mattyfo

Something doesn't add up with this story and I suspect it's going to come out in the lawsuit.

If the doctor REALLY did want to lower testosterone levels in the 16 year old, there's a slew of medications that would have been more effective (Spiro, Lupron, Bica, etc). That amount of Estradiol isn't going to do much to lower T levels.

Well I'll tell you what, you had me a little concerned when you launched. We're working on similar challenges over at Smartsheet. Please reach out if you're interested in staying in this space!

Have you considered therapy? It sounds like you need some self-reflection skills and a therapist could help you develop those skills.

This is really helpful with understanding where data analysis goes wrong but he totally mis-characterizes proper segmentation strategies.

"These average people who are content with the default" are going to be your customers. My grandpa has an iPhone and his friend uses uber all the time. Both are very conservative and might fall into that realm of 'average people' yet use disruptive game changing ideas.

Get out there and empathize with real people with real problems. You'll find that even the most boring, ho-hum, run of the mill person will be happy to lay down hard cash for your game changing idea if it fixes THEIR problem.

That being said, focus groups are a horrible way to get meaningful feedback. Customer interviews and other more in depth ethnographic techniques are going to deliver what you're looking for.

You're so young, enjoy the ride.

Cultivate a rich life and identity outside of work. It's hard but what we do doesn't have to be what defines us.

An HTML/CSS prototyping framework that is dead simple for designers to use. They would only write the code in an easy to organize way (layouts and snippets) and the tool would take care of building everything, live reloads, creating documentation from comments, collecting feedback from stakeholders, and serving it up.

I've been wireframing for a while and have yet to reach a solution I really like.

I'd disagree on the JS part. I think given the timeframe and context it's fine as is. He did do a lot of things right such as not leaking globals and using gulp/browserify.

SEEKING WORK - Remote or Baltimore, MD

I'm a User Experience Designer and Developer. I work with startups and companies to figure out how their products should work and execute on their vision. You should contact me if you need help with javascript development, wireframing, or user research.

Development that I do includes, traditional front-end coding (PSD to HTML), functional prototypes with Foundation or Bootstrap, client heavy apps with Backbone.js or Meteor.js, Node.js applications – checkout https://github.com/matthewforr/sitemapper for a recent example of my work.

Design deliverables I create include, wireframes (low to high fidelity), sitemaps, application flows, content models, visual designs, clickable prototypes (InVision, Flinto, Axure)

User research methods I use include, ethnographies, usability testing, heuristic analysis, stakeholder interviews, competitive analysis, surveys, card sorts

You can find my portfolio online at matthewforr.com, I'm on github at https://github.com/matthewforr, and you can contact me at matthew.forr at gmail.com

I think your product managers are doing it all wrong. They should be showing up with "this is the problem we've identified" and asking how the makers can solve it. Product management looses out big when they show up with "this is the solution we demand".

The author of this article failed in stating up front a basic assumption about UX which is that you need to be making your decisions from a position that is informed by quantitative and qualitative observations about the actual users.

When you collect the data you can test things 'from a design perspective' and 'best practice' standpoint and see if those hold true. Any other way and you're making stuff and justifying your decisions after the fact.

If you're not talking to users then you're not doing USER experience design, you're just making up an experience design. See Whitney Hess: http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2011/04/23/youre-not-a-user-expe...

From reading the description if you need this functionality you should move to something else as the functionality you mentioned is out of it's scope.

As a UX Designer and front-end guy a lot of the appeal is being able to build something functional without a lot of help.

You are correct about the taking off part. If any of my ideas were to take off then I would need to swap out one of these services for an actual back-end.

Catshirt, I actually would love to get feedback on this comment:

>> initialize models and controllers, then pass that data to newly initialized views. at any scale, this hardly differs.

Where do you find it makes the most sense to initialize models & controllers? I've done it in the router function but that feels really heavy and gets big.

Alternatively, since I use require.js I have used a view wrapper that initializes everything and then puts together the sub-views and models/collections as necessary. I like this approach because it feels more organized having it delegated out to my various view files.

Thanks in advance :)

I disagree, I found the Bootstrap JS code hard to read and follow because of the lack of semicolons. For a framework that is supposed to help people 'bootstrap' it would seem to me that making their code understandable and accessible is something important.

