Tags: collaboration

W3C@30: W3C and me - YouTube

This is a lovely, lovely talk from Léonie!

It’s about time I tried to explain what progressive enhancement actually is - Piccalilli

Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.

The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.

UX London runs for three days, from June 18th to 20th. If you can, you should get a ticket for all three days. But if you can’t, you can get a one-day ticket. Think of each individual day as being its own self-contained conference.

The flow of the three-day event kind of mimics the design process itself. It starts with planning and research. Then it gets into the nitty-gritty product design details. Then it gets meta…

Day three, Thursday, June 20th is about design systems and design ops.

Maintenance matters, not just for the products and services you’re designing, but for the teams you’re designing with. You can expect a barrage of knowledge bombs on alignment and collaboration.

The bombardment commences with four great talks in the morning.

1. Brad Frost kicks things off with the question is atomic design dead? Brad will show you how to imagine what a global design system might look like.
2. Alicia Calderón is going to be talking about unlocking collaboration . Alicia will show you how to use a framework for creating lasting aligment between developers and designers.
3. Benaz Irani will be speaking about empathy overload. Benaz will show you how to strike a balance between compassion and confidence within your team.
4. Kara Kane is going to talk about why UX building blocks need standards. Kara will show you how to use standards to enable adoption and contribution to design systems.

After the lunch break you’ll have your pick of four superb workshops. It’s not an easy choice.

1. Brad Frost is not only giving a talk in the morning, he’s also leading an afternoon workshop on the design system ecosystem. Brad will show you how to unpack the many layers of the design system layer cake so you can deliver sturdy user interfaces and help teams work better together.
2. Stéphanie Walter is running a workshop on designing adaptive reusable components and pages . Stéphanie will show you how to plan your content and information architecture to help build more reusable components.
3. Tom Kerwin will be giving a workshop on multiverse mapping. Tom will show you how to pin down your product strategy and to align your team around the stuff that matters.
4. Luke Hay is running a workshop on bridging the gap between Research and Design. Luke will show you how to take practical steps to ensure that designers and researchers are working as a seamless team.

Finally we’ll finish the whole event with one last closing keynote. I’m very excited to announce who that’s going to be—I’ll only keep you on tenterhooks for a short while longer.

When step back and look at what’s on offer, day three of UX London looks pretty unmissable. If you work with a design system or heck, if you just work with other people, this is the day for you. So get your ticket now.

But be sure to use this discount code I’ve prepared just for you to get a whopping 20% off the ticket price: JOINJEREMY.

Time team: Documenting decisions & marking milestones · Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s the transcript of Paul’s excellent talk at this year’s UX London:

How designers can record decisions and cultivate a fun and inclusive culture within their team.

Burn baby burnout by Amy Hupe, content designer.

Here’s the transcript of a great talk by Amy on the realities of working on design systems.

Get it shipped — building better relationships with Devs

This advice works both ways:

1. Collaboration
2. Communication
3. Respect

Harnessing groupthink: fine-tuning CSS specifications | Clearleft

In order to thoroughly attend to every pertinent aspect of the spec, fantasai asked us each to read one sentence aloud to the group. At which point we were all asked whether we thought the sentence made sense, and to speak up if we didn’t understand any of it or if it wasn’t clear.

Rich documents the excellent and fascinating process used in a recent W3C workshop (though what he describes is the very opposite of groupthink, so don’t let the title mislead you):

I’d never come across the person-by-person, sentence-by-sentence approach before. I found it particularly effective as a way of engaging a group of people, ensuring collective understanding, and gathering structured feedback on a shared document.

Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies – Baldur Bjarnason

This extract from Baldur’s new book is particularly timely in light of the twipocalypse.

The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time | The New Yorker

This story of the Network Time Protocol hammers home the importance of infrastructure and its maintenance:

Technology companies worth billions rely on open-source code, including N.T.P., and the maintenance of that code is often handled by a small group of individuals toiling away without pay.

Douglas Engelbart | Hidden Heroes

An account of the mother of all demos, written by Steven Johnson.

Utopia - an introduction - YouTube

James and Trys have made this terrific explanatory video about Utopia. They pack a lot into less than twenty minutes but it’s all very clearly and methodically explained.

Turning 30 · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

I have no idea what the web will look like in another 30 years. But I am sure that we will look back at the first 30 years of the Web like we look back at the silent era in cinema today: as the formative years of a medium that was about to evolve to even higher heights.

The Web has always been about what each and every one of us contributes. And contributing is easier and more important than ever. So let’s not leave the future of the Web to big tech alone. Inclusiveness, accessibility, performance, security, usability, decentralization, openness – in almost all areas, the Web is far from done.

Midweight Design Engineer | Clearleft

Want to work with me? If so, come and be a design engineer at Clearleft!

What’s a design engineer? A front-end developer at the front of the front end who values accessibility, performance, and progressive enhancement.

We’re looking for a design-friendly front-end developer with demonstrable skills in pattern-based prototyping and production to join our friendly and supportive team in the heart of Brighton.

Even if this isn’t for you, please spread the word …especially to potential candidates who aren’t mediocre middle-aged white dudes (I’ve already got that demographic covered).

