centre{source}

When was the last time you had a really enjoyable experience with a product or service? Do you remember how it made you feel? Do you remember what about it made you feel that way? What about your experience stuck out most in your mind? If you are like me, some of these questions can be fairly difficult to answer, while others may be incredibly obvious. On top of this, the answers may seem clearer in one case than they do in another. Welcome to the world of experience design. This post is primarily taken from the first part of a presentation I made a BarCamp Nashville in 2009, entitled “Whoa! Creating Engaging User Experiences“.

Slide from Whoa! Creating Engaging User Experiences

We recently launched a new site for Nashville Center for Laser and Facial Surgery. The practice is lead by Dr. Brian S. Biesman, a world-renowned authority on cosmetic, reconstructive, and laser surgery. For the site, the goal was not only to tell about Dr. Biesman’s practice, but to serve as a repository for helpful resources on a wide range of industry topics, including his own “Face Facts” resources. It was a lot of content — nearly 150 articles on research, services and treatments — and our goal was to make it user-friendly and easy to navigate. Think Wikipedia.

Every day at CentreSource brings with it a new challenge. With every challenge comes the opportunity to try a unique approach. We all know sailing the interweb can be stormy at best. But if you keep your eyes open, you will find code that can be a lighthouse to your sinking ship. Today’s Code that Saves the Day™: The Symfony Admin Generator!

Even in the design community, there’s confusion and sometimes arguments over what minimalism really is. Everyone has their own opinion on where you draw the line, but common indications include liberal use of white space and limited decoration. Wikipedia describes minimalist design as a something “reduced to its necessary elements.”

Which elements are necessary and which are fluff is itself a gray area as design is often concerned with creating an experience. Only a seasoned designer with a good grasp on a project can say whether a light sheen or gradient helps cater to the experience or is needless noise.

For anyone (like myself) who has been religiously following Google and the amazing things that they have done to improve people’s experience on the web, you would have noticed a pattern in December 2009 of “speed.” The reasons for their speed obsession are clearly justified; a user’s experience on the web is made or broken by the speed at which they are able to browse, including the initial page load, the responsiveness of the interactive components, and the number of clicks to get to retrieve their desired information.

As such, Google has been busy releasing various tools to help with user’s experiences on the web:

Bash Aliases

Working on a Mac, I spend a lot of my time in Terminal (the command-line utility). This is where I do all of my interaction with my local databases, the central Subversion repository, and issue various system commands. Some of these commands can get quite long and are time consuming to type out. That’s where aliases come to the rescue!