Even Simple Multi-tasking Can Make a Project 30% Late

“Instead of doing many things at once (thinly-veiled in the name of Productivity), focus your attention on one task at a time, which in the long run will allow you to do more.”

Collaboration with development is a handshake, not a handoff

“As designers, we have the opportunity to provide an immense amount of value as the design moves through the development process. This process is best when it’s less of a handoff and more of a handshake; it’s a commitment between the designers and developers. Trust is a key component of this relationship, and once developers learned to trust our design decisions—and realized that we were really listening to their feedback about technical feasibility—it allowed them to focus on writing code and not second-guessing our design choices.”

If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough

“It is well known that the sooner you catch a mistake in development, the cheaper it is to fix. I believe this is just as true in marketing. A sure way to find these marketing mistakes is to release. You wouldn’t write a thousand lines of code before you tried to compile it. Why would you spend a year or more on development before testing it in the market? Creating software should be an incremental process.”

How well do you know prototype

“Here, I’ve collected most common use cases that do NOT use all of prototype’s capabilities and their simple solutions. I hope this will be a basic checklist to go through when developing for your next project.”

Simple Ways to Help Your Design Suck Less

“I often deal with people that have programming and website creation experience but lack any design experience or even common sense in design. Creating things visually pleasing comes naturally to me (I think), I also study the area at a tertiary level. Following some published theories as well as my own aesthetic sense there’s some simple things you can do to create better design.”

Getting Creative With Specs: Usable Software Specifications

“Usability applies to our deliverables as much as to our designs. Creating a usable spec is an excellent way for us as designers to make things easier for the rest of the team.”

Foundations of Interaction Design

“…Interaction Design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It’s not Information Architecture, Industrial Design, or even User Experience Design. It also isn’t user interface design. Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral–about why and when rather than about what and how.”

Hat Heads vs. Bed Heads

“Every project and every office has multiple personality types. How you work with them and how you manage the rationale of decisions and feedback is crucial to your success.”

Typenuts, The Funny Side of Typography

see for yourself… ;-)

Continue Reading

A week ago, we quietly opened up the process for accepting new orders for our brand new hosting solution for Ruby on Rails. Here is what we sent out to all those who signed up on the Rails Boxcar mailing list.

Rails Boxcar is here!

We’ve been busy getting everything setup and tested for our newest hosting solution for Ruby on Rails. Boxcar, a pre-configured virtual server for hosting your business-level Rails applications, was developed out of our observations of how our Rails hosting customers are deploying their applications. Boxcar was designed to support the best-practices for Rails deployment.

How, you ask?

Unlike a typical VPS, we’ve pre-configured Boxcar to allow you to follow just a few steps to get your Rails application up and running as quickly as possible. We’ve also given you more control over your environment to install additional packages, gems, and programs.

We don’t want your Boxcar to box you in… except when you want it to.

Boxcar will provide you with more privacy. Your application will be completely separate from other customers’ applications. You will also get excellent performance as you will not be competing for memory usage or disk space with other customers, which leads to more stability for your application.

Don’t feel lonely!

All Boxcar customers will have access to a community-driven documentation project, aimed at helping everyone share tips
and tricks for configuring and maintaining your Boxcar.

Ready to hop on our train?

For the initial launch, we’re offering 6 and 12 month plans, both of which have a 30 day money back guarantee. Prices start at $85/month for the twelve month plan and $90/month for the six month plan.

Go ahead and place an order

Questions?

If you have any questions about our new Boxcar service, don’t hesitate to send an email to contact@planetargon.com or give us a call at +1 877 55 ARGON.

We’re excited about the launch of Boxcar and would like to thank all of our existing customers who have helped us design it.

Cheers,

The PLANET ARGON Team

Continue Reading

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong

“A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality. Here are the 26 most studied and widely accepted cognitive biases.”

The Five Biggest Web Site Mistakes

“Mistake No. 2 Don’t organize your site based on what’s familiar or convenient for your organization or its departments. You want a site that’s convenient for its end users—they come first. Put yourself in their shoes. Use language that makes sense to your intended audience; translate terminology (and any other jargon) into plain English.”

Multi-Tasking: Why projects take so long and still go late

“In most project environments multi-tasking is a way of life. This seemingly harmless activity, often celebrated as a desirable skill, is one of the biggest culprits in late projects, long project durations, and low project output. At the same time it is one of the least understood factors in managing projects.”

IT Conversations – Several podcasts of conversations with Interaction Design experts, from Irene Au to Jesse James Garrett.

