bugs and methods

I'm a big proponent of talking to users early in the product design process, getting feedback and iterating - aren't we all? It's a good way to ensure what you're designing and making is on the path to being useful and usable.

However many of us, including myself, tend to shy away from actually doing this on a regular basis. One of the biggest pain points is time.

It takes time to recruit the right persona.

It takes time to schedule and find a time that suits both parties.

It takes time to set up and conduct the sessions.

Typography Cheatsheet

How to use Sidekiq-Pro with a public repo..with Heroku

Only because we didn't try it anywhere else.

tldr;

TLDR Solution

Story behind problem

In a recent project in which we are using a public repo we made the mistake of including our source url for access to the Sidekiq-Pro Gem within minutes Mark Perham was knocking our digital door(email) giving us a wag of the finger.

We where then faced with a dilemma the client insisted we kept an open repo but we needed the power of sidekiq-pro. Having to edit in the url into our Gemfile everytime we pulled from Git would be a pain.

After much googling and StackOverflow no simple answer bubbled up. It wasn't until we came across this RubyGems Doc -Gem Sources

Solution:

Just create a .gemrc in root of the rails app directory, remove the source url from the gemfile and add the source like so.

./.gemrc

sources: - https://user:[email protected]/

This solved our problem in development and keeping the repo open but then we came across another issue in that our heroku server wouldn't build becuase bundle wouldn't pass after some experimentation we found out that the Enviroment Variables are available at the start of each build and since a Gemfile is just ruby anyway.

./Gemfile

# If production use sidekiq pro url if ENV['RACK_ENV'] == 'production' gem 'sidekiq-pro', :source => "https://#{ENV['sidekiq_url']}" else gem 'sidekiq-pro', '~> 1.9.2' end

Tldr Solution

./.gemrc

sources: - https://user:[email protected]/

./Gemfile

Saga of Soul

Role: Designer and Developer

Site: SagaOfSoul

Source: Github

The popular web fiction was in need of a new site and this was my proposal. Analytics showed a steady increase in mobile readership so I designed it to be responsive with a Mobile first design with a few techniques cribbed from the Bootstrap version at the time and planned to maximize accessibility. 

Revive

Was brought on to implement subscription services and design a user settings dashboard. They are a large amount of limits for each subscription tier and a user needed to know what they currently have and what they have currently used. As the system is used it’s updated to reflect their current usage and limit.

Role: Designer and Developer

Team(2): Self and Jan Ding

Website: Shift.City

Source: Github

Built for the Smart City Hackaton its a simple app designed to do one thing well and that is find suitable cities for specialised migratory workers such as Emergency Personel, Social Research Scientists or Engineers. The only data we where able to procure in the short period was information on the top 10 cities hiring for Firefighters the rest of the data is generated on the fly.

Developed and Designed over ~43hrs.

Role: Designer and Developer

A simple app built over a weekend to present primer concepts to future students of Wyncode. We kept close tabs on the students progress which then use to inform them of their completion percentage of each unit.

Unit - Show

We needed a way to keep track of what sections students had complete, inform them of their progress and an easy way to provide the curriculum in a quick and simple non-threatening manner.

It was pieced together using bootstrap components; carousel, scroll spy and list items.

Navigating the web is a means to an end and every click counts. Users need to know which areas of the page are plain static content, and which areas are clickable (or tappable).

Make clickable elements obvious to users so they don’t need to ponder the meaning of design elements or encounter nasty surprises when something doesn’t work as expected. As Jakob Nielsen puts it, “Life is too short to click on things you don’t understand.”

It’s a simple matter of interaction cost: People treat clicks like currency and they don’t spend it frivolously.They guard clicks with care and resent sites that force them to hunt for clickable items, or, even worse, waste their clicks.