something out quickly so you can get it in front of customers or proxy customers
• Test externally: get someone in front of your prototype and see what happens; is it usable? Is it USEFUL?
• Learn from user behavior
• Iterate
• Designers need to step from behind their monitors and show early work much earlier and more often

First five things you need to do in order to make Lean UX happen:

• Solve the problem together; don’t implement someone else’s solution
• Bring the team you’re working with further into the process
• Involve them in ideation and problem solving
• Build shared understanding, which relieves the focus on deliverables
• Let people know why certain decisions are being made
• There’s no reason a developer can’t contribute to the design phase of a product and vice versa
• Sketch
• Remember, you’re not DRAWING; you’re sketching ideas together
• If you can draw a circle, a square and a triangle, you can draw every interface that exists.
• Work together on sketching and iterating, then work in parallel to build the thing
• By working together, you don’t need to document things because you’ve already talked about it
• Prototyping
• Get your experience out, not the document
• Validate hypothesis
• What is the fastest way to get something into peoples’ hands that helps communicate the concept and its usefulness?
• Axure
• Straight into code
• Other prototyping frameworks
• Pair up cross-functionally
• designer with developer
• builds a common language and trust between the pair
• makes the team more efficient
• “design in the browser”
• helps develop working code really quickly
• Style guides are ESSENTIAL
• could also be pattern or component libraries
• make it a living document
• make accessible to the entire team
• button styles and logic
• color palettes
• default values for drop down menus
• add code assets where applicable
• helps the team put things together more quickly over time; assets can be grabbed and “dropped in” to a prototype
• Critique early and often on designs that don’t feel “finished”
• Designers have trained their clients to believe that the first thing they see will always be beautiful and “right”
• NOBODY gets it right the first time, and nobody else is expected to.
• It’s about getting concepts out early, and moving towards the “right” solution based on validated learning
• It’s not the “Spec” that gives control
• Lead with conversation, trail with documentation
• designers are there to lead and facilitate the design process
• Keep everyone moving forward
• Provide team members with insight into the design process
• Build momentum and engagement
• Build shared understanding

How to manage quality vs. speed

• “Speed first, aesthetics second” — Jason Fried, 37Signals
• “It’s not iterative if you only do it once”
• Iterations mean quality continually improves.
• Move from minimally viable (simply works) to minimally desirable (works well, looks good, people want it)
• Once you’ve validated your concepts, demo to the team
• get them started building on a parallel path while you work on exception cases

Everything you put out into the world is a hypothesis. Your goal is to validate that hypothesis as quickly as possible and learn from the results.

• Lean UX builds user testing into every sprint cycle
• Don’t build things that people don’t want
• Use data to settle subjective issues
• A/B testing
• Qualitative testing (user testing, etc.)
• Use qualitative data to find out what people prefer; use A/B testing to validate that they prefer it.
• Fill in the gaps through shared understanding
• the more you talk about it, the better people understand why decisions were made, and more easily they can put the pieces together.
• allows for estimation and prioritization within the flow of the building the project
• Form factor is ultimately irrelevant
• Many ways to test hypothesis
• Testing doesn’t have to be expensive
• Proto.io

Lean UX is NOT

• Lazy. You still have to work hard, perhaps even more than what you did before
• Collaboration level is significantly increased
• What’s being removed is the WASTE that comes from the traditional UX process
• Using the right tool at the right time
• Design by committee
• Yes, you’re involving other people, but it’s the DESIGNER’s job to synthesize that info into a concrete design

Getting started: in-house

• Start small on an internal project
• Ask for forgiveness
• As you build camaraderie and start seeing results, others will start to notice and build interest
• You are in the business of solving problems; you don’t solve problems with design documentation

Getting started: startups

• This is the way to go, particularly in B2C

Getting started: interactive services/agency world

• It’s a tougher sell, because agencies are in the deliverables business.
• Give your clients the power. They like that.
• Concept
• Validate with client
• Iterate
• Validate with client
• Prototype
• Learn from user behavior
• Can you get to the clients’ customers, or a similar proxy?
• Gives clients the ability to see their “fingerprints” in the work; increases ownership.
• Prevents “seagull management” — “swoop in and poop on it” — they can’t blame the agency anymore
• Builds a more collaborative, less adversarial, relationship with clients

Getting started: Consultants

• Consultants are mini-agencies

Distributed teams

• If they’re part of you, it can work really well;
• If they aren’t, i.e. third party vendors, it’s much harder and likely to fail
• Blog post: http://www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/remote-collaborative-brainstorming-and-sketching-part-i/; shows collaborative sketching process with remote teams

Considerations

• With content heavy experiences, some up front planning is necessary
• Must understand what those content blocks will be, where they come from, and what they’ll contain
• Highly experiential consumer sites may suffer under lean; hard to gauge experience with a usability test
• Letting people into the design process makes them realize that design is HARD
• Designers must evolve in order to stay relevant

Listen to it now.