Survey: Internet Explorer ‘most influential’ tech product in past 25 years

“Interesting word “influential.”" .. ""Best" certainly would have been a different story."

Microformats in Google Maps

“Today we’re happy to announce that we are adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results. Why should you care about some invisible changes to our HTML? By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily.”

Proving the Value of Design

“We know that design is an expense—just look at any company’s balance sheet. And we know intuitively that for many companies, design is a profit center. But few organizations can actually prove that great design drives profits.”

Open – Code – New York Times Blog – The New York Times launches a new “blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers. This includes our own projects, our work with open-source technologies at nytimes.com, and other interesting topics in the open source and Web 2.0 worlds.”

Why usability is a path to failure

…"why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a different place in my pants to put them on. "

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo

“Have you ever had that sinking feeling when you realize—just a split second too late—that you shouldn’t have clicked “Okay” in the “Are you sure you want to quit?” dialog?”

What Puts the Design in Interaction Design

“Designed behavior is not invisible. Sometimes it is obfuscated; at other times, it is apparent or even obvious. Most importantly, designed behavior dictates the flow between action and reaction, which is the basis of an interaction.”

Using Omnigraffle to visualise Rails model associations

“a quick script to scan the associations between models and output it in the Graphviz DOT format.”

Continue Reading

If you’re in the Portland area (or would consider relocating) and are interested in a contract or potential full-time job working with Ruby on Rails, continue reading!

PLANET ARGON is currently seeking Interaction Designers and Ruby on Rails Developers.

We’re looking for passionate people that are enthusiastic about working in a diverse and collaborative environment. Developers on-site in Portland are preferred, but we will consider top-notch people that can demonstrate their ability to collaborate as quickly as our team does in our company offices.

If you’d like to apply, please introduce yourself with a thoughtful cover letter and resume. We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Continue Reading

We decided to create an account on twitter for PLANET ARGON.

More details to come, in the meantime, add planetargon as a friend!

Continue Reading

In the June/July 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind, there is an article titled, The Science of Team Success, which discussed some findings from a recent review of research literature on teams.

“We recently reviewed the past 50 years of research literature on teams and identified factors that characterize the best collaborations. It turns out that what team members think, feel and do provide strong predictors of team success—and these factors also suggest ways to design, train and lead teams to help them work even better.”

Our team recently refactored our ways of collectively sharing what we learn with each other. This comes after a brief period, where our individual knowledge of new information was increasing, but shared knowledge amongst the team wasn’t. As a team, we were making wrong assumptions that everyone was spending enough individual time, learning about new techniques for doing the work that we do.

Assumptions are bad.

Once we realized that there wasn’t enough shared understanding of a few steps of our Design and Development process, we had to quickly evaluate how information was being distributed to all team members. Through this discovery, we’re now encouraging all members of our teams to have more open discussions about new ways of solving problems. While it’s up to the individual to ask questions when they don’t understand things, it’s also up to the team to approach individuals when they see something that isn’t consistent.

Everyone is a mentor. Everyone is a student. Everyone is a team member.

“A 1995 experiment by psychologist Diane Wei Liang, then at the University of Minnesota, psychologist Richard L. Moreland of the University of Pittsburgh and Linda Argote, professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University, nicely demonstrated how team members benefit from their collective knowledge when they learn together.”

While our team is far from perfect, we’re finding that our productivity levels have increased as we’ve become better at learning together. As we continue to evolve and grow our team, we’re seeking those that will add more value to our team, not just those who might consider themselves the next Ruby on Rails Rockstar.

Rely on the team, not the individual.

So, if you’re in the process of designing (or redesigning) a team, you should definitely “read this article”:":http://www.sciammind.com/article.cfm?articleID=D9058A4E-E7F2-99DF-36023504D1E43BD6.

Scanned from Scientific American Mind June/July 2007

Also, if you’re an excellent team player and feel like you flourish as an Interaction Designer or Rails Developer in a team-focued environment, introduce yourself.

Continue Reading

Watch this Wine Evangelist

“Gary has been sharing his passion for wine with daily online videos where he sniffs, slurps, and spits wine all the while imparting wit and wisdom about wine (and about the New York Jets).”

E-mail is not a platform for design

“E-mail is not a platform for design. Unlike the web, which also started as an exchange medium for text messages but which benefited from the inclusion of images and other media, e-mail works best when used for its original purpose, as the most basic of content exchange systems.”

How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

“…I like hiring people who haven’t done the specific job before, but are determined to ace it regardless.”