Awesome!! His first book 'Learning Processing' is what got me back into coding after a 5 year hiatus. Processing is a really fun language for experimenting and this should be a good book.

Sort of a tangent here but I've been trying to decide if our organization needs to move away from using Drupal for custom application development. You see to have some experience, what are your thoughts on it for highly customized web applications?

Yeah, there really is no comparison when it comes to wireframing. In terms of creating client deliverables and complete documentation we export the wires to PNGs and place them in an InDesign template we have.

The template allows us to add an extra layer of notation and InDesigns file linking capabilities makes updates/changes a snap.

I had hoped that myBalsamiq would fix these issues but alas it did not. It works for collaborative, iterative team work but falls down flat for big 'Sprint 0' planning. Maybe one day it will get there but it needs to add some features to hit scratch that itch.

Now, whether or not that is in their big picture plan is up in the air. It did take them this long to get rid of the 'sketchiness'.

Ha, totally forgot about backlift. Did you guys send out an email when the open beta was launched?

I'm looking forward to trying this out as I'm front-end developer turned product manager that can't seem to build any of that 'backend stuff'.

Have you seen any good prototypes built using backlift yet? I'd be curious to check them out.

For sure, when you launch the beta let me know and I'll give you my honest feedback. I might even be able to use it on a project but will have to take a look at the product first.

Nothing to see here but I am curious to see what this team has come up with. As a UX Architect/Product Manager it's a tough game staying on top of client requests, clarifying them and then handing them off for development. I think the challenge is having something that meets the needs of everyone but is flexible enough to adjust for unforeseen work, new requirements and shifting priorities.

I would argue that they've done a good job of pulling together a lot of the look and feel of their peers into one library. While it can be obnoxious that a lot of MVPs all look the same because of it I don't think it actually looks that bad.

Agreed, my number one gripe with spreadsheets as development trackers is that you can't have a discussion around a task.

As a product manager I might write something down and it makes perfect sense to me but not the developer. Hence there needs to be a place for a discussion.

While a spreadsheet might feel simple, I'm argue that there are other simple solutions (PivotalTracker) that get this thing "right"; even for a team of one.

Baltimore, MD - Full Time & Interns - http://www.mindgrub.com/careers

I'm an information architect at Mindgrub and I love it. We're a growing agency that has some of the best mobiel and web developers in Baltimore. We've worked on interesting projects for Dell, Geico and other clients. We're currently growing really fast and need to add people to our team in the next six months.

We're looking for mobile developers, web developers and design minded folks. We're looking for both full-time and interns. We actually take a lot of interns from UMBC as we're located a mile and half away from the campus.

If you're interested please get a hold of me at mforr@mindgrub dot com.

Thanks!

Baltimore, MD

We're global ad agency working on some cool digital projects. We could use another solid front-end developer. Drop me an email at matthew.forr -at- eurorscg.com

Paul,

Come swing by the Node one of these Thursdays, we're normally open at 7:30pm and in there working all sorts of projects until we head over to Joe^2 for drinks. We love company :)

Peter,

You may want to follow the tech in Baltimore google group as it was created to help over come this problem. The idea is to help connect the tech circle, check it out. http://groups.google.com/group/techinbaltimore

Wow, you're lucky, NYC has so many amazing tech companies to work for an a really vibrant community. As Alnayyir said start breathing the tech scene and get out there.

I feel fortunate to be in Baltimore and part of our local Rails group (monthly pub nights) and our hackerspace (total playground) because I've met people at numerous other tech companies and if I ever want to go looking for a job I know I have a network to call upon.

Go live it!

It sounds like you don't have a clear voice.

To find that you might want to try defining clear goals for your blog and limiting it to a certain topic area and then begin to write.

By reposting comments there's no overarching thread that pulls your blog together into a coherent narrative. A good blog does that.

It seems like you're able to write well and have the time to do it so go for it.

PS It might help to find a comment you liked and then re-write it into a blog post, IE explain to your audience the context and then your opinion/thoughts.

Part one is here if you haven't read it yet.

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/09/state_of_mob...