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Designing for Drupal

Is it really user testing?

Is there a better way to help our participants feel more comfortable? They’ve taken the time and effort to help us improve the usability of our work; let’s see what we can do.

Automated style guides with KSS-node

During PreviousNext’s weekly developers meeting I recently gave a lightning talk about how to use kss-node to auto-generate a website style guide. If you’ve even tangentially followed front-end development, you’ll find that this is yet-another blog post describing “project A implementing technology B with hip, new language/framework C.”

But kss-node is really cool and useful, especially if you understand how it fits into the larger picture of the new web development process. Fortunately, my previous post provides that big picture, so if you’d like to understand how Agile is turning web development inside-out and how style-guide-driven development is the new website development workflow, please go read that first. Then head back here for the screencast to get you started with kss-node.

Senior Front-end Developer

Style-Guide-Driven Development: the new web development

If you’ve looked at front-end development at any time during the past four years, you know that there has been an explosion of new technologies. We are inundated with new projects like bower and cucumber and behat and KSS. It is a lot to take in. At the past two Drupalcons there have been sessions about this overload, My Brain is Full: The state of Front-end developement. Essentially those sessions are asking “What the hell is going on?”

“Everyone is describing the one little piece they’ve created, but don’t explain (or even reference!) the larger concepts of how all of these elements link together.”

— Frank Chimero, July 2014 Designer News AMA

This is my attempt to explain.

Senior Front-end Developer

UX in the kitchen: An introduction to UX Spaces

User Experience is a much misunderstood discipline. For a start, in software and web development, we generally think of it as a design task, for design wonks, or some kind of process prior to real development where we determine some user needs or requirements. In particular, within web development, user experience is treated either as a step in a process, or a specialised skill, but almost never as a holistic development vision.

Drupal consultant

DrupalCon Sydney: User-centered design for Drupal sites

Drupal gives us a range of powerful tools for structuring and presenting content, but relying on these can produce bland, list-driven websites. How do you structure a site to get the benefits of Drupal's content-first tools, while still producing a first-class user experience?

Drupal consultant

Pagination