How Bad Design Increases Business

“The web is a marketplace. When people stopped respecting the rules of the market it crashed. They put priority on getting users with no revenue stream. They put priority on fancy trinkets of websites that didn’t produce income or even have a business model. That was Web 1.0 bubble.”

Hacking Firefox: The secrets of about:config

“…many of Firefox’s settings aren’t exposed through the Tools > Options menu; the only way to change them is to edit them manually. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most useful Firefox settings that you can change on your own and that aren’t normally available through the program’s graphical interface.”

Hot for Features

“Instead of the engineering specs, design and marketing have to work together to figure out what the story of the product is, how all the features fit together into a unified product that can be sold and enjoyed. We don’t need to sell simplicity any more than we should sell complexity. We need to sell — and design — products that are useful, usable, and desirable.”

Continue Reading

Let’s face it, there is always work to be done… and if you find yourself in need of a table, a chair, and some free wifi, be sure to check out some of our favorite spots.

Cafés and coffee shops

• Urban Grind – There are two in town, and while we prefer the one in NE, the location in the Pearl is easier to get to and not crawling with kids. The NE spot, however, is bigger and they have extension cords running throughout. The coffee is decent, and they do have some food options. The NE location is open until 4pm, and in the Pearl you can stay until 9pm through Saturday, and 7pm on Sunday.
• Costello’s Travel Caffe – Costello’s may be small, but it is one of my favorite places in town to do a bit of work. The coffee is good, the food is tasty, and the music is almost always excellent. Plus, they have these wonderful flat screen tvs showing scenes from the day’s chosen cities. They are open Thursday, Friday and Saturday until 10pm and Sunday from 9-5.
• World Cup – Be sure to check out the World Cup at the Ecotrust building in the Pearl (also home to Hot Lips Pizza, yum) for good coffee and free wifi. There is outdoor seating as well. I haven’t been there, but I have heard that the NW 18th location has more outlets.

Late night hacking?

• Nob Hill Pharmacy Cafe – Located on NW 21st, Pharmacy is probably Portland’s favorite 24 hour coffee shop. There is lots of seating to be found, but it does fill up quick. When you are done working, there are bars aplenty, in nearly every direction. I recommend the Zesty Cucumber martini at Bartini just next door.
• Backspace – Backspace is one of my favorite places is Portland, and not because it’s right around the corner from the office. Backspace is open until 2am, for you night owls. If you read our last installment of Portland Revealed, you will know that this is one spot to grab a Viso Vigor. Easy to get to by bus, but be warned, our neighborhood is currently a construction site. Don’t let that stop you from checking out Backspace, though. Hey, and if you need a break from work, head over to Ground Kontrol for some old (and some new) school arcade games. Want a glass of wine while you work, two doors down is Someday Lounge, a great new bar brought to you by the Backspace brothers and then some. It is easily one of my favorite bars in Portland.
• Fireside Lodge – The Fireside may not be ideal, but they are open 24 hours and it is usually a little less crowded than Pharmacy. The service is usually friendly, and the coffee is okay (but not great).

Your office away from the office

• Cubespace – Site of Portland’s first Barcamp, I had the chance to check out Cubespace last weekend. In fact, it was my first experience working in a cube, and while it may not be ideal for an everyday sort of thing, the space was pretty great for what I needed. Rent a cube for $10/hour or $40/day. They even have a soda fountain serving RC Cola and a cheerio/m&m dispenser.
• Souk – I haven’t been to Souk, which is right down the street from our office, but I know they are similar to Cubespace. I believe the desks are not cubed in, which means a little less privacy, but certainly less distractions than a coffee shop. Souk’s hotdesks are available for $10/hour.

Coding in the sunshine

• Pioneer Courthouse Square – Want to sit in the sun and work? Head down to Pioneer Courthouse Square (right on the MAX line), where you can enjoy being surrounded by downtown Portland and get free wifi.
• Couch Park – One of several Portland parks that has free wifi, though I can’t say I have tested it. Couch Park is in the lovely NW neighborhood with coffee, tea, and bars all nearby. Couch Park is also near a bus line, so it is easy to get to.

Not enough?

• Find more at wifipdx.com
• Want just bars with wifi? Check out BarFly’s guide to wifi loving bars in Portland.

Continue Reading

It was just two years ago that I discovered local beverage company, Viso (Visoda at the time), makers of the popular Vigor energy drink. It has since become a staple in the PLANET ARGON offices.

