Garrett’s Content is the Design
My friend and co-worker Garrett Dimon recently relaunched his eponymous blog. The results are fantastic. Garrett cites the work of Edward Tufte as his inspiration to provide visually compelling examples when writing about web design, technology, and other usability topics. The new layout is completely clutter-free, focusing completely on the topic at hand. His simple grid layout provides a variety of interesting ways to incorporate illustrations and examples that are both meaningful and pleasing to look at.
I’m looking forward to reading Garrett’s future posts. If you’re into user experience and visual design, you will likely look forward to them as well. Add his feed to your reader if you haven’t already.
Links from the High-Fidelity Prototype Presentation
Here are the links I referred to in the presentation this evening.
- Henrik Olson’s “Balancing fidelity in prototyping�
- Dan Brown’s “Representing Data in Wireframes�
- Garrett Dimon’s “Just Build It: HTML Prototyping and Agile Development�
- Lots more on my del.icio.us feed on prototyping
I’ll try to have the deck posted by this Sunday. As promised, here’s the PDF of the deck of last Thursday’s presentation.
Workflow is dead! Long-live workflow!
James Robertson and my co-worker Jeff Potts have a great discussion running on the problems with workflow in content management applications.
Workflows can be infinitely flexible when they are modeled the way work is really done. What’s needed is a model that more accurately reflects how people naturally work.
I think linear workflows are inherently flawed by design. Even in the most extreme example of linear work, a manufacturing assembly line, workers typically have the ability to stop the line and reject an item outright or request rework. But often the rework is something more complex than simply passing the item back to have it worked again.
When these kinds of exceptions occur in most workflow systems today, users create workarounds to the system to get their work done.
About 8 years ago I used a different kind of workflow engine at KMPG when Kevin Parker and I were helping creating an HR outsourcing center. We used a product called Action Workflow to handle all of the transactional items in and out of the center. Action is based on the ActionWorks Business Interaction Model which more realistically models how work is really done. Take a look at the model to see how different it is than the standard linear approach.
The Action model treats work the way it really lives, organically in a cycle of negotiations and performance. New cycles can organically recur in the parents. It’s a completely different (more effective and realistic) way to look at workflow.
I know James and Jeff were trying to keep this product-agnostic. But Action is the only example I know that’s using the cycle-approach. Everything else I know of is linear.
We need ways to systematically track the work that we do. The more accurately they model the way we do work, the less people will use workarounds, and the happier everyone will be.
