Gluue » efficiency

The Last Ones to Go.

Kristin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:58:14 +0000

“But since that glorious day, you can well imagine how much pain, suffering, blood, sweat and tears not having to worry about IE6 has saved us…”

When was the last time you saw such happiness at the idea of dropping support for something? Society has spoken.

Read the entire article.

Simple. Is. Better.

Kristin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:38:59 +0000

If you take a look at the reasons we create web apps, it boils down to mainly one thing: organization. With that in mind, it makes sense that we keep organization simple. If we don’t, we get wrapped up in everything that had us disorganized in the first place. Simple. Is. Better.

Veteran creative director Rich Barrett recently talked to readwriteweb about some of the online trends he sees today.

Barrett said he’s seen apps become smaller, simpler, and more streamlined – perhaps to be more mobile browser-friendly.

“Simplicity is key so that the design can either work on both web and mobile devices or at least be consistent with the simple design of the mobile version.“

Web apps can become complex and try to accomplish too much. It’s easy to get carried away when you realize all the angles you can take, but it’s important to keep the main objective of your app in focus. The great thing is that the app can be tailored specifically to solve your problem- but it should be done in the simplest form. Clean code, simple html and css. Once you add all the extra code, layers, functions and other buttons, it becomes too much. The leaner you are, meaning the less weight and baggage you carry, the easier it is to change. That’s imperative in today’s fast-pace technological age.

[On readwriteweb.com], Barrett spoke to the tendency to flood users with options rather than making decisive design choices.

“I think a lot of apps try to be everything to everyone so they overload their interface with features to try to be as useful as possible. I appreciate clean and simple applications, even if it means that you have to direct the user more and limit their choices.”

Don’t lose sight of the app’s look and feel, though.

“There are rare cases where an app’s mind-blowing functionality can override any other concerns but otherwise users tend to make a decision about an application’s usefulness to them within the first few moments of using it. Aesthetics play a major part in that decision.”

So get lost in your work, but lose yourself in the simplicity of structure, design, and usability.

Read the entire article here.

Staction Quick Tip: Tagging Updates with Hash Tags

Paste Interactive — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:07:05 +0000

Recently we’ve been thinking about how to more effectively use Staction; and, being programmers and designers our minds first turned towards graphical or programmatic methods that we could implement in order to speed up our work flow within the app. But in the end, the most graceful solution turned out to be the simplest one; and typically, the hardest one to see.

One of the most striking needs, in our eyes, was a way to keep track of topics or general concepts within Staction. So we thought through how we could build a tagging system within Staction to allow users to define their own tags. It would be incredibly useful for things that don’t really fit the bill of a project, person or time entry (logins and passwords to the various services your group uses are a good example). But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that creating a new feature just to keep track of concepts would be complete overkill. Staction already has a great search function, and building more stuff just to track arbitrary words just wasn’t graceful, or a good use of time.

Twitter users out there will recognize where we’re going with this right away but, in the end, the obvious solution reached up and smacked us while we were tweeting away one day. Using hash tags would be a perfect way to keep track of topics in Staction! Hash tags, for those uninitiated, are just little blocks of text at the end of your update with a hash sign (#) before it. Two good examples would be: #password, or #login. Staction’s powerful search can then be used to grab that text and compile all the results for you. Instant tagging system with no programming.

We hope you’ll use this idea to work smarter and faster! If you have any other ideas that you think the Staction community should know about, please email them to info@pasteinteractive.com and we’ll share them.