Dynamo Blog

A video posted by Prima Creative (@thisisprima) on Oct 13, 2015 at 12:23pm PDT

Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn! Literally...! We are loving Trump Donald, this interactive horn blowing website. As Canadians, we aren’t really sure what’s going on south of the border in this year’s presidential candidacy run, but we do know that we are enjoying this website.

Want what they have? Minimums is a beautifully designed website, showcasing interviews with interesting people in many fields, and the stories behind their most treasured possessions.

Live like you were Victorian! Always creating amazing online experiences, the V&A Museum has built this super fun and educational Victorian wig builder so you can show off just how you would have styled your hair “back then”.

Not that we want to replace developers.... We’ve stumbled across some interesting prototyping tools recently that we are excited to share with you. Principle is built to create animated and interactive UI designs and can give you a beautifully realistic design prototype that really wows your clients. Webflow helps designers launch dynamic and responsive websites without having to know how to code. Web flow can actually function as a CMS as well. 

How can we make working together easier? Figma is a collaborative interface design tool, letting multiple people work on one file simultaneously. It works cross-platform and can sync up with your team’s Slack channel to make editing your design easier. We’re torn as to how much we would actually need this simultaneous design feature, but are agreed that it is showing just how forward thinking we can be as designers!

I felt this more than ever over this past trip. Struggling to find a space to get into any kind of zone can be a bear for anyone. However, if you are unfamiliar to an office (open or cubed) this “zone of unproductivity” can become unbearable.

Over the course of the last 10 months, I have actively tried to combat this challenge by spending small amounts of my week at a local coworking location. Like any common office, there are people to grab your attention, temperature settings that are out of your direct control, and a sense of randomness that you don’t encounter in a more controlled environment. Much like how Westley fortifies himself against poison in the Princess Bride, I sampled these distractions hoping that acclimatizing myself slowly to office life would make the time in Montreal that much easier.

So far this method fell rather flat. Not only had I increased my time spent in a coworking location prior to arriving in Montreal but, I actively attempted to work in locations that were busier and more distracting. All of this in the hopes that my time at the office would be just as productive as my time in my home office. Looking back over the week, it wasn’t all bad.

Working closely with peers puts you into a zone that isn’t comparable to what you get working alone. There is a much closer sense of “oneness” and flow that can be challenging to garnish from reading pull requests and Slack. In the end, not all was lost. But I’m left thinking that there must be a better way to prepare one’s ‘remote self’ for the rigors of office life.

1. The Observatory ( 25min. episodes/ release schedule is sporadic) Michael Beirut and Jessica Helfland are the most perceptive and sharp designers and design criticism voices of our time. Their joint podcast, an audio extension of Design Observer, serves up shows covering the current cultural zeitgeist through the lens of design. They’ve discussed topics ranging from Hotline Bling, Beirut’s reluctance to give up his flip phone, design for refugee camps, and virtually any relevant current event seen through a design lens.

2. 99% Invisible (18min. episodes / weekly) Roman Mars and his crack team of reporters uncover the fascinating back stories of unnoticed objects in our daily life. Recent episodes feature the worst smell in the world, an NYC skyscraper that almost collapsed due to poor design choices, the origins of “central casting” in Hollywood, expiration labelling on groceries, and many more seemingly dull subjects that are surprisingly fascinating. 

3. Start Up (30min. episodes/ seasonal & weekly) A bootstraps-to-term sheets chronicle following the unlikely success of an ex-NPR host creating a podcast network called Gimlet. The 1st season offers a step-by-step guide to Alex Blumberg’s process of bringing partners and funders on-board, honing his elevator pitch, having second thoughts, and anxiety-ridden conversations with his wife. Blumberg’s recorder is always running - capturing very real moments of a business being born. Look out for the design sprint episode with our friends at Google Ventures.

4. Monocle 24: Section D (30min. episodes/ weekly) This show is the most design-centric offering from Monocle magazine’s radio network. The shows snags high-profile guests and covers global trends in architecture, industrial, fashion, and graphic design. Section D is firing on all cylinders in its long-form interviews with rarely-heard icons, like Mirko Bosche, Lance Wyman, Yves Behar, and Daniel Liebeskind. 

5. Buzzfeed’s Internet Explorer (30min. episodes / weekly) Internet culture moves at an incredibly fast pace, most adults over 30 probably can’t keep up, that is unless you listen to Ryan Broderick and Katie Notopoulos’ Internet Explorer podcast featuring the high, and more frequently, the low points of web culture. They’ve covered Facebook’s true detectives, Vine stars, Russian troll farms, bodybuilder web forum lingo, and of course, Jason Derulo.