What is a user interface systems architect?

• equal parts listener and software developer
• Listens to users and finds pain points
• Understands software and how to build the technology
• Focus: how to bridge the gap between the two.

Two doors:

• The user happy place, where they understand the user interface they’re dealing with
• The development environment, where people need to understand how to make the system work
• Opening both doors opens new conversations, and leads to new insight

Three UX Fundamentals

• Usability is a lack of suffering on the part of the user
• Usage context: Functionality has no meaning outside of a usage context
• Primary questions:
• Who is the user?
• What are their tasks?
• These are “simple” questions, but very difficult to answer.

Case study: a registration system for music exams in US and Canada

• Two websites, two separate usage context
• Examinations are key to their business model
• Registration must be easy
• Multiple types of users involved in the system
• Design and testing
• Started with “pilot” for US school
• Prototyped the solution in a rich HTML prototype, then created a testable site
• In user testing, discovered:
• Structural issues: how to improve the location and function of key components
• “Language” issues: issues around the language being used to navigate around

User narratives:

• Role-oriented UX design
• Is about supplying the right tools at the right time
• Don’t throw all the tools the user will ever need into one space
• Provides a way to trace the path from end user to the engineer
• Roles = a set of tasks
• Tasks require specific elements on the screen to facilitate completion
• Has an impact on:
• Layoute
• Information Architecture
• Data Retrieval
• Data Structure
• Connecting the dots
• Handle idioms/terminology used
• Different cultures have different terms they’re used to
• Handle roles (mindsets and usage contexts)
• Student
• Parent
• Teacher
• Applications and tools try to mimic mindsets, but it doesn’t always work out
• Role-oriented designs handle mindsets comfortably
• idioms (language beyond “language”)
• Unfamiliar terms don’t fit
• Generic terms have rough edges; don’t resonate
• Familiar terms are comfortable; help achieve “invisibility.”
• Real-life narratives
• Life is a sequence of roles, and those roles need tools
• I’m a cook at breakfast {stove, toaster}
• I’m a commuter {train, car}
• I’m an emailer {computer or smartphone, fingers for typing}
• I’m a [insert role here]

• How words get to the screen
• String: set of words that arrives on the screen
• We all have words that resonate with us in terms of different roles, tasks, mindsets
• Thoughts come in clusters; so do the words that describe those thoughts
• Drupal thinks of strings individually and not in clusters
• Drupal excludes UX designers
• Drupal defines “roles” differently (as a set of permissions that’s fixed depending on roles)
• Doesn’t support the ability to express things idiomatically
• Organization of words for UX
• Strings have two lives:
• The ones the user can’t see (internal code)
• External ‘user’ strings (human names, what users see)
• Code strings should never change unless there’s some kind of functional change intended by the developer
• User strings should adapt to users
• All of the strings (user, internal code) exist in code!
• The t() function handles user-facing language
• You can find them and change them, but not to role or idiom-based terms
• Translation (from English to German, etc.) is there, but not when thinking in terms of different idioms within the same language
• Inclusive alternative approach
• Have to go beyond the t() function to fix this issue
• Extract the user-facing strings from the code using semantic keys
• ‘name’=>$sm->t(‘LABEL_BLOG’)
• $_string_array = array ( ‘LABEL_BLOG’) => “Blog entry”
• Role oriented key: $sm->t(‘LABEL_BLOG__’.$role)
• $_string_array = array ( ‘LABEL_BLOG’) => “Blog entry” LABEL_BLOG__STUDENT’ => “student’s blog entry”
• Do this through the user narratives module
• It’s about organizing strings
• Takes a custom “adapter” module (uses form API) and routes it through the user narratives module into a different place that the uX designer can evaluate and change to accommodate new needs/mindsets

What does it mean to design for media?

• Designing for a site that is meant to reach a large audience with a daily content cycle
• Newspapers
• high-traffic blogs, etc.
• What makes it different is the sheer amount of information
• Photos
• Videos
• Lots of body copy
• Organizing lots of information in a way that works for the user
• ADVERTISING
• Designing for a frequent publishing cycle
• How do you design for content creators?

