SOME RANDOM DUDE

A while back, I posted a basic example of layout organizers and layout organizers applied to video. I kept talking about how cool I considered this idea to be, yet I had yet to truly explain the idea and (more importantly) the source code for people to download. I wanted to make sure the code was at a good spot before releasing it; I believe that is now the case. You will find examples, the basic gist on how it works and some possible reasons why layout organizers may just make your life easier. (more...)actionscript, actionscript 3, displayobject, experiment, flash, flex, front end, layout, layout organizers, programming ui

Hey, whaddaya know, two weeks in a row… Get used to it.

Enjoy the links.

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Well, yesterday was very fruitful - if this pace continues, Some Random Dude will have quite a few enjoyable new features/trickets throughout the site. My hope is that all of this will make the site more enjoyable to come to and interact with. A few features I am all but sure will not be implemented by May 1 but will come to existence eventually. A lot of this productivity is due to the fact that I finally invested the time to make a local instance of the blog on my laptop so that I was not making direct changes to the live site. The more I think about it, the old process just seems absolutely ridiculous. I was always so concerned about the live site that I was always extremely hesitant to make serious changes due to the potential consequences. Now with a staging instance, I can break that blog all I want until I get the code right.

This weekend I was able to finish up these three features - Comment Love is, well, getting some love:

• A list of all the commenters for the current month and how much Comment Love they have generated.
• Features to help bubble up/promote articles, work, events and other sites that I/we enjoy.
• Better commenting UI (in theory)

It is not huge, but I think these will be nice additions to the site. Another piece of the puzzle I am really working towards is a much larger role for photography on the site. I have been running through some options and I think I have come to a good solution. The implementation is gong to take a bit longer, but the result will be much nicer. I really hope these changes end up being successful, my feeling is they will.change, comment love, comments, design, experience design, interaction, may 1, Photography ui

I had the fortune of being invited as a judge for Standards Reboot, a standards-centric web design event. The deadline is May 1 and I thought it would be appropriate to “reboot” my site to go along with the event. Let me clarify a bit, the reboot will be less visually oriented and more user-experience oriented. These change (which hopefully will occur) are tied to the moves I have been talking about for quite a while. I was lucky enough to have had an online buddy help with some changes that I have yet to institute due to a lack of time. I feel pretty confident that a few serious sit-down sessions could end up being quite fruitful. Life has finally started to slow down and so I feel right now is as good of a time as ever. Still, this project needs to be very focused and pragmatic. No significant changes can be implemented within the 2 weeks before May 1, so I really would like to tackle two or three areas in a very simple, yet effective manner. As the title suggests, these are short term goals, but they are all directed towards much larger ideas.

Here are the topics I am considering - I would love to hear your thoughts on what you see as the more important to you.

• Increased Comment Love functionality
• Improved load times
• Improved commenting experience
• Basic user participation elements
• Cleanup/refinement on homepage UI elements
• Easier access to less noticeable areas of the site
• Work on branding and visual language - only where it improves user-experience throughout the site

This site has continued to grow much more quickly than I would have ever imagined. Nonetheless, the actual site has not progressed significantly for nearly 6 months. There is no way that a large-scale redesign could happen, nor do I think it should occur. Still, I really want to make this site more enjoyable to come to as well as come back to. Your feedback would be amazingly helpful.

design, experience design, feedback, judge, layout, loading times, short term goals, some random dude, standardsreboot, ui web design

I really like seeing what other folks are doing in terms of Flash video interfaces nowadays - more specifically in the embeddable area. Sure it is still relatively easy to do something new and exciting in terms of Flash video UI, but can that cool concept actually work as well when someone drops it on their own site? The usability and accessibility challenges of designing an interface for anybody to put on their own site is much more difficult than people want to give it credit. YouTube is still dominating the market, but let’s be honest, their video player is not too hot. The one thing that they did right was to keep it simple - ugly, but simple.

The UGC market is still growing and so we are going to continue to see more and more video players being released. I happened upon Embedded Video, a blog that covers the embeddable video players currently out there. The updates are a bit infrequent, but understandably so - there are only so many players out there. Still, the collection is pretty large already and I spent quite a lot of time browsing others’ video UI work and learning quite a bit. If you are into flash video, interface design or both, I highly recommend this site.

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