“Its cheaper than a mocha, has more caffeine, and has vitamins so I don’t end up in catatonic state after coding for 20 hours straight.” — Alain Bloch, Rails Developer, PLANET ARGON

Organically sweet, available at our neighborhood coffee shop (and most nearby markets and grocers), and chocked full of caffeine. 300mg, to be precise. You read that right, 300! According to the bottle sitting on my desk, that is the equivalent of 3 cups of coffee. But don’t worry, it’s all organic, so it’s good for you… right? ;-)

Viso beverages taste great and are nothing like regular energy drinks. They’re sweet (but not too sweet), non-carbonated, and full of vitamins. You can also get a sugar free version, called Will. Non-caffeinated varieties available too. You’ll likely see me wandering the conference floors with one in my hand.

Where to get Viso?

• Order online (website designed by Portland locals, Needmore Designs)
• Backspace (where we often buy it.. 1/2 block away from our office)
• Several smaller markets (think that 7-11 is carrying it now too)
• Bars (some bars now make Vigor-based hard drinks!)
  As you can see, we take our Viso drinking… very seriously.

Consider this a friendly tip from the locals, if you need a little pick me up that you can carry around in your bag, grab yourself a Vigor and join the ranks of the Portland caffeinated.

“Viso makes me feel alive again!” — Chris Griffin, User Interface Design, PLANET ARGON

Continue Reading

In Portland Revealed: Episode 1, Gary gave a quick overview of some of Portland’s finer points. In this episode, we’ll go into more detail about some of the things to do outside while at the conference. We know at least a few of you are planning on spending a few days before and/or after the conference soaking up the city and surrounding areas that wanted to explore the lovely outdoor parts of Portland.

It’s springtime in Portland and the weather has been great the past few weeks for lacing up your boots, running or walking shoes up and hitting the paths. We’ve kept this list to places within the city limits and easy to get to for conference goers.

Hit the (dirt) trails at Forest Park

It would a crime to not begin this list with Forest Park, Portland’s pride and joy. As Gary mentioned in Episode 1, Forest Park is the largest, forested natural area within city limits in the United States. Since many of you will be taking advantage of our excellent public transportation system, you can actually get to several trails via Tri-Met, both the MAX and by bus.

You could spend days wandering around all of the trails here. A few of us at PLANET ARGON have been known to go hiking and running around Forest Park in the afternoons/early evenings after a nice, long day of working with Ruby on Rails.

Gary Blessington, Director of Design and Development at PLANET ARGON, seen running through Forest Park earlier this week with his dogs

For more information about Forest Park, visit Friends of Forest Park.

Pound the pavement at Waterfront Park

Just a quick jaunt from the conference center and you’ll find yourself at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, on the Willamette River (pronounced wil-LAM-met). If you are a runner, try the waterfront run for an breezy 2.5 miles, which takes you down waterfront park, across the Hawthorne Bridge, up the Eastbank Esplanade, and back across the steel bridge. For more information and directions, visit here.

Waterfront Park

If it’s sunny out, Waterfront Park also makes for a great place to lounge on the grass with a good book.

Climb your way up to Mt. Tabor Park

If you make it farther into SE Portland, you might head over to Mt. Tabor Park, which sits atop an extinct volcano cinder cone. Don’t worry, we’re not expecting it to come back to life anytime soon, but be sure to check out the cinders “near the peak, where a basketball court and outdoor amphitheater are now situated, part of the cinder cone has been cut away, and is visible to park visitors. The remaining cinders were used to pave the nearby parking lot” (via wikipedia). Mt. Tabor is great for picnics, going for a jog, walking the dog, and getting a nice view of Downtown Portland (but you’ll have to make it to the top for this one). You can take the buses directly there, which makes it very accessible and a favorite among the locals.

View of Downtown Portland from Mt. Tabor

Take a stroll through Washington Park

Lastly, for those of you looking for a more leisurely walk though a park packed with extra amenities, make your way to Washington Park in SW Portland. You can get there by bus, or MAX, with the Washington Park MAX station being the deepest transit station in North America, at 260 feet below ground!

Trails at Washington Park

If the trails aren’t enough to keep you busy, you will not be short of things to do. Washington Park is home to the Oregon Zoo, the World Forestry Center, the Portland Japanese Garden, Hoyt Arboretum, and the International Rose Test Garden, with more than 700 varieties of roses. It’s just about to hit its peak of the season, so all you flower lovers, this is the perfect time! Best of all, the view of downtown from the Rose Garden is stunning, and on a clear day you can get a great view of Mt. Hood.

Feeling brazen?

If you have a lot of free time, check out the 40-Mile Loop and let us know how it is. ;-)

We hope that you all enjoy Portland as much we do!

Continue Reading