Case studies

• Take Part
• Digital media organization and cause services agency that provides content, products and services that inspire, empower, and ignite people to take daily action in making the world better.
• Visual Design goals
• Exhibit great storytelling
• Compel users to take action, get involved in the community
• Promote sharing: make sure the content doesn’t just live on that site, but belongs to the entire internet
• UX Goals
• Take action in the context of a story
• Support the ebb and flow of topics
• Make sure that editors have a good UX too!
• Too many designers don’t take into account the process that editors have to deal with; focus too heavily on end users.
• Visual Design process:
• Conduct interviews with stakeholders about their brand and needs
• Thematic Analysis: find adjectives
• Engaging, action-oriented, personality
• usable, present, depth, spacious
• circulate, community, editorial, content focused
• Use style tiles to help establish visual priorities
• Offer one that’s “specifically what they’re looking for”
• But also offer ideas that speak to the adjectives and themes you’re hearing.
• UX Process
• Content strategy
• Types of content
• Clasification/tagging
• Embeddable content types: Put one node in the body of another node
• Curation requirements: What are the requirements for analyzing and curating content? Are there expiration dates?
• Curation capacity: What staff and other resources do you have to manage the requirements?
• Campaigns of varying scale
• Pair wireframing
• Flush out misinterpretations early
• How much fidelity do we really need?
• Are we being over-specific?
• Minimize revision cycles
• Style tiles are done concurrently with wireframes
• No conflict between UX and visual designer
• Avoid over-designing
• Washington Examiner
• Regional newspaper that covers news, politics and sports in the DC area. The logo was created by William Randolph Hurst and it has a rich patriotic brand.
• Visual Design goals
• Feel modern
• Stay true to history of the brand: wide and loyal readership
• Promote ease of use: Readability is major; need content to shine through
• UX Goals
• Demonstrate breadth and depth of coverage
• Section based
• Cover a lot of local news for DC metro area, but also very respected nationally for political coverage
• Set hierarchy; not all sections are the same
• Promote top-quality curated content
• Provided challenges in image handling
• Challenges in creating hierarchy and ratios
• Showcase the talent they have in house
• Challenge: many sources of content coming into the system
• Feeds
• Direct to Drupal
• Imports from AP
• Need to define how authors are treated depending on where content is coming from
• Visual Design Process
• Adjectives:
• Local, political, regional
• Opinionated, scrappy, speedy, focused
• ease of use, decluttered, visual balance, simplified,
• polished, clean, fresh
• Flexible, dynamic, Interactive
• Had done a smaller site project beforehand; had some data on what the client liked and didn’t from the first site.
• Work elements of the paper (print edition) within the website.
• UX Design process
• Sketch session: group brainstorming of UX concepts for a project
• Got the entire team involved
• Timeboxed to an hour
• HAND-DRAWN sketches
• Come up with ideas, no matter how “crazy”
• Alleviates the “where do I start?” feeling
• Wireframes were more high-fidelity because of the collaboration
• heavily annotation of wireframes to make notes of interactivity, content, etc.
• Common themes
• Design a system, not individual pages
• Clients think in terms of pages; it’s really easy for designers to think of things in pages as well
• Because of the way Drupal (and other content management systems) handles media, content, etc. you have to think in systems rather than individual pages
• Create style guides for clients to use and adapt as the site grows
• Dealing with the author experience
• Authors can be Drupal users, or they could be organizations
• Have to consider how different types of authors will need to be treated or highlighted
• Cross promotion of content is a common theme when designing for media
• Want multiple page views
• Make sure people can see additional or related content
• Helps users find related info; helps the organization get more views on their content
• How to distinguish between “articles” and “actions” — what’s the different treatment between requests for action and related articles?
• Lifecycle of Topic
• How to build a set of tools that lets editors evolve the content and its treatment/important on their own without needing extra developers
• Commenting
• Drupal core commenting vs. Disqus or FB comments
• How to make things visually consistent with third-party integrations?
• Advertising
• Designers often have a fear of advertising; it “ruins the layout”
• How to make it part of the design, and find subtle ways to make it less obtrusive?
• You can’t get around the need for advertising; it’s the bread and butter of the media industry
• part of our work as designers is solving problems, and this is part of it.

