Thursday Oct 14 Meeting

I'll put together a discussion/presentation on wireframing.... including a license giveaway for Balsamiq Mockups.
That's both non-technical (so newbies to Drupal will find it useful too), and very open to discussion and comparisons and sharing...

See everyone on Thursday!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=153738864662520

Nice to meet everybody. Very interesting.

As usual, Seth gave a great talk. Interesting and informative.

A couple extra thoughts that came to me on the drive home:

First, prototyping can be a great requirements gathering technique, especially when the client doesn't yet really know what they want. Also, if they think they know, but you can see other advanced features you just know they are going to ask for when they see the final product, a prototype can get those requirements out there earlier. Often when you sit down with a client and a blank sheet of paper or white board, you also get a blank stare and it's a real struggle to get specifics at first. However, throwing a prototype up on a screen, not only makes sure you're on the same page, but the client's eyes often light up and they start getting creative. That's that magic moment when the requirements really start to flow.

The second is from the "Learn from My Mistakes File." Don't make your prototypes TOO good. For one of my first clients, I made a prototype for a 3 or 4 month R:Base project (back in the late 80's). The prototype took about two weeks and was almost fully functional, but with none of the nitty gritty. No error handling, duplicate data mitigation, or database indexing for scalable searches. The client was so impressed with the prototype, they said, "OK, that's it! You've done it!" Despite my protestations, they wanted the prototype only. I had not only lost a 3 or 4 month project, but 6 months later, after the database had slowed to a crawl and was loaded with dupes, I had lost the client for good. They didn't remember my warnings that this would happen, just that I had built them this mess. For future clients, I solved that problem by programing a 15 second "sleep" delay for every action in my prototype. They'd press a button, and we'd wait for 15 seconds, while I told them the real system would be immediate. After an awkward wait, the next screen would come up, and we'd move on. The bottom line is don't make a quick and dirty solution so close to the end product that the client ends up making a bad decision that they regret later.

Thanks again, Seth!
Boz

Seth Thank you for the information on wireframes. In the past I have not had a reason to use wireframes but I see how useful they can be. I've mostly done web design for my own projects but have just recently started to take on clients I see that wireframes will be a useful tool. My problem will be getting the theme to look like the wireframes, guess I need more play time with CSS!!
It was nice meeting everyone and I'm still interested in getting a meeting started in the Keene area!

And I'm not just saying that because I want to be randomly picked to get the software you demonstrated.