Communication

The other day I came to the realization that what I need to be good at is communication. Sure my programming skills are still important and my ability to right solid code is a must, but if I can not wrap it in a useful and stunning user interface my coding may be in vain. Many times when I am reviewing applications online I spend less then 10 seconds on their website. If it doesn't load quickly and isn't impressive at first glance I move on. How do I make a stunning interface? How can I get people to pause and learn more when they visit my site?

I know that this sounds silly, but it all started when I started working for an Ad Agency in Cincinnati. As a web developer and a backend, server side programmer, I had spent years developing web based applications that typically were targeted at a single browser, internal audience. Now the applications where public facing and the browser or platform was not controlled. I learned very quickly how hard developing UI and cross browser functionality could be. This wasn't necessarily new as I have known of these issues, at least their existence , for a while now. I have been investigating Google Web Toolkit as a way of navigating around some of these issues. GWT does not provide very much in the way of UI components and most of there stuff is very basic. However if someone knows CSS and HTML fairly well then they can enhance and use the basic components to build more sophisticated components that work well across the browsers. I was determined that CSS was a must to know.

Learning CSS I started with this book. Now for the past several months I carry this thing under my arm as a reference when working on website user interfaces.




During this same period of time I was asked to give a couple different presentations. I had been to the No Fluff Just Stuff conferences and seen some really good presenters. I knew that I did not want to give a boring, read from the slide, bullet riddled presentation. How do you create a stunning presentation? Luckily I work with some really smart people that had already turned me on to a book on Zen presentations. I found it at the book store and glanced through it. It gave me some good ideas that boiled down to finding beautiful pictures from stockphoto. There had to be more then that though. I was very much interested in how to communicate using my presentation tools. After all this post is about communication.

I finally found this version of the book by the same author and it gives details starting with the idea of Zen presentations, going through the different type faces, color themes, photo/video techniques etc...



Conclusion is that I need not only to write good code, but I need to articulate my thoughts in narrative form (blog), live (presentation), and finally in my craft as stunning UI.