View modes:

• Help you theme faster
• Write less PHP
• Create easily reusable layouts
• Named ways of displaying entities within different context
• “Full” — the actual node page
• “Photo Teaser” — photo with title
• “Dated Teaser” — date on top, summary
• “Subtitle Teaser” — photo with summary, title
• View modes are in core
• View modes are NOT in Views
• They’re built into all Drupal 7 entities
• Nodes
• Users

Bad themer habits:

• Too many .tpl files/custom templates
• Too many functions in template.php
• You use Views to do theming.
• In D6, we needed these things, but NO MORE! D7 brings us View Modes!

How to use View modes:

• In Manage Display, “default” and “teaser” are built in by default
• “Full” — how to display the full page
• “RSS” — how to display RSS feeds
• “Search Index”
• “Search Results” — how to display nodes in search results
• To activate said view modes, click on custom display settings and activate the new ones you want; otherwise, default and teaser is it.
• If you go into the view mode to edit, you can deactivate extra fields, or add new fields
• This happens in code
• You don’t need to do a new node–type.tpl.php for each type anymore
• BUT, we need more custom view modes! How?
• Entity View mode
• Simple, lightweight
• does what it says
• con: keeps EVERYTHING in one variable (this means that Features might get stuck if you use it with this module)
• Display Suite
• Has a better way of exporting view modes
• Extremely powerful way of dealing with this
• Con: it does A LOT OF THINGS. If you want that, great, but if you just need to add a couple of View modes, it’s a bit much
• Doing it in code.
• Just need a little bit of code
• use hook_entity_info_alter( )
• change $info[node] and create a new machine name and array with qualities
• add it to a module and throw it on your site.
• Now it should show up in your view mode display panel.
• Exporting view modes
• Throw them into Features when you export your content types; they’ll come back in when you import the content types into a new site
• Use cases:
• Node reference: add a custom view mode to the User Content page
• Why not use Views for this stuff?
• it’s messy and complicated
• takes significant time
• too many templates, customized for each View
• View modes actually make using Views much easier!
• Other ways of using View modes:
• Customizing search results
• Customizing search index: offer more information to search index than is generally available to the index.
• Create custom blocks with related content at the end of an article.
• Big win: you don’t have to theme, as long as someone sets up the display for that content type’s block with “subtitle teaser.”
• Changing view modes:
• make one change and it populates across things
• Issues
• Consistent design is key to using view modes
• Make use of repeating elements
• Use grid systems
• The more you can use reusable elements, the better.
• Save time & money
• Look for inconsistencies; those will add to the dev time.
• Also doesn’t work with tables
• Won’t work with outputting fields from multiple entities at once, e.g. multiple content types or nodes.
• Theming issues
• Consistency is good, but boring sometimes
• You might have to give a bit in order to get a design that the designer will be happy with.
• Sometimes you might have to make a separate template, or preprocess something.
• The way we were forced to do things in 5 and 6 forced us to do all these extra things.
• We don’t need to do this by default anymore; we can save it for when we actually need it.
• bit.ly/view-modes (http://www.treehouseagency.com/learn/view-modes)
• Learn more about View modes
• download the code to make a new View mode module
• BEANs (custom block entities) BoF (Thursday 2:15; room 506)

How 4kitchens has been doing websites for the past decade:

• Requirements and planning
• Site maps, user flows, wireframes
• Comps
• Implementation

The new way:

• Requirements/planning
• Content strategy (mobile first!)
• Design systems > Comps
• You can’t spend time doing comps for every single device anymore; it’s not an effective use of your time.
• Prototyping is KEY
• You can leverage design systems within prototypes to enhance the mobile experience.
• Build. Design. Iterate. Design. Build. Iterate.

Major changes:

• There is no more “page”
• Layout/template are consistent across devices
• Comps are no longer golden
• Don’t need one for every single page/screen
• Elements are no longer static—they adapt to different devices
• Prototyping happens much earlier in the process
• Helps define the vision; helps client get it sooner
• Designer and developers working closer together
• Higher level of client communication
• Some clients are skeptical, think there’s too much risk involved.

THE PLAN:

• Future-friendly
• http://futurefriend.ly
• We don’t know what will be on the market 2–3 years from now;
• want to provide advice and design that’s going to be sustainable.
• Mobile-first
• Luke W’s book: Mobile first (available on A Book Apart)
• Focus on three things:
• Growth = opportunity
• Constraints = focus
• Screens have different sizes, different needs
• Capabilities = innovation
• Tap the capabilities of the phone—GPS, location, etc.
• “Designing the mobile app first forced us to strip down to the essentials”—Bill DeRouchey, Banksimple
• Focusing on app first carried the focus of the project into the rest of the experience
• User-first is content-first; THEN you worry about mobile strategy.

