Frances Berriman
Frances Berriman is a London-based front-end developer, where she currently works for the Government Digital Service building their new single domain site. Prior to that she served as a senior web developer at BBC and Nature Publishing Group. She is one of the people behind microformats.org, a former editor at Digital Web Magazine, and a contributor to 24 ways.
You can read her posts on her blog and see her tweet as @phae.
More thoughts by Frances Berriman:
-
One of the reasons I enjoy what I do for a living, is it feels as though we're in an industry where we're still exploring and working out what we want. We get to define the technology, approach and ethos of what we do in a raw sense, from language design, browser features, scalability or user experience. You name it! Because we probably haven't yet. We should feel privileged to do what we do while we still don't know exactly what it is we're doing.
We're not just building throw-away websites, we're building an entire way of working from the ground up, and we all still get a say in what that looks like. It's pretty exciting, don't you think?
-
Various debates this last fortnight, particularly around vendor prefixing and using other work in progress features, reminded me of the importance of testing in my workflow. Working to make your users get the best experience possible is still paramount. The only way to succeed in doing this is to understand what they see, and then fix and enhance accordingly. I've seen mentions of cross-browser testing missing from many of the arguments, and blindly using prefixes more or less encouraged.
If you're not noticing the lack of a prefixed property, where one is available in a browser your site has visitor stats for and a commitment to support, I'm guessing you're not looking very hard at all in those browsers. They probably have more fundamental problems than a few missing rounded corners. Worse still, if you're not testing thoroughly, using a vendor's work in progress, unfinished, unstandardised feature could make your site behave poorly in ways you can't foresee. Using a prefix for a certain vendor should be an automatic commitment on your part to check what that prefixed effect actually looks like in those browsers that understand it.
-
"UX" as a single person's role strikes me as a red herring. User experience is everyone's job to get right -- from making sure servers respond quickly to having buttons that seem tangible and copy that's understandable. "Good UX" should be a core competency within every team member.
-
I'm continually surprised by those that tout their "user-centred" design approach, when it comes to developing digital services. Who else is there to design for, if not the users?
Here are the dates of Frances Berriman's future thoughts:
- Monday, 28 May
- Saturday, 23 June
- Thursday, 19 July
- Thursday, 23 August
- Wednesday, 26 September
- Friday, 26 October
- Friday, 23 November
- Sunday, 23 December