Detroit.Code() Sessions tagged ui

You are not your user

Why did my last product flop? Why aren’t users flocking to it like we thought they would? How do I make something better next time? How do I get buy in for my next great idea?

Fear not! In this session, we will discuss how anything from politics, to culture, to variance of internet speed around the world can affect how your product is received. Learn how to avoid falling into the trap of thinking you are the average user in your audience...and take the pressure off yourself with some good ol' DIY user tests, interviews, observation, surveys and a few other tried and true methods.

Learn whether your business and creative goals might be in direct conflict with a user’s goals and how to decrease the risk of making a bad experience. You will walk away feeling more confident in your business, design, and development decisions regardless of budget size.

Speaker

Sheila Mullings

Sheila Mullings

Experience Designer, VML

How to talk to designers (to get them to finally understand!)

Do you sometimes find yourself frustrated at the sheer audacity of designers making completely design-centric decisions, throwing all sorts of documentation and rocks over the fence, all the while completely oblivious to just how many holes they're making in your windows? Do you feel that they might as well be speaking in Lorem Ipsum to you? When you say something to them, are they just getting an error 404 message back?

It doesn’t have to be that way! In this talk, you will learn about the fundamental differences in the perspectives of designers and developers and how we might tap into those differences to strengthen the way we work together. You will learn techniques and exactly what to say to take steps towards breaking down silos and becoming involved in the design process while also involving designers in the development process. As a result, you will open the floor up to educating each other and avoiding resentment by working close together in interdisciplinary teams with a unified end goal in mind, finishing on time and on budget (living the dream!).

Speaker

Sheila Mullings

Sheila Mullings

Experience Designer, VML

Block__Element--Magic: CSS Modularity for the masses.

Have you ever faced a code base worked on by more than a dozen developers, blankly staring at thousands of lines of CSS, not knowing where to begin? A solution to this is B.E.M., or Block Element Modifier. B.E.M. is a CSS architecture. It's a methodology. It's a naming convention. It is based off of Object Oriented CSS. This talk will focus on basic B.E.M. CSS architecture and how it can be the solution towards modularity and writing clean, well maintained code within a large organization.

CSS is hard, we all know that. There has to be a more effective way to facilitate the modularity and flexibility of our code. When tasked with creating new components for a Web project and inheriting over 8,000 lines of code, where do you start? When you are told to keep it modular as possible, what solutions do you have at your disposal? During this time is when you break in to your bag-of-tricks with one of the many modular CSS architectures out there.

B.E.M. is a great method to use to keep code very flexible and modular from component to component, and page to page. The greatest thing about using B.E.M. is the reusability of the code and being able to maintain the code in small pieces opposed to a large blocks with excessive declarations and generic naming.

One of the greatest takeaways from using B.E.M. is the naming of styles. With B.E.M., you can be as specific as you want to describe exactly what that style is being applied too. Naming the style according to where it is being applied and what it is being used for helps other developers who inherit your code as well as your future self.

Speaker

Chris DeMars

Chris DeMars

Senior UI Developer, United Shore

Hands Free Mobile UI Testing

Testing your mobile app against the sea of mobile devices can be daunting. Just testing with the popular devices of the last few years can be cumbersome and expensive. Not to mention the wear and tear on your thumbs with all that tapping and swiping. Wouldn't it be great if you could apply the same skills and practices you've honed implementing unit testing of your app logic to the testing of your UI? I've got great news, you can! We'll explore how you can get started automating all that tapping and swiping today in your existing mobile apps and plan for it moving forward. We'll also see how those tests can be applied to online services with thousands of devices waiting to run your app.

Speaker

Duane Newman

Duane Newman

Co-Founder, Alien Arc Technologies, LLC