
👋 Oi, mga repapips, Brian Dys here! I love music, photography, and creative stuff like UX design and art. This is a place where I collect my thoughts and works. Apart all these, I’m Jaycelle’s better half and Bryce’s dad. 🥰
It’s coming together – the ultimate plan of Smart to wipe out the culture of Chikka. Well, it’s not deliberate I guess but that’s the effect of the new business direction that we’re headed. You should well know that recently, PLDT bought 10% of Rocket Internet. If you don’t know Rocket Internet, it’s the parent company of Voyager — just look at the similarity of their names and logos! Exploring the depths off this planet thru a rocket and stuff.
Just kidding. Rocket Internet is the biggest copycat there is on the face of the interwebs. But the good thing about it is that it brings internet products and services to developing markets like our country. If you ever got rescued by Easy Taxi during your morning commute towards a big boss meeting, you have Rocket Internet to thank for that. If you applauded Zalora or Lazada by their prompt delivery of that cat double bed you ordered, applaud Rocket Internet. We in this developing country need not wait for Amazon to cater to us – Rocket Internet’s business model is built this way. They will bring Amazon to our doorstep but in a different packaging under a different name. You may call it fakery, unoriginal, imitation — or class A if you may but what more can you ask for? They are serving us iPhone 6 just weeks after it was released in public. Otherwise, telcos will offer it a day before Apple releases yet a new version.
This is the reality that we’re in now, the business model of Rocket Internet is being adopted by Smart – putting Voyager in the place of Rocket Internet. Voyager will incubate ideas – a new one or an existing one and it will be spun into the hands of an “independent” company. In case you’ve noticed the quotation marks, you might have sensed my sarcasm. The independence of a company isn’t simply rooted to it’s differently-incorporated name. It’s not even in the effectiveness of it looking like it has sprung from bright ideas and hard work without any backing from big shots. It’s effectiveness lies behind its culture – it’s years and years of built-in traditions, values, and principles.
When a parent company suddenly barges in with all these new business directions, they would be like two giant feet trampling over ants mound. People and everything they built will be disturbed — some will run around like headless chickens. It will spell D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R. Sometimes C-H-A-N-G-E spells the same. But let me be clear — change is good especially for a very stagnant and antiquated product development company like Chikka. Development is best for everyone especially in the view of sustainability and progress. But the balance between upholding a company’s culture and introducing development to it is very delicate — tip one side over and you get a very people-centric company and tip the other side over, then walls come crashing down on them. In this situation Smart did it poorly. Two giant feet.
This is all about business but the people are a company’s greatest asset. Or are they?
I took a portrait using my DSLR. It produced an image with a 3:2 aspect ratio.
I went to a photo lab to have it printed.
Do I want it cropped? Hell, no.
I spent hours enhancing and editing it. Besides, I already cropped it to perfection in Photoshop.
No cropping? Then here are the only popular photo paper sizes that I could choose from:
The other sizes like 3.5×5 (3R), 5×7 (5R), 8×10 (8R) will crop my masterpiece.
So I had it printed on an 8×12 photo paper.
I went to the picture frames section of my favorite department store.
Only to find out that they are only selling these frame sizes (cue Psycho shower theme):
Now, do I end up snipping the printed photo to fit into an 8R frame?
No. I ended up buying a certificate frame with enough margin to fit my photo.
This age is digital age; this year is 2014 and it’s ending. Everyone has a digital camera in his or her pocket.
Most likely, the digital picture that one camera produces has either these aspect ratios:
Even a full frame film camera is in 3:2.
So why in the world are photo labs and picture frames still speaking in the language of 5Rs and 8Rs?
Photo papers and picture frames must cater to the popular aspect ratios.
Support 1:1 Instagram size if you must!
Recently, the design team is conceptualizing on a new Chikka Text Messenger branding. As you very well know, the phone and mouse icons aren’t up with the times already. Mobile phones have shed its antenna and keypad; the mouse, well pretty much some still look the same.
