Pemaquid Communications

Rob says: I’ve been giving Jordan some required reading during her internship. Here’s a book report.

The Design of Everyday Things sounds like a subject we shouldn’t need to read a book about. Especially the people who are trying to do the designing.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman (also known as The Psychology of Everyday Things) talks about how poorly some things are designed.

Have you ever had trouble figuring out how to open a door? Or do you constantly turn on the wrong light switch even though you use it every day? Do you have a coffee maker, or stereo, or alarm clock that has so many buttons you don’t even know where to start? Maybe you’ve even… had trouble finding something on a Web site?

These are all failed attempts at usability.

The kicker: People usually blame themselves when they can’t figure out how to use somehting, but when things like this happen, it’s not because you’re stupid; it’s because the device or object was poorly designed.

In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman talks about all the things about human nature that aid or detract from the ability to come up with the perfect design. Everything from the user’s “conceptual map” in their head doesn’t match the physical layout, or the designer’s conceptual map, to the subtle signals we have become used to, such as, a door with a vertical handle is to be pulled out and a door with a horizontal handle is to be pushed.

As long as designers don’t ignore what people already know, and the amount they are capable of remembering they won’t have a problem. As the book goes on he goes on to explain how new technology is making some design problems, like buttons with too many functions, obsolete. He describes the various issues with everyday designs with real examples that he has come across, making it an interesting and funny read.

To anyone who is interested in learning more about Usability and Design in a book that isn’t painful to read, like a lot of the informational books out there, pick up a copy.

We have a new Delicious account – delicious.com/pemaquid – that we created to compile helpful links for beginning Web designers, programmers and whoever else might be interested. There is all kinds of sites included and I did my very best to label them in an understandable way.

For the uninitiated, Delicious is a social bookmarking tool – it allows you to access links from anywhere and share them with anyone. You can also see which bookmarks are the most popular.

We’ll be adding to these links over time and because Delicious is a social bookmarking tool, feel free to add them to your Below are some of the links that caught my eye, either because they seemed really helpful, or because they seemed really cool.

If you know of any sites that you think would help out the friends of Pemaquid let us know and we will check them out and add them to our Delicious account.

http://www.w3schools.com/sitemap/sitemap_tutorials.asp – This one may be my favorite. It is tutorials for html, css, javascript, xml, ajax and a bunch of other things. It was the perfect place to start for someone who knew barely anything about the code.

http://www.useit.com/ – This is Jacob Neilson’s website, and anyone who knows anything about usability should know about him. He was the author of the textbook, Usability Engineering, we used in my GUI Design class at USM.

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ – This site lets you upload a picture and create a color palette from the colors in the picture. Do you really like how the colors in a painting, or the view as you look out your window look together? This site will give you the colors to use on a website.

http://www.1001freefonts.com/ – Looking for that perfect font for a logo or headings for a funky website? Here’s the place to look. 1001 fonts and they’re all free. Fun idea: write your next note to the office in one of the funnier ones.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/ – 53 CSS techniques you couldn’t live without! I think the title is self explanatory.

And there are many, many more (247 more to be exact). These are the ones that stuck out to me, being an html novice and easily amused by colors and fonts. I’m sure we have something that will help or amuse you too.

I have been able to play around with some fun things while at Pemaquid. I’ve been spending some time last week sprucing up the Pemaquid Fan Page on Facebook.

We are still playing around with is, learning all that it has to offer. I wish there was a better way to write in a description of the company, but there are other cool features, including discussion boards, the Wall, and video that will help us keep you all updated about what’s happening round the office at 28 Maple Street.

We have 73 fans as of today. We need to break 100 in order to get a vanity page URL (“http://facebook.com/pemaquid”). Like what you read here? Become a fan and help put us over the top!

We know the value of social networking for a business we wanted to keep up with the trends. There is also an ad manager but I haven’t even looked at the capabilities of that yet.

The other thing I have been playing around with is Google docs (http://docs.google.com). I never knew such a thing existed and it might be the best thing ever. Every student should know about this! You can create word processing documents, spreadsheets, even forms.

It’s all wicked easy to use and then you can email it to others, and let whoever you want have access to view it or edit it. You can make surveys and send it to people and Google docs automatically makes a spreadsheet and records the responses for you. In addition to all that, because it’s linked to your google account you can access it wherever you can access the internet.

No need to worry about having your own computer, or your flashdrive, or emailing it to yourself (which I think every college student has done at least once), it’s just there, whenever you need it. For someone like me, who is crazy about having everything organized this is the best thing ever.