“Mobile Web”

• Most clients seem to think folks are on mobile devices “on the go”—grocery store, bus stop, etc.
• But honestly, that’s not true; people are spending more time on their phones, more time on the site through that medium
• Mark Boulton: “Start designing from the content out, rather than the canvas in.”

Future friendly content

• What are the types of content and why?
• Video?
• Text?
• How will it be broken up?
• Make it modular
• Drupal makes this easy; you can leverage fields, etc.
• What’s really important?
• If something goes away, will users care?
• If something gets smaller, will that change/decrease value?
• How will the tool you’re using organize this stuff?
• Drupal gives you flexibility to organize content in multiple ways.

• Page tables give hierarchies
• Title
• Message
• Secondary Messages
• Design strategy
• Workflows aim for best user experience; focus on task/behavior, not layout
• Responsive is about providing the best experience, particularly when you focus on content.
• These experiences can differ between devices; desktop may contain more information; mobile can contain more FOCUSED content.
• Wireframes can help organize layout and convey content flow
• Still needed
• Focus on content, flow
• Design systems save time, create patterns
• Styletil.es (@samanthatoy)
• Using texture, fonts, etc. to capture feeling
• Build style guides/pattern libraries
• Comps are probably still needed, but not for every page in every viewport.
• ICANN: Created 3 comps, for 3 different viewports, AFTER creating and iterating style tiles.
• Goal: get the design to the browser QUICKLY.
• Prototypes help the team fail faster, to facilitate better solutions.
• Provide client value; help them “get it” sooner.
• We’re focused on much more complex problems now.
• Clients can get really focused on comps; the browser is where the responsive magic really happens.
• A “living” design allows richer convos between devs and designers.
• Developers can talk about content flow and other design decisions
• Designers have to understand more about how things will actually be built.
• Fail fast. SUCCEED fast.
• Agile/Lean
• All about iteration and letting the team direct changes.
• Best practices = Best experience
• Not about convention; it’s about creating the best experience for users.
• mobilewebbestpractices.com—library of best practices for mobile devices
• Understand how people use their devices and why
• Content > navigation
• Users on mobile are generally coming in through a link; they don’t necessarily care about navigation.
• Best experience doesn’t necessarily mean limiting choices
• Stripping the experience down to just links/text isn’t the best experience
• Users spend more time on their phones than you think; particularly reading.
• Maintain clarity and focus
• What makes a good experience?
• Readable (font size, spacing, contrast)
• Relevant (most valuable content first)
• Keep forms to a minimum unless you’re dealing with commerce, surveys, etc.
• Avoid modal overlays (lightbox, ads, etc.)
• Make it snappy
• People want to do stuff, and they want to do it fast
• Performance management (reduce the amount of time for loading)
• Get people to the content quickly
• Layout
• Design for screens, not devices = Breakpoints
• You really can’t focus just on iPhones anymore; Android, Windows phone, etc. is growing
• Be fluid, liquid, flexible
• Think in proportions, NOT pixels
• aligns with content strategy; focus on hierarchy
• aids in fluid grid management
• Think scale in media, text, images
• Consider device orientation
• lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1514: Looked at a bunch of different mobile-to-desktop layouts; identified patterns for responsive layouts
• Navigation
• Starbucks changed their navigation; took a risk on an icon-only navigation with drop down box.
• Don’t try to make drop downs a work of art; the OS takes care of things in their own way.
• Put fixed toolbars at the top rather than the bottom.
• The bottom is where the OS puts its hardware buttons; you don’t want users accidentally clicking the hardware buttons.
• Consider OS and hardware buttons.
• Responsive Images
• How do your images scale for various widths and orientations?
• Reduce the # of images if you can.
• Not everyone has super-fast phones!
• Be careful of using HUGE images
• Mobile text
• Make it readable
• Consider text flow; long headlines might not scale well on smaller viewports
• Be aware of typeface characteristics
• Tall, skinny?
• Short, fat?
• Test performance with mobile devices; make sure that loading fonts isn’t slowing things down
• Gestures
• Buttons are a hack: they’re basically styled links.
• globalmoxie.com/blog/buttons-inspired-ui-hack.shtml
• Make gestures obvious.
• Don’t make your users read a manual
• There’s no such thing as “hover” on a touch site.
• Do use visual cues like coach marks.
• There is a need for universal conventions
• Current conventions: tap and swipe (pull down?)
• Consider competing OS/Browser gestures
• Provide alternatives to gestures
• All devices aren’t yet touch-enabled
• Design for humans; embrace the physicality of touch
• Size elements and space them appropriately
• rule of thumb: size touch elements at about 40px
• Remember: not every device is touch-enabled
• Tools
• Software isn’t necessarily the answer
• Start with pen and paper
• Fluid grids
• Goldengridsystem.com
• Github.com/davatron5000/Foldy960
• csswizardry.com/fluid-grids
• gridsetapp.com (coming soon from Mark Boulton)
• Wireframing/prototyping
• Whiteboard!
• Pen/Paper
• Axure
• Balsamiq
• Boston Globe used InDesign
• handles both images and text
• Can create patterns with paragraph/character styles
• Responsive media
• Images
• http://drupal.org/project/responsive_images: Module to use Filament Group’s responsive images library
• Slideshows
• Videos (fitvidjs.com—takes any embedded video and scales proportionately)
• Text (fittextjs.com)
• filamentgroup.com/lab/responsive_images_experimenting_with_context_aware_image_sizing
• markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/responsive-advertising
• Media queries
• @media screen and (max-device-width: 480px) { .column { float: none; }}
• Media type: screen (desktop, phone, tablet)
• Query for media feature: width, height, orientation, pixel density
• Prototype frameworks
• foundation.zurb.com
• twitter.github.com/bootstrap
• goldilocksapproach.com
• html5boilerplate.com/mobile
• Touch frameworks
• jquerymobile.com: can create something that looks like an iPhone app within a browser
• sencha.com
• Test on REAL DEVICES
• blackberry
• Windows phone
• Kindle fire, iPad2
• Galaxy tab, etc.
• Adobe Shadow: labs.adobe.com/technologies/shadow
• Runs in the background, and has an extension on FF/Chrome
• Make sure your devices are on the same wifi network; then you can browse on desktop and it shows up on all your devices.
• Browserstack.com
• will emulate any number of browsers inside one website
• Just started adding mobile VMs.
• Won’t get the same fidelity as an actual device, but you can get a general overview
• Subscription is pretty cheap.
• Blaze.io/mobile
• tests mobile performance
• Gives load time and other factors
• mattkersley.com/responsive
• Type in different websites, and it’ll show you how it looks in different browser widths.

