BarCamp - or better called BlogCamp - as it focuses on topics around blogging - is back in town.

Head over to barcamp.ch for detailed information about the ad-hoc conference.

I'm going to talk about the Geoweb and the importance of location awareness.

Do you remember the days where "presence-awareness" was the hype word? Today we have agile corporate organization models in place that take presence for granted (yes the Skype blackout gave us a hard time). The ability to put/find information in context of space (=location) and time is critical for some of us today (emergency workers, logistics and law enforcement to name a few). Applying/extracting the location awareness "properties" on every information we create/manage/consume will open up new ways for us mear mortal to experiencing information.

I'm looking forward to see you at Blogcamp Zürich (October 20, 2007)

Tags: blogcampswitzerland barcamp zurich

Posted by Cedric at 8/26/2007 11:18:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

It's a well known fact that creating a great user experience for a web site/application needs consistant user testing. Small changes can make a huge difference in favour or against. Preparing variations of UI screens to test - as real-working prototypes or fake apps - is time-consuming. The closer the "fake" looks/works like the possible new UI - the better are the results of the test.

On recent tests I tried something new - using the Firefox extension Greasmonkey to modify the existing web site with a user script. Greasmonkey allows local execution of JavaScript in the context of the web application - therefore the ability to transform the current page at will of the script. That includes simpel things like - change labels - rearrange form elements - do visual changes and add new elements. The ability to add menu items into the browser menu and storing user prefs during the session allows creating different scenarios the user can pick from while running the test.

From the development point of view - it was surprisingly efficient to patch the existing code and adding new "virtual" pages based on query parameters with moderate JavaScript skills ;-)

I'm still searching a neat solution for rapid prototyping of new web application functionality - best in collaborative manner - e.g. in a workshop having multiple people contributing to page-flows/UI mock-up (best without coding skills ;-) And no - Photoshop is not the answer. The solution is not required to create the real code afterwards - just provide a way to imitate the behaviour of the web with the ability to quickly try various flavours and therefore be efficient in the decision process.

Posted by Cedric at 8/07/2007 10:21:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post