6. Design Details (1hr. / weekly) Brian Lovin and Bryn Jackson interview graphic designers working in interactive and tech. Design process and management strategies are often topics of discussion, making this podcast essential listening for any designer wanting to improve their company culture. A few of the interviews transcend common valley talk, offering profound life advice for anyone creative (gateway episodes: Mike Essl, Elle Luna, Jon Lax).

7. Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything (30 min. / bi-weekly) Benjamin Walker’s work is hard to pin down. His podcast is a mixture of prose and poetic reportage on the dangers of disruptors like Airbnb and Uber, offering linear stories from the field and full-fledged radio plays interchangeably. Walker’s 2-part story on the sharing economy in San Francisco is as fascinating as his surrealist childhood flashback to 1984. 

Over the course of my life, I’ve expended a lot of energy trying to avoid conflict. It’s uncomfortable. Second only to my fear of heights, the thing that scares me the most is the first time that I have to offer critical feedback to a colleague or friend. There’s no way for me to know what kind of headspace a person is in, how they’ll take it or if I’m being clear enough. Perhaps it stems from being overly-sensitive, and a past history of taking every piece of criticism as a sign of personal failure (I’ve changed, thank goodness). It feels like someone is punching you in the stomach while simultaneously poking your eyeballs with blunt toothpicks. I’m not sure if this is everyone’s reaction to providing feedback, but personally, I find it quite distressing. 

Unfortunately, I have found that in order to do my job well, I have had to learn to lean into conflict. My career is a series of critiques: between team meetings and client feedback, there’s not a whole lot of room for discomfort. Over time, I also realized that I rarely regretted engaging in these types of dialogues. If you think about it, some of the richest conversations that we have are the ones where divergent perspectives are presented. These discussions have the power to expand our horizons, elevate the quality of our work and strengthen the teams we work in. 

The truth is, when we engage in conversations that expose and reinforce our differences, the conflict is what pushes you harder and forces you to evolve your idea into something even better. Additionally, if you can learn to debate effectively as a team, it can help generate new ideas, push concepts even further and help you defend your work when the time comes.  

So while the anticipation of conflict still makes an insecure and surprisingly introverted person like myself want to hide in my office’s supply closet, I have found that not only is strife necessary, but it can also be hugely liberating.

A significant body of research now suggests that conflict among teams is actually really good, especially when that fighting is focused around creative ideas. If everyone on a team is always in alignment it can mean that ideas are stagnant, or that a team values cohesiveness over conflict. Either way, agreeing can sometimes stand in the way of producing outstanding creative work.

There is, however, one important, golden rule before you embark on the path of most resistance: you want to know what it is you’re fighting for. You also want to make sure that it’s absolutely worth it. This is not about being contrarian, disagreeing for the sake of starting an argument or being a troll. Conflict is exhausting, so before you take the time to gather your arsenal and go into battle, you want to ensure that the scrapes and scars you’ll get along the way will yield the results and impact you desire. 

Whenever you’re fighting about ideas, it’s important that you’re engaging in the “right fight” – criticizing a person’s ideas or work, and not the person himself. This type of conflict is what researchers call “intellectual” conflict, and it must be done in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Also, for whatever it’s worth, I try to temper my feedback with something I think my peers are doing well. I don’t do this for the sake of being nice, but instead because I think there is always some inherent value in what is being presented, and it’s important to recognize that.

When a project is being considered or developed, criticism and constructive conflict are vital to assessing the quality of your ideas. The old adage that there are “no bad ideas” may work during the idea generation phase, but won’t prove useful when it’s time to start evaluating the concepts to push them further.

For the animators at Pixar, conflict and debate are a part of their morning routine. Every day, the teams gather first thing to review their work from the previous day. They examine each key frame, and, in turn, criticize nearly everything about it. No detail is too small to critique, and no one is prohibited from arguing against the work of someone else. Everything, from the angle of the lighting to the timing of certain sound effects is brought into question and discussed. At Pixar, they call this “shredding”, and though I imagine it must be draining, the process is vital to their ability to release quality work again and again. 