Nifty stuff in Webform 3:

• Webform-enable any content type
• Download web form results as CSV, Excel
• Multi-page forms
• User-editable email templates
• Save as Draft and Resume (only works for logged in users)
• Save automatically between pages
• Total and per-user submission limits (you can only submit X number of things total tracked by IP and cookies)
• Tons of APIs for hacking; APIs like whoa
• Means many additional modules that integrate
• Rules integration is good
• Panels integration also

NEW features:

• added HTML5-friendly field elements (email, phone, etc.)
• Important advantages for mobile devices
• Also offers browser validation on latest versions of Chrome, Firefox
• quirksmode.org/html5/inputs.html
• Backwards-compatible: any browser that doesn’t get it treats it like a normal text field
• Number component
• Force users to input integers or decimals
• Also an HTML5 element
• Gives you a new keyboard on mobile
• CONDITIONAL LOGIC
• Can show pages, fields, etc. based on the value of another field in the form
• UI isn’t great, but it is functional
• Logic is currently limited to multipage forms
• Webform Conditional (http://drupal.org/project/webform_conditional) offers functionality for single-page forms
• Download range options
• Can download a subset of results instead of all results
• Remembers how many submissions you’ve downloaded since last time; only downloads the submissions you haven’t downloaded yet
• FORM BUILDER INTEGRATION
• http://drupal.org/project/form_builder

Tips and Tricks

• You can clone and export web forms
• Only fields clone; results don’t copy over
• Options Element (http://drupal.org/project/options_element) helps make it easier to create select boxes
• Use hidden fields to display information that only administrators can see
• e.g. track page they’re on when they send the form
• Use %get tokens to set default values—can get information from the URL and set it as the default value of the field
• Use MIME mail to send attachments and HTML emails with Webform

Why NOT native?

• Options like Titanium/Appcelerator support multiple devices
• Rapid prototyping: it’s easier to write JS than to do a bunch of memory management stuff
• Native is not easy for development.