Last week we asked other Maine Web designers to Twitter some words of advice for our intern, Jordan Warren. What we got was good advice for any Web designer at any level. A sampling:

Wendy Clark – @wending (Senior Web Designer at MaineToday) – “Occasionally leave the computer for your education and inspiration. Visit the PMA or local galleries once a month.”

Tim Shackleford – @fiveleafdesign – “Always be learning, test early and often, and surround yourself with people smarter than you. You’ll learn alot.”

Dan St. Peter – @danstpeter – “Listen to and learn from the experts you meet. Study http://www.smashingmagazine.com and other great online resources.”

Maggi Blue – @magpiecreative – “Don’t over think it…it only gets you in trouble.” (Don’t overthink, Jordan, but please do think.)

Ellen Kanner – @ellenkanner (Kanner Kreative) – “Firebug plugin for FireFox. period.” (We got her squared away with that on day one, Ellen!)

Calvin Gilbert – @calvingilbert – “Create libraries of frequently used code snippets and site templates… and listen to Rob.” (Listen to Rob? Smart man, that Calvin.)

You can find all these “tweets of advice” on Twitter, tagged as #4Jordan. Thanks to the folks above for taking the time to share insights based on their experiences.

So what advice do you have for Jordan? If you’re a Web designer here in Maine, we’d love a quick comment. No matter how insignificant you think it might be, it’s a gold mine of knowledge for her. Help her get better, faster.

She’d love to hear from you.

I spent the day the other day working at the Space Gallery in Portland with other people who work from home more often than anything else. It was an event called “Jelly”. Jelly was originally started in NYC in 2006 by two roommates and has expanded from there. You can find more information at http://workatjelly.com/.

Everyone I talked to was really excited about getting out of the house and it was definitely a good opportunity to meet people and network. There is also talk of holding this event once a month somewhere in Portland (There’s actually one scheduled for July 7). You can keep up happenings via its Facebook group: Portland (Blueberry) Jelly.

I think this is a great idea to help people brainstorm, get refocused, and be very productive.

One other new project I have gotten to work on lately is site mapping. I am using writemaps.com which can be made public so more than one person can edit it. It reminded me a little of building a family tree, only it functions much better than most of those I have tried. It is very easy to show how the pages drill down.

This project, however, gave me a much larger respect for everything that has to go into a website. This site map was for a bank so it was more complex than some of the other sites we come across but any business is going to have many many pages and subpages. It’s something you don’t really appreciate, and therefore don’t appreciate the work that goes into building them, until you look at each and every one.

My name is Jordan Warren, and I am a Business Major with a Computer Science Minor at the University of Southern Maine. I am very interested in Usability, Website Design, and Information Systems Management. I am the very first intern taken on by Portland Web design studio Pemaquid Communications.

As I started looking for internships, I was finding that most of those available are either all on the business side of things or too technical for my current set of skills.

Then Pemaquid’s principal, Rob Landry, came to speak at my e-commerce class, and everything he had to say about his own company was what I was interested in, and he seemed fun and enthusiastic about his career, so I did the brave thing and asked if he would like to have an intern, and we found a way to make it work.

Having never entered into an internship, I had only my own assumptions and friends’ stories to go on as to what it would be like. Having an employer who has never had an intern has added an interesting twist on things as far as I can tell.

Rob has gone out of his way to make sure I feel welcome at the office and has gone above and beyond to make sure I start out with the right tools and knowledge so we can both benefit from this partnership. Sheila Reiser, the Creative Services Coordinator, has been just as helpful, and is as excited to learn as I am.

Pemaquid is a unique environment and because of that I think I will gain more from this experience than I would have from a company that “knows what they’re doing” when it comes to interns. I told the folks at Pemaquid that I wouldn’t mind fetching coffee for them, but I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that.

The experience is much more like school than I expected, so far, but in a good way. Rob is so eager to share his knowledge and we have discussed the things I am most interested in learning. From there, he has offered books for me to read, and websites to look over, we are even starting a delicious account for Pemaquid that will include all our favorite sites for other to use to help them find what they are looking for.

It is also a lot more technical than I thought I would be able to find for an internship. I expected to end up in an office somewhere, filing, but instead I get to learn more about HTML and CSS and eventually help on some projects at Pemaquid.

I am so lucky to have landed this opportunity to learn and make connections throughout the Portland area in the process. I don’t think there is any way I can learn all that the people at Pemaquid could teach me in a single summer but it will definitely be a most worthwhile experience.