We work a lot like this at Dynamo, and it’s one of the aspects of my job that I find the most enriching. Sure, the conflict isn’t always fun, but it always leads to something better. We often take the time to sleep on our ideas and let them marinate. We aren’t too quick to make decisions, and we try to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard. I always feel that my colleagues are as respectful and constructive as the situation allows, but rarely at the expense of the work. Sometimes, this creative back-and-forth can be difficult (especially on a deadline), and it certainly presents challenges to the decision-making process, but I’m certain it yields results that the team can be proud of in the long term.

The biggest thing that I have learned about dealing with conflict is that it’s fundamentally about a mindset. Explicitly embracing conflict actually allowed me to take control of it. Not only has it helped me develop a thicker skin, but it’s also made the work I produce better and allowed me to present work more confidently knowing that it has stood up to our rigorous internal  standards.

Lastly, it’s important to remember that people don’t give you feedback if they don’t care: if someone is taking the time to let you know how something can be better, listen. Your team, whether it be your peers, employees, colleagues or bosses, are there to help, guide support and elevate you and the work you produce. 

You became a developer either by passion, or attracted by the potential of this career. Perhaps, you simply tried it and liked it so much that you made it your profession. During your journey, from school to work, you've learned different coding languages. Or maybe not so many. Perhaps you decided to stick with the language you learned at school. Maybe you were curious enough to learn others. By choosing your language, you've discovered communities, different cultures and paradigms. You adhered to some of the values promoted here and there. Or did you totally reject them? "Let me code the way I want!" you declared to an older generation of developers .

Along the way, you met people. Some of them evangelized specific techniques, attitudes, and workflows. How many of them did you take into account? It's important to improve your skills. After all, once you’re over 35 years old, they say your employability as a coder is significantly reduced. Or maybe you just didn't care. Life goes on, your code is good enough.

Amongst many job opportunities, you've chosen your company. Or maybe you stuck with the position the very first company granted you. How tolerant were you with hierarchy, with the job (almost?) done. Do you prefer the freedom of coding over the formalism dictated by "architects"?

Just as a novelist writes, the code that you write today is the reflection of who you are, at a certain moment. A succession of choices and an intimate reflection of how you personally deal with constraints. What code will you publish within a deadline ? Do you hate deadlines so much that you've moved to company with a different pace just so you never end up delivering badly-crafted code?

So you see, you are your code. And it's totally fine.

There were many talks that struck chords with me, but none so much as Jennison Asuncion’s talk about digital accessibility. I have to say sheepishly, that before this talk, digital accessibility was not something that I ever prioritized or even designed specifically for, nor has it been something a client has ever mentioned as a priority… But as someone who strives to be a thoughtful, considerate, inclusive person and designer I thought “Man, why haven’t I been thinking about this?!” I think that it all boils down to not knowing where to start. In this blog post I want to give some quick information bytes about digital accessibility and easy ways to start becoming more inclusive with our work, some things that we may already do but not realize their impact on accessibility!

As the senior staff technical program manager handling digital accessibility efforts at LinkedIn, Jennison is a major force in the digital accessibility movement. As the co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the founder of the Bay Area Accessibility and Inclusive Design meet up, and the co-director of the Adaptech Research Network, he is leading the way people approach accessibility on many levels. I also have a feeling that he was the only other Canadian at this event, so there was a little home-country connection too.

What is digital accessibility??

The first and most important thing is to define what we are really trying to accomplish. Jennison uses the W3C definition of “Designing and developing UX that everyone can independently consume.” The everyone refers to: people with mobility problems, cognitive disabilities, sensory disabilities, even aging adults, people with short-term disabilities and people who simply only use keyboards. 

A key principle of web accessibility is that the designs, in the end, should be flexible and meet many different user needs, situations and preferences. This is a more familiar concept to us as designers and developers, but in my case and I’m sure many others, the question is: where do we start?

Who is this meant for?

As described above, accessibility means that everyone benefits. According to the Board of Internet Accessibility, building a website that is inclusive can improve SEO, protect and improve your brand image as well as expand your reach in growing markets (eg. the senior population). More than a numbers game, accessibility is a way of empowering people and making sure that everyone has the same access to information, shopping experiences and whatever else they use technology for. A question we should ask ourselves, as designers and developers, is “How many people’s UX can we positively impact?” I think the answer is obvious.

Fun fact: most blind people use Windows PCs and Internet Explorer as their browser. This is because it is the most compatible for many programs and softwares meant for disabled people.

What does this mean?