WHY native

• Faster performance on the device
• supported by the OS maker (can make support requests on iOS/Android forums)
• Manage errors on the side of the stack
• No waiting on API updates, release schedule
• Game development
• Personal prefs

Dev process

• Start with getting your idea on paper.
• Getting the idea on paper helps the entire process go more smoothly
• Build wireframes/prototype
• It’s easier to fail in wireframes and prototyping
• Gather all the types of content you’ll be using
• Lay out the app in a workflow (user flows, task maps)
• Use tools like Briefs, Omnigraffle, Axure
• Save time on development by failing early and learning as you go
• Design (visual, UI)
• WIll it need to support multiple devices?
• What are the key tasks and how will those be called out
• Attempt to create an experience users are familiar with: colors, taxonomy menu, etc.
• Development
• Figure out what features are pre-reqs for others
• Will content come in as feeds? First build content, then feeds or vice versa
• Build API communication file
• If things are constantly changing, write unit tests
• Tackle the larger, harder problems FIRST

Mobile stack

• Mobile App
• Services
• Standardized solution to integrate external apps with Drupal
• Service callbacks can be used with multiple interfaces like REST, XMLRPC, JSON, JSONP, JSON-RPC, SOAP, AMF, etc.
• Gives you your connection into Drupal
• Much time is spent messing around with Services
• Servers
• Defines Accept and Response types
• Call Authentication Methods
• Executes the actual function call
• Authentication
• Session based
• OAuth both 2-legged and 3-legged
• Singletons: You’ll have a user object that exists through the entire app; you want to make sure that only that object exists. Singletons help with that.
• No need to re-login to the app when it opens.
• Endpoints
• A URL that a mobile app will hit
• The bread and butter of Services
• It’s a configuration object that has all the resources and servers/auth methods, etc. that you need to make Services work.
• You can also work with versioning, access controls for new developers, etc.
• Versioning
• Helps keep things consistent
• Won’t break apps when you build new features or functionality
• Things to note:
• Services Views is a bit wonky, but it works
• There is potential to break if you change Views
• Features allows you to take the View and put it into code so that it can’t be messed with.
• Adding images inline within content
• Services will insert unnecessary HTML tags instead of images
• Working on a module that will strip out images and attach them as a file to the node
• Use Imagecache to deal with image handling (it’s already in D7 Core)
• Tools
• Drupal iOS SDK and Dandy
• Sits between Services and the mobile app so you can communicate with Drupal natively
• Helps do user/session management
• Services Log
• hooks into services and logs everything that Services is doing.
• You can see when you’re getting a 403, etc.—what is messing up and why?
• Drupal
• Holds and organizes content
• Can be sent to mobile app through Services

Goals of the media project:

• Unified media/file management within Drupal
• We’ve been looking for a way to treat all media and files the same way in the Drupal database; this has been difficult.
• Media/files as fieldable entities
• Can tag and add taxonomy terms directly to files
• Can include start and end dates on files to ensure limited access
• Use a Single browser for editorial control
• Makes things easier for content editors
• Don’t have to worry about different fields for files vs. video?
• Thumbnails for all images, video, etc. right in the browser
• WYSIWYG and Views integration
• Lets editors embed media directly into a text area
• Allows you to modify the browser with Views
• Can organize files by tag/title/etc.
• Can use exposed filters, etc.

Media in Drupal 6

• Attached to nodes via upload file
• Upload module has been retired for Drupal 7
• Or media was created as a node through specific modules, which created baggage
• Image
• Video
• Audio
• OR media was created as a field within a node via CCK, which required a different type of field for each media type, and doesn’t give the opportunity to separate the media file from the node
• Imagefield
• Filefield
• Embedded Media Field
• VideoField
• AudioField
• Every module had its own strategy for file management, which led to confusion
• Inline media became possible via
• WYSIWYG
• IMCE
• Node Embed
• Embedded Inline Media
• Node Reference/Embed Media Browser
• Before Drupal 7, there were MANY different modules offering media/file management, but each offered different stuff, and it wasn’t very extendible (multiple modules for new media requirements)

History of the Drupal Media Ecosystem

• 2008: Proposal for Rich Media GUI
• Create extensible browser for rich media editors
• Create API to better connect developers with extension modules
• Called the module Media
• Original proposal went out to 5-6 developers; 2 dozen folks by the end of the year.
• Ongoing Media sprint
• 2009: added some patches to Drupal core
• Now there are lots of maintainers, and an unofficial Media Initiative