Chikka Text Messenger or CTM helps Filipinos abroad communicate thru SMS with their families and friends here in Philippines (PH). Basically, if you’re abroad, you text your mom (in PH) thru CTM app using Wi-Fi or data then she receives it as plain SMS. But if she’s also using CTM app and is online, then she receives the text thru the app like instant messenger.
We started the branding redesign by this square icon:
From here, I simply extracted the message balloon. The resulting icon, also shaped like an ear, embodies communication from end to end – you speak and the recipient listens and vice versa.
Reading in Facebook about an upcoming Procurement Hack by the Open Data Philippines and PhilGEPS, I followed a link to http://data.gov.ph/hackathon and I was shown a 404 Not Found page.
I could have been well within my wits to simply use Google Search but the immediate thing I did was to search for the word “hackathon” using data.gov.ph’s Search Form – that’s why it’s there, right?
There, I saw the title of what I was looking for as the second result – #KabantayNgBayan.
The link took me to another page with yet another link.
Hoping to “learn more” about #KabantayNgBayan, I followed the link to http://beta.data.gov.ph/news/kabantayngbayan-hacking-national-budget which turned out to be worse than a 404.
Now I already knew where the real page was upon hitting that Server Not Found (thanks, Google Search). But we should expect more from Government websites to provide us with the information we are looking for – immediately.
Let me itemize the things that must not be experienced by other users – be it those looking for hackathon information or those looking for more important information on Philippine Government websites.
Hackathons are like sleepover without the sleep – in a workshop with only cardboards, glues, and scissors as your materials and you are expected to come up with a rocket ship to relocate Philae to a sunny spot. Overnight.
But the websites hosting hackathons shouldn’t appear as if it was done in a half-hackathon event and launched. Think of UX Event websites that actually do not understand what “UX” means.
It’s true that this is a simple case of a broken link (or a user who opted not to use Google Search). Besides, I already found what I was looking for. But this scenario has proven to me that there’s a lot to improve regarding how the Government publishes and maintains information on its websites – not to mention when it comes down to searching for it – will the user find what he or she is looking for immediately?
Previously, I’ve discussed a class naming convention in the form of:
<generic>__<identifier>–<specific>
In this manner we are using a UI State class located up in the DOM tree – particularly in the body
to manipulate different UI elements under it.
Take this as an example: in a site’s header, both the main navigation and search form are located.
<header>
<h2 class="accessible-name">Header Content</h2>
<nav class="main-navigation">…</nav>
<form class="search-form">…</form>
</header>
How would you be able to affect the main navigation depending on the state of the search form if its class is only confined within its container? The answer might be “thru JavaScript” – undeniably, we would need JS in this topic but only for manipulating class names. The trick lies in putting the UI Type or UI State class in a place wherein both main navigation and search form are under it.
What benefit do we get in having a global class
located higher in the DOM tree? It lets us control different parts of the UI depending on the site’s or app’s UI Type or UI State.
It is important to reserve the highest element you can put a class on – which is html
(for pertinent class names), thus, the second highest element we could attach a class
attribute to is body
.
Going back to our example, we would use the following UI State class to define the state of the search form:
<body class="ui-state__search-form–active">
The body class
, in words, translates to “The UI State of the Search Form is Active”.
Now, whenever the search form is active, you can already manipulate the main navigation based on that state.
Take a look at the demo on CodePen:
See the Pen Using <body> to Define UI States and Types by Brian Dys Sahagun (@briandys) on CodePen.
Infomap is a spinoff of information architecture – it is a small part of it and is specifically for the usage of designers in creating Interaction Diagrams (basically a diagram of wireframes showing interaction; details on this in the future).
It helps in setting up the environment for the web product’s navigation and content structure.
1. Purpose of the web product
2. Business goals
3. User goals
4. Features
Basically, a Product Requirements Document (PRD).
Let’s use a Messaging app as an example – basically it allows the user to send and receive messages to a recipient; the app also requires the user to accept the Terms & Conditions before usage. For the sake of simplicity, let these be the only functions of the app.
That’s it – as for the other views, every link must have its own View (so that your views will be: Entrance, Home/Read Messages, Compose Message, etc.)
All in all you must end up having the following: