Developer Eye for the Design Guy/Girl

CMS: Drupal

Friday - 3:00pm - Friday - 4:00pm

Description:

14 grad students + 5 faculty members + 7 projects + 1 person who understands Drupal, PHP, MySQL, and CSS = Success?

This presentation will outline the process students in the Masters in Interactive Journalism at UNR's Reynolds School of Journalism and Advanced Media Research went through to create custom Drupal modules for their hybrid community/journalism site OurTahoe.org. The process starts with design documents > paper prototypes > workflow mockups > functional prototype > beta. This cohort was made up of reporters, video editors, graphic designers, and photographers. Most knew little to no HTML when they started and haven't learned much HTML since.

This is basically the antifried (as in Jason Fried from 37 Signals) approach to development. It's not rapid. It is iterative and it puts most of the work back on the people who came up with the idea for the project.

Jason has presented his ideas about how useless a traditional design process is at several conferences. I found Jason's "get real" approach to development only works if everyone developing is a seasoned developer speaking the same language and the people you're working for have at least a basic understand of the technology used... which is rarely the case. Jason's response has been, don't do those projects.

This presentation is for the rest of us who don't have the option of turning away work.

My experience working with designers (and most recently journalists), is that they are much happier with the end result and fewer time consuming changes need to be made to "finish" the project when we use more traditional development process. Yes it is ugly and yes they will complain, but the information covered in this presentation will help you avoid some of that, handle the rest, and give you the documentation you need to convince the non-developer of the advantages of using this type of process in your work or incorporating it into your curriculum.

Lead by: