User Experience

This October, come to our Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) booth to give your elected representative a piece of your mind. We won’t be holding members of congress captive at the Kalamuna booth (or will we?) but we’ll have plenty of other excitements there to keep you curious. And of course, BADCamp is a celebration of open-source software, so we’ll be giving plenty of Drupal talks. Read on to find out about those and our exciting booth happening.

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Interested in online style guides and static site prototyping? This year at the Drupal North conference in Toronto, I spoke on the topic, and we’ve got the video of the presentation right here. I'm hoping that by watching you'll understand how you can quickly develop the front-end of your digital product and deliver overall better work with our prototyping tool, Kalastatic.

 

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Every year I try to attend as many industry conferences as possible, but over the years I’ve become more selective about which ones I go to. I find them to be incredibly valuable and insightful, but they also cost money and take time, so I grade them pretty hard. This year I had the pleasure of attending several UX-focused conferences. Each was great in different ways, and I came away leaving inspired each time, and wanting to share some of the lessons I learned, so I wrote this blog post.

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Mother Jones is a politically progressive American magazine reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. The magazine tapped Kalamuna to increase their social media presence by adopting the new Facebook Instant Articles standard, which delivers incredibly fast and immersive reading experiences for people on Facebook, making mobile browsing quick and easy. In fact, Facebook Instant Articles:

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This year we were happy to have six team members offering sessions at the Bay Area Drupal Camp in Berkeley, California. From topics ranging from the business of running an agency to actually making the Internet, we had a ton to share. Click to see videos of all of our sessions. Read more

A long time ago in a galaxy not too far away, I supported myself through college (and then some) by waiting tables. It was a lot of fun and good cardio, but not the kind of thing that I thought would look good on a resume when my aim was to leave the hospitality business. But nothing could be further from the truth. I learned important life lessons, including how to manage my time, work under pressure, and feel more empathy for people. Waiting tables prepared me for my professional career far better than all of the internships I had over my collegiate career.

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SCATTERED, COLD & ALONE

 

 

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This is a tale of empowerment. I promise. But first...

Am I the only one that is perpetually frustrated by the tradeoff between functionality and beauty that seems ubiquitous in the Drupal.org hellscape? Why is it that modules so often rife with visual promise and loud verbage end up being naught but vaporware? Why is it that the most powerful and useful tools lack any meaningful documentation and/or look like someone threw up all over themselves?

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Last week I attended the HTML5 Dev Conference in San Francisco. While reasonably priced, the conference offered excellent workshops full of cutting-edge techniques and geeky humor. I enjoyed learning about new technologies and tools, as well as receiving confirmation of some best practices that I’ve been using.

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My last post focused on the Information Architecture phase and our method for establishing the client goals, website metaphor and site elements through investigation and science(!!!).  It is with this information that we will construct the website wireframes for the client's review.  If you are unfamiliar with wireframes, they can be generally described as stripped-down "sketches" of what the site will look like before beginning the more formal design and development phases.

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