Content Design Basics by Giles Turnbull - YouTube

This is a great series of short videos all about content design. The one on writing for humans is particularly good.

239: New CSS Tricks and Design Engineers | CSS-Tricks

We need engineers, we need designers, and we absolutely need design engineers to make that connection across the great divide between the front-of-the-front-end and the back-of-the-front-end. It’s only then that we can make truly great things together.

Design Engineering - Snook.ca

Here’s a seven-year old post by Snook—this design engineer thing is not new.

It’s been just over two years since Chris wrote his magnum opus about The Great Divide. It really resonated with me, and a lot of other people.

The crux of it is that the phrase “front-end development” has become so broad and applies to so many things, that it has effectively lost its usefulness:

Two front-end developers are sitting at a bar. They have nothing to talk about.

Brad nailed the differences in responsibilities when he described them as front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development:

A front-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code.

A back-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing JavaScript code necessary to make a web application function properly.

In my experience, the term “full stack developer” is often self-applied by back-of-the-front-end developers who perhaps underestimate the complexity of front-of-the-front development.

Me, I’m very much a front-of-the-front developer. And the dev work we do at Clearleft very much falls into that realm.

This division of roles and responsibilities reminds me of a decision we made in the founding days of Clearleft. Would we attempt to be a full-service agency, delivering everything from design to launch? Or would we specialise? We decided to specialise, doubling down on UX design, which was at the time an under-served area. But we still decided to do front-end development. We felt that working with the materials of the web would allow us to deliver better UX.

We made a conscious decision not to do back-end development. Partly it was a question of scale. If you were a back-end shop, you probably had to double down on one stack: PHP or Ruby or Python. We didn’t want to have to turn away any clients based on their tech stack. Of course this meant that we had to partner with other agencies that specialised in those stacks, and that’s what we did—we had trusted partners for Drupal development, Rails development, Wordpress development, and so on.

The world of front-end development didn’t have that kind of fragmentation. The only real split at the time was between Flash agencies and web standards (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Overall, our decision to avoid back-end development stood us in good stead. There were plenty of challenges though. We had to learn how to avoid “throwing stuff over the wall” at whoever would be doing the final back-end implementation. I think that’s why we latched on to design systems so early. It was clearly a better deliverable for the people building the final site—much better than mock-ups or pages.

Avoiding back-end development meant we also avoided long-term lock-in with maintainence, security, hosting, and so on. It might sound strange for an agency to actively avoid long-term revenue streams, but at Clearleft it’s always been our philosophy to make ourselves redundant. We want to give our clients everything they need—both in terms of deliverables and knowledge—so that they aren’t dependent on us.

That all worked great as long as there was a clear distinction between front-end development and back-end development. Front-end development was anything that happened in a browser. Back-end development was anything that happened on the server.

But as the waters muddied and complex business logic migrated from the server to the client, our offering became harder to clarify. We’d tell clients that we did front-end development (meaning we’d supply them with components formed of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and they might expect us to write application logic in React.

That’s why Brad’s framing resonated with me. Clearleft does front-of-front-end development, but we liaise with our clients’ back-of-the-front-end developers. In fact, that bridging work—between design and implementation—is where devs at Clearleft shine.

As much as I can relate to the term front-of-front-end, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I don’t expect it to be anyone’s job title anytime soon.

That’s why I was so excited by the term “design engineer,” which I think I first heard from Natalya Shelburne. There’s even a book about it and the job description sounds very much like the front-of-the-front-end work but with a heavy emphasis on the collaboration and translation between design and implementation. As Trys puts it:

What I love about the name “Design Engineer”, is that it’s entirely focused on the handshake between those two other roles.

There’s no mention of UI, CSS, front-end, design systems, documentation, prototyping, tooling or any ‘hard’ skills that could be used in the role itself.

Trys has been doing some soul-searching and has come to the conclusion “I think I might be a design engineer…”. He has also written on the Clearleft blog about how well the term describes design and development at Clearleft.

Personally, I’m not a fan of using the term “engineer” to refer to anyone who isn’t actually a qualified engineer—I explain why in my talk Building—but I accept that that particular ship has sailed. And the term “design developer” just sounds odd. So I’m all in using the term “design engineer”.

I can imagine this phrase being used in a job ad. It could also be attached to levels: a junior design engineer, a mid-level design engineer, a senior design engineer; each level having different mixes of code and collaboration (maybe a head of design enginering never writes any code).

Trys has written a whole series of posts on the nitty-gritty work involved in design engineering. I highly recommend reading all of them:

• I think I might be a design engineer…
• The designer and developer relationship
• Systemised design foundations
• Prototyping

People Problems | CSS-Tricks

I’d maybe simplify this people problem a bit: the codebase is easy to change, but the incentives within a company are not. And yet it’s the incentives that drive what kind of code gets written — what is acceptable, what needs to get fixed, how people work together. In short, we cannot be expected to fix the code without fixing the organization, too.

SydCSS 7th Birthday with Ethan Marcotte - YouTube

A great talk by Ethan called The Design Systems Between Us.

Uniting the team with Jamstack | Trys Mudford

This is a superb twenty minute presentation by Trys! It’s got everything: a great narrative, technical know-how, and a slick presentation style.

Conference organisers: you should get Trys to speak at your event!