While Jennison set up a live demo of JAWS, the screen reading software that helps him, as someone who is  blind, navigate the internet and use his computer, he challenged us to book plane tickets on the United website using only our keyboards. To be honest, I didn’t even know where to start. I stared at my computer for a few minutes and then pressed some keys and made zero headway before the challenge was over. It had been so long since I had not had access to a mouse or trackpad that I didn’t even know how to get going.

This was my first time seeing how a screen reader actually worked, as seemed to be the case for many others in the audience. For those also unfamiliar: it is a software that reads out what is on your screen. Using your keyboard, you navigate through links and text, buttons and images. It’s surfing the web, just through words and keyboard clicks. When you use a screenreader to browse a website, you end up searching and navigating through different lists (such as lists of all the links, buttons, form fields or first words in paragraphs). On the United website, we saw that because of the fake drop down menus and the nested selectors within them, a person using a screen reader would not be able to buy a ticket for more than one person and would only be able to fly economy. From there, they would not even be able to choose a flight or continue purchasing at all as the selection process is not navigable for screen readers or by keyboard. The greatest takeaway was that intentional form-follows-function design decisions are essential to accessible design.

Where do I start? Best Practices to keep in mind.

I think it’s important to state that making a separate accessible version of a website is the opposite of inclusivity. Why should someone’s UX be inferior?

While creating something totally and completely accessible is an involved process that really needs to start from the top, there are many little things that you can start doing to immediately work towards building inclusively. If anything, you’ll be surprised at how much these principles actually already apply to good web design.

- Make sure there is enough contrast between the foreground and background. This includes text on top of images, buttons and gradients in the background. Image source: Snook.ca

- Don’t rely on colour to convey information.

- Be deliberate and consistent with your naming. This refers to buttons, links, titles etc. A person using a screen reader will most likely pull up the list of links to quickly navigate, this means a link saying “CLICK HERE” means nothing without context.

- Keep your navigation consistent and clear through your website, including naming, positioning and styling. You need to make sure your users understand where they are on your website. Offer more than one method of navigating your website, this can include having a site-wide search function or a site map.

- Interactive elements, such as links and buttons, should be easily identifiable. This can be as basic as creating unique styles for different link states. The key thing is that styles and their respective names should be consistent throughout the whole site.

- Keep proper hierarchy with proper use of headlines and body copy. Text size and line height should be at appropriate and readable sizes. This means using responsive font sizes that scale, not set point sizes that won’t zoom in older browsers. This also should reflect in the code, meaning that logical reading order should be taken into consideration when placing content.

- Forms should have clearly associated labels. Descriptors for text fields are usually found on the left or above the input field and then on the right for radio buttons and checkboxes. You should also associate labels for every form control. To help avoid user mistakes you can include examples or suggest corrections. Image Source: Mailchimp

- Alt text in images is not only good for when the image doesn’t load but lets people who use screen readers to experience them as well. This also means that we should not use images to convey too much important information. Image Source: Phase 2

- If you have an autoplay slideshow, you should include a way of controlling it: to turn it off and on, and buttons to go forward and back.

I hope that everyone realizes just how easy it is to start building or even retrofitting existing sites for inclusiveness after reading this list. The great thing is that we most likely already think about many of these things in one way or another in our design/development processes. It is simply a matter of being deliberate and intentional with our actions. Digital accessibility is not as intimidating as it sounds like! I’ll leave you with a few wise words from Jennison :  “Nothing builds better than empathy.”

Resources:

Treasure Map

Inspired by Borneo and British explorer Tom Harrisson, we’re obsessed with this customizable map motif sweater from Christopher Raeburn’s SS16 collection. Drag, drop and have some fun.

Go Analog, Baby Our love affair with digital interfaces is out of control. From the boardroom to the bedroom, screens have taken over our lives. In The Best Interface is No Interface, Golden Krishna (currently designing at Zappos, ex-Samsung and Cooper) challenges our screen-based obsession and demonstrates how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces.

In The Bag With eComm this delightful, you won’t have buyer’s remorse. Bartaile’s home on the web features bold swipes, bright blues and a carefully-considered product details page that make us wish we’d dreamed up such an innovative shopping experience.

tBS This month, TBS awkwardly re-imagined their identity and it looks eerily similar to MTV in it’s heyday. The result is clunky, odd and completely off-kilter (which may be a nod to their programming schedule). Nevertheless, the ‘BS’ close-up on their brand applications was an unfortunate choice and gave us a good LOL around the office.