Well I’ve finally made the push. I’m doing a full on RoR site. I’m pretty excited because I’ve wanted to for a long time and just not had the situation right for doing it, but now I’m on a great project and RoR is the completely correct way to go.
Things that I love so far…RESTful_authentication, scaffold, MVC - the whole point of RoR.
I’m just needing to flesh out the structure a bit more, but I’m well on the way. RoR rocks.
Recently, I was approached by a friend about a new job that he may take. The problem is with the job he has right now, he’s only been there a month and he feels bad about the whole situation because they sent him to NY for training and now he’s leaving. This is what I told him:
1. It’s not a contract…unless it is.
When you go to work for someone, they pay for you to work, and you work for the pay. If you’re still employed then everyone is getting what they want out of the deal. When they feel the pay isn’t worth what you’re giving (or not giving) them, you got it, time for the unemployment line. You shouldn’t ever feel bad about leaving for a better situation, some circumstances can’t be helped and any smart employer knows this. These are the risks.
2. Are you dumb?
At my last job, I did the typical personal-sick day to interview routine. In my exit interview my boss gave me this lovely quote, “I think it was immature of you to lie about being sick, you could have just told us you had an interview.” Wow. I was shocked. Don’t ever let an employer pull that card. Anyone knows that you have to look out for yourself, and eventually your family too. Sneaking around is unfortunately part of the process of getting a new job and anyone who thinks you don’t have to is either too understanding or not to be trusted. Yeah, let me tell my employer I’m looking around, not get the job, and then get let go because they already cut me out in their minds because I was looking around. Please.
In the end, looking around can make you feel bad because you may feel in debt to your current employer. Don’t. A good person will understand better situations come around and sometimes it’s sooner than later. Give them the 2 weeks for goodwill, make no promises, and get to your new life. Good luck.
Motivation is tough when you’re working on a project that you loathe. It’s a typical scenario, you’re “Johnny DoGood” and offer up your help when your manager or co-worker asks you for it. Soon you realize that you’ve been duped into the worst project you can think of being a part of and you’re staring at your screen saying, “What have I done?” It’s ok. We’ll get through it.
Environment. Do you like it dim? Light? Find what works best for your productivity. Is your chair killing you? Steal the interns. Kill the clutter on your desk, having a clean work space will make you feel that this project is already on its way to finishing itself.
Distractions. Find a way to drown out other distractions, whether it’s your RSS feeds, Email, or co-workers blathering on to people about office gossip, put on some ear covering headphones, close your browser and treat lunch time as your catch up time.
Change. Getting sick of the logic you’ve been staring at for the last hour? Change it up. Work on something else. Having little projects around to pick up can be exactly what you need to get going again. A change of pace is great.
Lastly, break it up. Figure out what needs to be done and the smallest chunks that you can break it out into. Then start slaying that to-do list. If you hate paper…try out Ta-Da Lists. They’re a great way to keep track of what you need to get done.
How do you keep motivated? Share your tips and tricks to getting your work done in the comments.
We’re on break and drinking frappuccinos and red bull. We just got done with Rob Jones talking about web analytics. He brought up some great ideas and furthered my opinion of how important usability testing is. Even if it’s small scale and cheap. He pointed out a book that I’ll be reading when I get home: Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. It talks about how less is more and the psychology behind it.
Before him, we listened to Garrett Dimon talk about the development of UI and keys things to keep in mind and how to open your mind to new things while developing interfaces. He paid great attention to subtle changes of color, bolding, typography, etc. to make impact on the interface without pulling attention away from important aspects of the layout.
He also helped me find exactly what I was wanting for my sketch book. I bought a plain page book and find it still not what I like, but he spoke about the Dot Grid Book. It’s basically a glorified sketch book with a grid of dots to help form lines and boundaries for designing UI ideas. Fantastic. I ordered one.
Next is mobile design.
I read an article by Jakob Nielsen on banner advertising that made me think about how advertising is being used on sites currently, and how it could be improved in the future.
The findings in his eyetracking research led to some age old, rather obvious findings. If site ads are made up of text, faces, or cleavage (a.k.a. anything sexy), people will look. But the greatest find was that when people are navigating through a site for content, they are on auto-ad-block. They don’t even see the banner ads or ads that are not built into the site to look like meaningful content. (Banner Blindness)
This leads me to, again, think about the need for useful and intelligent site advertising. I feel that no site page should ever have more than 3 ads on it. The ads need to follow the design of the page, not construct it. The problem I have is that there are a lot of sites that would fall apart, layout-wise, if the ads were removed. I understand a need to make money, but I strongly feel that if you have the viewers, advertisers will pay to get their ads in those viewers’ faces.
I read a great article by Luke Wroblewski talking about Primary/Secondary form actions. He worked with the UK-based usability firm Etre to see which pattern of Submit/Cancel buttons work best for completion times and usability on web forms.
I agreed with the results of the study and the philosophy that while it may take a second or two longer for the user to decide between a primary and secondary button that look different, it helps eliminate incorrect actions from being taken. Changing the color of the buttons isn’t always enough because people will still take a moment to figure out which one is correct for their action, but if you make them physically look different, it helps distinguish which action is more than likely the one you want to do. This can help ease the user along.
Link to the article: Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms
I came across a couple links today that made me really think about the state of the internet’s UI. One word came to mind…BAD.
Now my problem isn’t that not everyone has an amazing UI, in fact most are mediocre to bad, but at least they try and not everyone can afford graphic designers (or the skills).
My problem though is with letting users and your site go haywire. Case in point below:
If these scripts have to be created for your site, you’re doing something wrong! I’m all about user customization, but my problem lies in the fact that people don’t know what they’re doing, and when I visit a MySpace.com or Facebook.com site and there are blinking, twirling, “unreadable by poor color decision” texts and pictures on the page that now scrolls horizontally and vertically, well…it just makes me sad.
My solution is that designers lay out the page with areas to put things, don’t include ads in objects that people will embed in those sites, keep color customization to themes, and only allow so much crap…sorry, “extras” to be added to the page.
The internet in 2007 is about content. We’re done with 1997 and it wasn’t pretty. Think about how much content people are able to look and grab at. Speed readers and internet readers share a skill not many take into account, the ability to scan pages. We should be making the internet more accomodating. Do I like to sit in front of a webpage figuring out where the content is? No. Show me where it is, visually. Let me know what I’m looking at so that I can already read and be done and off to another site before I realize I just looked where you intended to land me.
Please, help me spread the word…save the UI of the internet. The tubes are clogging as we speak, er…read.