[Plone-UI] Report from Providence RI Designers Meetup

[Ed Manlove]

Jen has posted the slides from her talk (see my report below) to 
http://www.slideshare.net/JenRobbins/designers-and-code-and-workflows-and-stuff-14900090.  
She has several links embedded throughout the slide deck.   - Ed


On 10/25/2012 08:50 AM, Ed Manlove wrote:
> Tuesday night I attend a meet-up of designers with a talk given by Jen 
> Robbins [1].  It was well attended by a good mix of both designers and 
> developers. I wanted to listen to Jen and the other designers from the 
> perspective of a Plone developer understanding how Plone might be more 
> designer friendly; also seeing how designers work.
>
> Jen's talk focused on the upheavel web designers are experiencing due 
> to the mobile web. Designers are trying to deal with their changing 
> workflow moving from several static designs for a few "screen sizes" 
> to the next new thing in order to design for many many more screen 
> sizes. The next new design workflow Jen sees that designers are 
> converging on is called "Responsize Workflow".  Responsive Workflow, 
> no surprise, is focused on and around responsive design. Responsive 
> workflow she outlines goes through the steps of
>
> Plan -> Sketch -> Prototype -> Increase Fidelity -> Iterate/Talk
>
> and she presented a great graphic showing that last step Iterate/Talk 
> is really occurring at every step between designer/coder/customer, 
> following very closely with a description of agile development 
> workflow. Getting into some highlights of her talk...
>
> - Jen urged designers to move quickly from planning and sketching into 
> prototying ***within the broswer***. She clearly noted that this 
> prototype does not need to be much more then a simple prototype (style 
> tiles, wireframe) but it should come earlier in the design workflow 
> than has occurred in the past.   This appears to be a significant 
> change within designer's workflow.
>
> - Further expanding on the prototype phase, Jen used the term "style 
> tiles" to describe the end product designers are producing.  These, of 
> course, are not our deco tiles but my ears really perked up at the 
> word 'tiles'. Jen referenced these sites when talking about style 
> tiles: http://styletil.es/ and 
> http://sparkbox.github.com/style-prototype/. http://styletil.es/ gives 
> a great overview of style tiles and the sparkbox sample prototype is 
> responsive so you should resize your browser to see how it reacts.
>
> - There was a discussion amoung the designers as to what tools to use 
> for responsive workflow and there was no one tool that people had 
> settled on and mostly tools were just starting to emerge.  One mention 
> was Adobe Edge Reflow, http://html.adobe.com/edge/reflow/, which 
> hasn't been released yet.
>
> - Instead of thinking in pixels designers should think in terms of 
> columns, which is what most the responsive frameworks are doing. Jen 
> also suggested the designers should ***start*** with one column 
> design, i.e. the mobile device and then move up to the full screen 
> multi-column design.
>
> - Finally a discussion amoungst designers occurred concerning getting 
> buy-in from customers with specific concerns about the change in 
> workflow increasing billable hours and concern about switching to 
> responsive design. There was a great response, and ***if you get only 
> one thing out of the report*** it should be ***this***, "If your 
> customer does not have a responsive website then they are creating a 
> 'barrier to consumption' between themselves and potential customers".  
> That is. they are not reaching all their potential customers and 
> losing money.
>
> One reference Jen shared was Andy Clark's slidedeck from his 
> presentation entitled "Fashionable Flexible Web Design" [2] which is a 
> long slideshow but covers a lot of material. Jen also passed out a 
> handout filled with links and reference which I've asked that she post 
> an electric copy. Will share it when its posted.
>
> So what should we within the Plone community be doing? Let me make 
> some bold suggestions ...
>
> Plone's Responsive Design Roadmap
> ------------------------------------------------
>
> ***Plone 4 should be responsive out-of-box.*** - I've seen various 
> Plone responsive themes and Jen listed seven responsive frameworks in 
> her talk [3]. These should be evaluated, compared and one chosen for 
> Plone 4.
>
> ***Deco should be responsive.*** - This is probably some line you'd 
> hear from a clueless manager but deco should have some concepts of 
> responsive design.  Like "How to tiles move when a screen size is 
> changed?" or "Can we create a menu bar tile than transitions from 
> horizontal to vertical?".
>
> ***Plone.org should be responsive*** - Plone.org should be responsive 
> to show that we are serious about responsive design.
>
> ***We should track designer's tools*** - We should keep a close watch 
> on tools used by designers to see how we can tightly tie together 
> designer workflows with developer processes. Jen, an O'Reilly editor 
> and author, is tracking these trends and would be a good resource to 
> follow [1].
>
> ***Incorporate various screen size snapshoots into CI tests***  - This 
> is more of a side project that doesn't need to be for out-of-the-box 
> Plone 4 but having a procedure or test code to run a plone site 
> through various screenshots would be nice.
>
> Any other bullet points for a Plone Responsive Design Roadmap? Any 
> thoughts?
>
> Ed
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/jenville
> [2] 
> https://speakerdeck.com/malarkey/fashionably-flexible-responsive-web-design-full-day-workshop-1
> [3] Responsive Frameworks:
>    Gridpack - http://gridpack.com/
>    Gridset - https://gridsetapp.com/
>    Bootstrap - http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
>    Foundation 3 - http://foundation.zurb.com
>    Skeleton - http://getskeleton.com
>    1140 CSS Grid - http://cssgrid.net
>    320 and up - http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/projects/320andup/