Presentation: User Interface is King
October 16th, 2007 — 10:22 am —
This is the presentation I gave at HighEdWeb. If you’ve been to my talk and want the slides
download them now
. Hope you liked the presentation. Here’s the overview:
“User interface (UI) can make or break a Web app project. Simple and easy? Users will flock to your project. Overly complicated and confusing? Your project will wilt. Using slate — a Ruby on Rails-based CMS being developed at West Virginia University — as our example, we’ll be looking at lessons learned in developing a good Web app user interface. To help demonstrate our points we’ll share before and after example screeenshots from slate. We’ll share practical steps any developer can take to improve their current applications user inferface. We’ll also discuss issues and ideas a developer should keep in mind when tackling a new project to get the UI (nearly) correct from the very first release.”
Credit to Amy Hoy’s slash7 site and 37signals’ book Getting Real which both played a large part in forming my views on UI and providing material for the presentation.
Updated!
I updated the presentation on Oct. 20th 2007 so all the notes should be there. I also added a few more slides and added a real example for the wireframe stage.
About slate
slate is a content management system (CMS) developed using Ruby on Rails focused on rapid production of traditional websites created by WVU Web Services. Read more about why we created slate and a longer list of features of slate. You can also check out a list of sites using slate. If you have questions or comments let us know but if it's a question about open sourcing slate have a look at this article first.Archives
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Great presentation! ‘Slate’ continues to impress!! Hope the presentation went well.
Heh, it could have gone a little better than it did :) How ‘bout this, I’ve definitely learned my lesson to start writing a presentation more than 48 hours in advance. Really appreciate the note!
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