The new NEW Media module for D7

• Pushed 1.0 out of beta and into release/stable status in September
• Now there’s TWO versions
• Wanted to add new features, but didn’t want to break it before stable release
• 2.x is unstable (we’re working with crazy sauce/hot sauce
• Wiki link groups.drupal.org/node/215218
• 1.x is feature locked; only fixing bugs right now
• Views integration/UI changes will go only into 2.x
• Palintir is already up to 2.x
• Choose 1.x if you need something absolutely stable right now; BUT it won’t get any of the new stuff.
• If you have the resources to fix what breaks, go with 2.x; it will be getting ALL the new features/updates.
• In the sprint, they changed the Media browser so it was powered by Views
• gives more flexibility for site builders to filter, present data
• makes good use of code that ALREADY WORKS WELL

Media stack

• Modules that integrate with Media
• Media Module:
• Widget for fields
• Media browser
• more UI
• Views module: backend for Media browser (2.x)
• File entity: Fields on files, file display and view modes, Admin UI
• Drupal 7 core

File entity provides and API/UI for

• Viewing/editing/deleting files
• Managing fields and their display on file types
• Allows file to be easily extended via
• Translation
• Rules
• Does NOT
• allow file types to be edited, or how they’re defined to be changed
• Provide an API for file access
• provide the greatest performance
• exist currently in D7 core

Media

• provides a unified UI for managing Drupal files
• allows upload of new files
• allows you to mass import from a directory
• integrates with WYSIWYG
• provide an API for other modules to provide
• Media browser plugins
• integration with media_internet for external sources
• DOES NOT (yet)
• natively display audio and video
• Use oEmbed, MediaElement, etc. for display
• embed non-media with WYSIWYG
• works great for images, though
• make it easy to configure
• allow more control over WYSIWYG integration
• have the greatest usability

Adding media files to content type

• Add file field
• Choose “Media file selector” as Widget
• Choose in file settings WHICH browser plugins to show
• Update allowed file extensions
• Update “Allowed Remote Media types”
• Update “Allowed URL schemes” – i.e. Youtube.com, Vimeo.com, etc.
• In Manage Display tab, choose “Rendered File” – and then update the “View Mode” for that file.
• Media will provide a new field in your node/edit screen which allows you to “add media.”

Adding remote videos to a content type

• In the browser, choose “Web” instead of “Upload” or “Image Gallery”
• Copy and paste URL.
• Works the same way as image upload.
• Displays multiple images at once.

Setting it up:

• Configure WYSIWYG to accommodate new media content types
• Make sure that “Convert media files to tags” is checked.
• Update your various text input filters
• Make sure the “Media Module” button is checked.
• You should then see the “Media” button in your WYSIWYG editor, and pressing it will open the Media browser.
• Configure Fields on a file
• Structure > File types (2.x)
• Allows you to add new fields to file types, e.g. tags, availability date, caption, image credit
• Configuration > Media (1.x)
• New “Edit Media” feature in 2.x allows you to update media fields without leaving the node.
• Want to use fields for information that’s going to be the same everywhere you see it (currently, if you change fields on one image, it’ll show up everywhere that image is used).
• Can’t edit the file itself (e.g. upload a new one); you can only update the FIELDS on it.
• What if you want to upload a new version?
• Multiform (http://drupal.org/project/multiform): allows you to include several forms in one <form>
• New “Add file” section allows you to upload files in one go for later; nice touch for editors
• You can also update the media browser in 2.x with Views, add new ways to filter, etc.

What other people are working on in Media

• Plupload
• Multiple upload
• not integrated in Media browser (yet)
• Does work from the Add file page
• d.o/project/plupload
• oEmbed
• Easy workflow for embedding from multiple various content providers
• integrates with Media: Internet
• Used in Gardens
• Works with both 1.x and 2.x
• d.o/project/oembed
• Remote stream wrapper
• Easily ref files from CDNs and external sources
• Can generate image style derivatives
• Integrates with media browser
• Works with 1.x and 2.x
• d.o/project/remote_media_browser
• Derivitaives API
• Use rules to create derivatives and process media files
• Media update/translation
• Only works with 1.x
• Replace and translate files
• Media crop
• Used in Gardens
• Crop, rotate, and edit images via WYSIWYG
• d.o/project/media_crop
• Media front
• Open standard media player
• HTML5 with Flash fallback
• MediaElement
• External Lib.