Experience Design
- his definition: “looking at usability from a contextual perspective”
- “it’s just a hammer”; the tool is not the point
- world of developers vs. world of designers blah de blah *(Bri’s opinion: Get over it, people, just talk and educate each other and stop freakin’ fighting already.)
- experience design involves bridging the two worlds
- problem: people get siloed into creative or engineering (ergo, if you’re not “a creative” then you’re not creative)
- but really it’s all about design & technology that live together in a creative space
- what we do is a craft, craftmanship involves equal parts artistry and engineering

Process
- the natural flow of web development is: IA, design, development (put another way: layout, aesthetics, execution)
- all are thinking about their craft; but who’s thinking about the user?
- their process has IA, design, development all in one room
- iterate, create a concept, build it, use it as the starting point for the next round
- quick cycles; days or weeks-long, NOT months
- everyone agrees to communicate & maintain a level playing field
- start with sketches & storyboards on paper - quick quick!
- then create prototypes
- all three roles participate in both of these phases
- quick feedback among roles reduces designer anger (*Bri sez: which is measured in Anthonies, of course) & developer frustration
- “designers are a lot less hostile than we think, they just don’t trust us” (*lol)
- look at it as putting the extra cost and time at the beginning, rather than having to fix things at the end

Case Study
- 2 weeks to put together a pitch for Martha Stewart
- started with post-it notes exercise
- have to have a person in the room with final decision-making authority during this phase; no delegation allowed
- observed people looking at books, magazines at a bookstore
- what do they look at? which parts of the book do they go to? how do they use it after they buy it?
- from this they got features like highlighting, clipping out content and saving it
- tested out the idea of highlighting/clipping content in code, for feasibility & beginning grasp of the interaction
- meanwhile sketching out structure and page layouts (on paper!)
- inspired by video editing software w/a timeline; but then realized that users wouldn’t be familiar with it so had to change
- when done, moved to a clickable jpeg-based prototype with a few faked-up interactions added in
- used prototype/scriptaculous for interactions
- large blocks of the prototype are images, only “live” areas with the interactions they want to show are actually built
- 2 weeks total, from beginning to faked-up prototype

- recommendation: “Go buy a designer a beer”