Author Archives: Kshipra

About Kshipra

user experience designer, curious by nature, early adopter, gadget nut, remix cook, dog aficionado, ceramic cup collector http://about.me/kshipra

Agile and UCD, clash or collaboration?

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After being conditioned to UCD in grad school, Agile or Extreme Programming can be quite unnerving when you initially start out in a company that practices this methodology.

Here are some resources out there to start an initial phase of “getting used to”

Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-Centered Design
by Desiree Sy
Source Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 2, Issue 3, May 2007, pp. 112-132
[Do download the pdf of the Article Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-Centered Design ]

Clash of the Titans: Agile and UCD
By Richard F. Cecil
Source UX matters, Published: December 18, 2006

How to incorporate user-centered design into agile development methodology
Activator: Pawan Vora
Source Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA 2004 Idea Markets)

I found a lot of resources in slideshare and added them to my favorites with the tag “agile”.

Effective Web Design Principles

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Again and again, you must be bumping into them!!
Practice maketh the person perfect i guess!

Source Smashing Magazine

Source Spoonfed Photoshop

Photoshop Express

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Are you one of those people who have the OCD of updating your friends about your travel exploits?
Finally after uploading your holiday snaps, you are a in a desperate need to color correct them? or remove the red eye which spoil many of the digital images?
Wish you had you laptop with you on your holiday? (with Photoshop installed?)
No need to fear,  Photoshop Express is here!!
You can upload digital images to the Service and to organize, store, edit and share those images with family and friends and/or with the general public.
Also create and share albums, slide shows and online galleries containing your images and other content.
Apart from signing up for the  2GB storage (Adobe clearly states to keep a back-up!), you also get to create a Personal Sharing URL such as your_name_here.photoshop.com.

Though i am really not sure why this service allows access to external sites such as facebook, picasa and photo bucket, maybe they (Adobe) plan to have some sort of collaborative integration :-P

Adobe Kuler and ColourLovers.com

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Came across this topic that talked about Kuler being ripped off from ColourLovers.com
I am not being biased with any group but i think both the interfaces do not match each other and their interactions are totally different.

I  first started out with Abobe Kuler, got the hang of creating themes sooner than ColourLovers.com
ColourLover.com seemed more community based with lot of things happening, which i really didnt have time to check out.

I just needed to create combinations and deploy them on my design at work and the time factor matters!!
Whenever i have some time or a break, i go back to re-edit the name and tags at Kuler.

I agree with the differences (comments) stated by Josh Chernoff on Chad Udell ‘s site that:

  1. colourlovers is more community based. forums and blogging and a better commenting rating system
  2. Kuler is more technical and logical. Provides CMYK, LAB and RGB with color theories and a over all a better color wheel).
  3. Kuler is more API friendly with a great deal of redevelopment emphasis.
  4. The web technologies are different. Kulers was in a way to provides a better understanding of Action Script’s capabilities as kuler surfaced just about the same time AS3 was introduced.

Fun with Adobe Kuler

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Working on Adobe Kuler has been quite an experience for me. Though i am a person who loves color, creating new themes was something i thought need major skills to come up with combinations!
Though i have done Color Theory in grad school, i still think you need to be a pro with colors to come up with breakthrough combinations with restrictions/constraints haunting your head.
So i played around on it for a while, didnt make any combinations public for obvious reasons.
Couple of months later i have edited and made them available publicly after checking out major funny combinations people have posted!
Hey you need a learning curve right? so from 6 combinations to 18 to 24 combos, 4 have been downloaded at least once, 1 twice, another 1 thrice and 1 has been downloaded five times….
hmm….not bad for a start i think :-P

So have you tried it yet?