July 2009 Archives

1. If you want quick and dirty, set everything to auto and hope you don't flub your lines. Camtasia does quick and dirty very nicely.
2. If you want something semi-professional looking abut don't have time or cash for a pro, record your video for length, edit it together minus VO, then narrate the video. Edit it all back together, throw in a couple of zooms, and your golden.
3. Find a computer with lots of memory. Your first clue that you don't have enough RAM is clips will start locking on the timeline, forcing a restart of the program to get it loose again.
4. The best process for editing video I found:
   1. When building your video, start with importing and laying in all your video.
   2. After you've got it roughly together with title screens and what not, start dropping in the audio. (Hint: break your audio up into clips before importing into Camtasia, makes it a lot easier)
   3. Edit again, tightening around VO (but not too tight! Leave room for transitions)
   4. From the beginning, put in all your panning, zooming, callouts and other effects. Tighten your video a little further at every step.
   5. Watch it once more with feeling.
   6. Produce it and kick it out the door. It doesn't pay to revel on these things, just get 'em done.
5. There's a fine line between being thorough and getting yourself wrapped around the axle. Trust your instincts. If you feel its good enough, its good enough. You don't work for an ad agency, so don't get caught up in the details. Spend that time doing your regular job!

Every time, every single time I've been involved with pushing something new  to the World Wide Web (aka, internets), something has gone wrong.

Every time.

Much like death and taxes, you can be assured something will assault your otherwise perfect rollout.  No amount of planning can prevent it. Whether small or large, some unforeseen gremlin is going to attack right when you press the button.

So, how can we defeat the trolls of uncertainty?  Simple, roll it out as a beta.

Give every project you have a minimum one week beta before you ever start promoting to customers or users.  Invite select customers, get feedback, test on the live site with live data.  Most importantly, don't set yourself up for failure.

Give your project room to fail.  This leads to a much more constructive process of refining and improving the product versus the more typical firefighting and last minute patches you'll be forced to do otherwise.

Bake a beta (or 2!) into your next project.  Your team, and probably your cardiologist will thank you.

Most web/UI/UX designers will tell you their job is to solve complex problems in a way that will create a nice user experience.  Because of this, they will often go away during the design phase of a project to solve the problem then bring nearly completed design back to the team. This approach often fares poorly, because a web designer's job is, first and foremost, to build consensus.

Good design is rarely the result of a single person's answer to a problem.  It is almost always the product of a team of people understanding business and customer/user needs when forming a solution.  But having a great team is not enough on its own, it takes someone who can see what the end goal might look like, and find some way to illustrate what they see in their head (their mental model), and express it to the rest of the team.  Its often called "shared vision".

A web designer is usually the best suited to build that first glimpse and share it with the team to get the process going.  Storyboards, wireframes, sketches on napkins, whatever.  Someone needs to provide a glimmer of what it might look like, so everyone else on the team can be assured they are talking about the same thing.

So web designers, stop getting in your own way trying to perfect a solution, just throw an idea on paper and start talking with your team.  I guarantee you will get better results.