Designing through prototyping

Not so long ago, I read something that really hit the spot. It’s a nice article but it also struck me because it was so in sync with what we’d just set out to do for a client here at Fusion – forgetting static imagery and wireframes, focusing instead on a more incremental and natural approach to designing software UI’s or an entire app (or a website for that matter). The basic idea is to take an Agile approach to a project and take coded prototypes as the main design tool instead of wireframes and Photoshop (or whatever tool you might use). I’ll tell you more about why and what the results were in the next article of mine, but for now, I’ll just say that a personal new year’s resolution of learning Haml, Sass and Ruby on Rails has already started to pay off. I encourage you to take a look at those, if you deal with web prototyping at all. And thanks to our guys Heikki and Florian for pointing out just why it’s so important to take a look at them.

Visualizations rock our world

We’ve been doing all sorts of GIS-​​applications, data visualization apps and graph components for various customers over the past few years. Our main tool for the last two years has been Flex but we also use the HTML/​JS/​CSS combo for a lot of stuff. Lately our guys Ding Hong , JP and Jarkko have totally taken data visualization to another universe. They’ve been designing and building some of the most amazing stuff I’ve ever seen considering situational awareness and location based data applications. In 2D and 3D! I hope that we can at some point actually show you some designs, mock-​​ups and prototypes but in the meantime we’ll write an article about the different things that we’ve seen, learned and rethought in this area. By the way, if you’re into data visualizations, you might want to check out the new Feltron annual, it’s also pretty awesome.

Social media is acoming, for real

It was an amazing year for social media, that in internet-​​time long-​​gone 2009. With the rise of Twitter and amazing growth of Facebook and newcomers like Foursquare, Gowalla, Posterous, Tumblr, Spotify and many others reshaping our behavior and content creation & distribution, it’s been almost too much to handle sometimes. Here in Finland we also had some companies break the way such as one of our customers WOT Services Oy (www​.mywot​.com) who reached an amazing 8 million downloads of their product and 1 million registered users to their website at the end of the year.

Here at Fusion we also continued our endeavors into the scene by developing and launching Hardcore Team (www​.hardcoreteam​.com) together with a client. It’s essentially the website for hardcore trainers – you know the breed of people who live for training no matter how much pain it causes? It’s also a micro-​​sized social media on it’s own and one that has had a monetization model built-​​in and in-​​use from the ground-​​up. I’ll pretty soon write an article about what we’ve learned during the process of building such a service for this interesting and demanding target group.

Agility and user-​​orientation

One of the most thought-​​consuming projects I’ve personally been involved in has been an ambitious attempt to glue agility and user-​​oriented design together as a functional process during last year (and the beginning of this year). We’ve actually almost written a book about this for a client now and even though that material is not public, some of us at Fusion will write about the Heureka! type of realizations we had thinking about these things and working according to a new world-​​order. Our own Niina, Asko and Jarkko will write more about dealing with end-​​users and agile methods and I myself will write about how design can be stitched to all this jazz.

So, four big headlines are out to give some direction to what we’ll at least be blogging about. I’m confident that there will be a lot of other interesting topics as well. We’ll see later on what they will be.