The Navigator, Buster Keaton

I found what my friend Pietro Polsinelli wrote in his article The blurring distinction between graphic design and software development really interesting; he takes the right point view of a modern approach to software development.

As a creative code developer and as member of Open Lab, I can say that this method of working keeps is quite different from the standard approach to development: it gives people a sort of three dimensional perception of what they are doing.

Usually a programmer draws the behavior and the workflow of the app he’s developing, constraining graphic designers to adapt their creativity to what exist. This approach penalizes usability, hampering possible “Wow” effects and increasing complexity. Vice-versa no graphic designer can create a usable and comfortable interface without knowing what’s possible on the code side. Neither developers nor graphic designers can finish their work without any marketing analysis and content editing.

As Pietro says, “among the hats one startup should include in its first team, there is indeed development and marketing, but also graphic and usability design […]” and all these roles should continuously involve each other, brain storming together on all sorts of problems.
This “cross-competence’s feedback method” increases our productivity and the interface’ smartness; we needed just three month from the idea to the product for both Patapage and BugsVoice (two of our new products); it completely changes the way of working both for both graphic designers and developers, expanding each other skills and flexibility.

Diagrams for the Living Interface

I am increasingly convinced that our skills should be less specific and instead embrace everything that surrounds what we do.
The evolution of the web in the recent years is a reflection of this change, from a system composed of millions of isolated pieces, to a system in which every element is trying to communicate intelligently with others, where there is no distinction between enjoyment and action.
Users have an increasingly participatory role and often become direct authors of contents; I’m thinking to the world of blogs, wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, and how these services are able to interact between them.

All this happens just because the distinction that previously existed between technology and creativity has been broken, invading every area of communication and radically changing our lives.

Today, a web designer must also deal with functional aspects of what she/he is doing, and must have programming skills, vice versa a developer must acquire user interface skills to optimize the usability of her/his application. This confluence of roles makes the difference between what works and what does not work for the end-user.

It doesn’t mean that a developer has to do the graphics himself … it would be a disaster! This means taking part and be aware of each other’s problems to address their skills in a more creative and responsible way, getting faster innovative solutions that respect user needs.

People are not looking for full featured complex applications… people are looking for something that fills their needs in the easier way. As we can learn from some successful web applications like Google itself or Tweetter or Flickr or WordPress and so on… we should not reveal the complexity of our application, we should instead exalt the smartness and the usability of it. And this is possible only if developers and GUI designers work together to code and interface interaction.

Those considerations can be applied not only to the web but to everything that needs user interaction in the real world; lets think at cars, phones, appliances, clothes, shoes, …

So you designers and you programmers participate and share your ideas! And also hope that Pietro (a developer) will never work alone on his application GUI!

Suggested readings:

• Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge
• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Alan Cooper

We have published a new charting tool for Patapage.

based on jqPlot for jquery, it let you easily show any data as chart on your page with many configuration and a friendly tool to insert your value; it has a history manager to let you restore previous versions and it’s on the Patapage philosophy! check this article written by Roberto Bicchierai (the author of this tool): http://roberto.open-lab.com/2009/12/21/javascript-charting-tools-an-overview/

Go and try it!

Another great functionality for Patapage: an on line RSS reader that slide over your web page!
Go and try it!

jquery.mb.flipText is a simple plug-in to turn your text vertically in both direction: top-bottom or bottom-top.Wasn’t that something you would have done on your HTML pages?

Take a look

See it also presented in Patapage: Flip your HTML text around.

Here is an introductory video of the basic functionalities of Patapage;
Take a look!

I’m glad to announce the public beta release of Patapage, a new way of thinking the web!

Try it, enjoy it!

http://patapage.com

Patapage will be out in the next days!

For all  web designers, a new suite of tools that add features available to web visitors in an unobstrusive way; Patapage gives you the power to enrich either static or dynamic web pages with additional contents and tools, without using any complex serverside solution!

For example…

what could your users do once patapage is used into your pages:

• They can read (and write if allowed) specific pataWiki (related contents);
• They can comment directly on your page;
• They can take a look to your flickr (or Picasa) gallery inside your page;
• They can contact you using an easy to set form specific for your page;
• They can rate contents or pages of your site;
• they can easly retweet your pages;
• they can read twits on specific tags directly on your page;
• they can search into your site using google search engine;

And many other things we are developing right now!

What would you have:

• A confortable backoffice where you can administer all contents inserted in your site (approve/unapprove contents, revert from history, manage spam, read form messages, get rates report,…).
• You can add as many site as you want and as many buttons as you need.
• You can use all the Patapage buttons actually available and all the once we are going to include in the future.

How does it works?

• Just create your button with its specifics, copy the few lines of generated code, paste it into your web page and it’s done, your page has now the new patapage feature!

If you want get an access to the beta… http://patapage.com

A really nice blogpost, inspired by startuptodo.com, on how to get visitors remember your homepage, posted by my friend Pietro Polsinelli: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-the-principles/

mb._scrollable short video

component page: http://pupunzi.com/#mb.components/mb.scrollable/scrollable.html

my youtube channel

http://pupunzi.com

the new Pupunzi site is out!

there you can find all my jQuery components, news and great design