Part 2: Site UI Design / HTML Structure

When I first picked up the project, I had a few things to consider: what requirements do I have, and once I had those, how would I display these feature in a neat manner, and what technologies would I use to implement them. The requirements part came out pretty easily, after a couple of phone conversations:

• Calendar of events
• Photo Gallery
• News section
• A few generic pages
• Email mailing list
• Misc. vital information (times open, address, that sort of thing)

And now I needed to put together some kind of design. I had recently finished reading a few usability books, so I was feeling pretty good about putting some of these ideas to work. I knew that people coming to the website were probably going for directions, a phone number, or hours of operation, so I put high priority on these being visible and easy to use (such as a Google Maps link for the address). I also wanted to entice people to explore other areas, so I added some photos from the photo gallery towards the top of the page. Finally, I included elements from all the page- just little teasers- across the front page, such as a small calendar of events, news block, and a blurb and picture about their restaurant. Now, I had a home page with all the information a user needs, quickly and at the top, while encouraging visitors to browse a little and check out the gallery and other pages for even more information.

With this sketched out on paper, it was time to actually write out the HTML. I came up with a structure similar to my HTML5 Template (and in fact, it’s what I based my template off of.) I wanted to use the new semantic HTML5 elements and attributes, such as example text on textboxes:

<input type="text" name="Email" id="email" maxlength="60" placeholder="email@youraddress.com" />

I used the help of a jQuery Watermark plugin to help style the textboxes as well, since few browsers actually pay attention to the placeholder attribute yet. Further HTML5 inclusions were sections for the individual blocks of text, an aside for the side column, header, footer, and nav elements. Besides the HTML5, I also implemented a link tag for the news RSS feed:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.waterfordfamilybowl.com/wordpress/index.php/feed/" />

This allows browsers and whatever happens to crawl your site to say “hey, there’s an RSS feed here” and allow users to easily pick up the news RSS feed. You’ll notice it in FireFox, IE, and Chrome if you have an extension installed.

Waterford Family Bowl website (www.waterfordfamilybowl.com)

A little while ago, my aunt approached me- she needed a website for her bowling alley. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go over what you want and we’ll build something that works for you.”  In the back of my mind, I was thinking “awesome! Perfect timing to flex my HTML5 muscles and try jQuery 1.4 in a production environment; will it work?”

The site’s now completed, and in production. Go ahead and check it out at http://www.waterfordfamilybowl.com (still waiting on a little alternate content ). I’m going to, over a series of 4 or 5 posts, go over how the site works- how and why I used PHP, jQuery, HTML 5, jQuery, WordPress, Picasa, Google Analytics and Webmaster tools, and Google Apps; and, how I merged them all to create a dynamic, easy to use and easy to edit website. I used principles from books like “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Don’t Make Me Think”, and I’ll explain how and where these came into play.   The process I took made even IE 6 compatibility a breeze!

Brief overview on how I plan to break it down:

1. Intro to series
2. Design - architecturally and graphically
3. Implementation of WordPress, Picasa, etc.
4. “Contact Us”, finishing touches
5. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools overviews
6. Wrap-up (maybe?)

My awesome first tablet design

(This post was started using my new tablet!)

Well, I suppose that now that I have a tablet, I oughta start practicing. You see, I’ve never been one to have exceptional handwriting skills, so it’s a good thing that I now have a computer that can understand my handwriting better than my 8th-grade Spanish teacher could. I used to get a LOT of zeros on my homework.

(At this point, I’m back to my keyboard because my hand began cramping up. I tried, at least… Typing at 90WPM  on my keyboard is superior to writing using a plastic pen on a mat.)

I’ve long dreamed of owning a graphics tablet, for quick mockups (I included my first here. Creative Commons license, feel free to derive from its awesomeness.) I picked up the Wacom Pen & Touch. Three days in, it has been fun to play with; while it hasn’t been 100% everything that I ever imagined it would be, I think that it may be more of a learning curve issue rather than an issue with the technology itself. I’m used to using a mouse that I have to throw all over a mousepad, not a pen and a tablet that maps 1:1 with my monitor (originally, it mapped to both monitors before I turned off the second monitor in the tablet settings.)

One of the troubles I was having was that it seemed somewhat laggy when I was using my pen on Windows 7 with Photoshop CS3. I noticed mostly that when I was writing, I couldn’t add small details well (look at how crazy all of the lines in my As are); it would sort of stick and think it was supposed to pull up some kind of command menu. I’d like to blame it on myself, as a user error… but it isn’t at all obvious how I fix that issue, if it is one.

Regardless, I’m going to soldier on and try a few more mockups before passing more severe judgement. There are probably some hidden settings somewhere to fix; and once I have those figured out, I’ll post a follow-up on how I did it. Hopefully I do it. Don’t crush my dreams, Wacom.

And, I’ve decided that Neflaria, Version 2, will be my playground.

Neflaria, for the unacquainted, is the online game that my friend and I inherited a couple years ago. You make a character, you log in, and you fight monsters and chat with other players; while there’s not a whole lot to the game, it has been around for about 10 years, and as such, has a lot of character. And a lot of characters. I mean that endearingly. (Hi, Chris)

However, to a lot of the players, and definitely to me, its 2001-era look is a little stale. Its 12px Times New Roman on 100×100 pixel repeating background. Another word might be “dated.” The server-side database and file structure is a little crazy and unorganized, and it is time for an upgrade. So, here’s where Neflaria version 2 comes in.

One of the decisions we made was to move forward and to use jQuery 1.4.1, which niftily came out just as we were restarting development, to use html 5 (by including the wonderful html 5 shiv [blog post, javascript] for backwards compatibility), and do as much as we can to bring Neflaria into 2010 while at the same time making sure that the people playing the game- who are probably still on IE6- aren’t left out in the dark. Now, I’ve always railed against IE6, and I hate IE6 support more than anything… but by building on a solid base of well-structured html, css, and javascript, we can bend the styles later on to suit IE6′s needs, while maintaining future compatibility. “Graceful Degredation” is the term of the day.

We’re developing Neflaria V2 looking for the future. We’re building our javascript more like a framework and less like a loose collection of methods called “x2″ and “j5″. We’re restructuring the database (aka normalizing the heck out of it) and using JSON served piping hot via short but precise PHP pagelets. It’ll be very client-heavy, assuring server-side performance, and it’ll be extensible for future features. We’re even working on multilingual support, using jQuery to query a language-based XML file by key.

I’m pretty excited. Get a preview here (only the home, terms of service, privacy policy, and “create” and “login” buttons do anything, and it isn’t wired up to the database): http://labs.crimsondeviations.com/NeflariaV2Preview/

Image by padday via Flickr

The first section of the book, called “Guiding Principles”, lays the foundation to begin thinking about usability. It explains the thought process that the end user takes; it’s never what you plan, but with proper design, you can help guide and funnel them in the right direction.

I’ve explained it in another post before: developers often think exactly like their application: we think, “if the user clicks X, they’ll see a menu for Y, which they can click to get to Z. Wire it up!” but in reality, the user isn’t a developer and doesn’t know the application end-to end. They have to muddle their way through the website, and if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to follow your carefully laid track. The only way we can have a hope to get them from X->Y->Z is by making each link, button, or step as clear as possible by developing controls that are self-explanatory in use. Buttons should look clickable, links should stand out from the text, headers should be obvious, and navigation should be clear. The user shouldn’t have to look up help text, experiment, or even pause to think in their quest to get to Z.