#user design

This app is ment to be a personal library for your art supplies, so that you could log what you have to keep a better track of what is in your collection. If you don't like what I'm showing I would love to hear what you think would need to be added/changed for it to be more suited for your needs. you can navigate this prototype by clicking on the Get started button or the cards at the bottom of the page. or click off the virtual computer to have the links highlighted.

here are also some screen shots if you would prefer to just look at those.

(src. wikipedia/ Michael3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut#/media/File:Pram_Ramp.jpg )

I learned about curbcuts. Curbcuts are those litle ramps, made especially as accessibility features to help people bound to wheelchairs to get on stairs. 

But what's even just as interesting: Curbcut Effect is the name of the phenomenon, when suddenly not just wheelchairs profit from this little feature, but every parent with a stroller or people having to transport heavy stuff.

Going backward means losing features over time. This has been the general trajectory of corporately made technology and particualrly software.

Here’s an example of what I mean, with what I’ve spent the last half hour or so trying to troubleshoot. In my case it’s a video game functionality, but consider this a microcosm of the issues in pretty much any consumer software.

Goal: Take screenshots of my Dragon Age experience. I legally own all of the games. I have made beautiful blorbos in these character creators and I want to take screenshots of them in their journey, which I will then share. This should not be a difficult ask.

Dragon Age: Origins, 2009: has robust screenshot-taking features! On PC there’s a built-in screen capture shortcut which saves to a local subfolder of Documents. In addition to this, the game itself takes some automated screenshots when you reach certain story checkpoints, saved to the same folder. So taking your own screenshots is really simple, and the game makes some for you!

Dragon Age II, 2011: does not have a screenshot hotkey, nor automated screenshots, but because I bought the game on Steam, I can use Steam’s overlay to take a screen capture, which I can then track down using the Steam UI (it’s also in My Documents somewhere). It’s a little clunky, because it requires launching DA2 through another layer, but the flow is still pretty simple: one key and it’s saved.

Dragon Age: Inquisition, 2014, I bought at a GameStop (I know, right? If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have believed they still sold PC games at the time). Though 18-year-old Julia hoped even then it would be a physical disk, instead the box came with a code for downloading the game through EA’s hot trashfire Origin, the world’s worst game launcher. Inquisition did not exist for Steam yet (and won’t for quite some time). To take screenshots, I add Inquisition as a Non-Steam App to enable the overlay and use the Steam hotkey like I did for Dragon Age 2. This requires some annoying one-time setup to troubleshoot Origin booting up with the game, and you have to have Origin as well as Steam running constantly in the background (should be fine for most modern computers, but every running application eats valuable memory), but for the most part taking screenshots itself isn’t hard.

Sometime within the past year (2023) EA catches on that its userbase hates Origin and force-updates everyone onto the EA App instead. I actually think as a launcher it works somewhat better than Origin but the transition seems to come out of nowhere and quite a few people’s game configurations break. Among the EA App’s “features” is that for all of its games it blocks the Steam overlay entirely. I can no longer use Steam’s nice screenshot shortcut.

So for my current run of Inquisition, every time I take a screenshot, I use Window’s OS-level snipping tool. (I actually have a custom hotkey for this on my homemade keyboard because, in case you couldn’t already tell, I’m a horrible massive nerd, but for everyone else) The built-in windows shortcut for that is Winkey+Shift+S, and it force-minimizes your screen so you can use the snipping tool overlay. You then have to switch to the tool itself, which is kind of slow, and manually save the screenshot.

I mean, like, it works. But it’s annoying. It takes a minute for Windows to switch contexts between all the open applications. Inquisition has a lot of loading to begin with (especially if you play with mods), and the last thing a player wants is more hard waits when they’re just trying to take a goddamn screenshot.

Look at the bolded dates. Look at how much feature access I, the user who paid comparable amounts of money for each game, am given over time, versus how much I have to use workarounds. Do you see how the software updates go backward?

And it’s not like taking screenshots is something the software devs should be trying to limit or anything. I’m not making the game “less fair”. Hell, you could call my OC-posting unpaid marketing for the franchise. There’s no good reason for video game companies, or any software companies, to be doing this. And yet they have been.

As parting words, some “research” on screenshotting with the EA app:

Coding.

That word in itself has a certain connotation that comes along with it. Some of us hear coding and automatically dissociate ourselves with the term. It is reserved for the likes of those we deem as super smart or nerds. Some of us consider code and automatically think of people who work in dark rooms with one singular light on who enjoy little to no company from others. Okay….that one might have been a little dramatic but the point is that we’ve given the gift of coding to a lot of other people besides ourselves. Strangely, we still manage to think this even though the likes of Myspace and Tag had us coding everything early on. You want an exclusive background? Here’s the custom code for it. You want this or that? Here is the custom code for it.

I believe what made the difference for us then versus now was the platform being used and the way it was presented to us. It gave us the ability to showcase our personalities in the background so we did it. It then gave us instant results so we engaged with it often. Finally it was presented in such a way where anyone could do it. So in today’s time this is a feeling I want to recreate for myself because coding is something I’ve wanted to learn for quite some time. I also believe that coding is for anyone who wants to learn it.

I believe one should always be expanding your skill set and I feel this a great way to do so. Still near the realm of design, I’ve come to admire how such a powerful and invisible language can support such an expansive framework. For example, there is code that was written to allow you to do everything from see your mouse move across the screen, to scroll down to see more content, to open up a new window in your browser, and so much more. Result wise, I like how you can talk to someone, get their feedback, and write for them exactly what it is they want to see coded on their website or app. I’ve read this falls into the areas of user design and front end development. I’ll have more on what those are in a later blog post, but my current goal is to share my journey with you guys and just get started.

Now if you’re looking for the one stop shop place to learn what and how to code, I promise NOT to be that. Rest assured. I don’t plan on being the spokesperson of all things code either. I do, however, hope through documenting my journey in developing this new skill that you guys will be inspired to learn right along with me. Even if that’s just to make yourself more familiar with the subject. I can’t wait to see where my newly developed skills take me and I hope you all will be here along for the ride.

Always happy to learn. Always happy to share.

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