psheridan's blog

I am pleased to announce the acquisition of CloverLeaf Consulting by Three Pillar Software.

Since founding CloverLeaf in 2005, I have been excited to deliver user experience consulting to large enterprises and independent software vendors. As CloverLeaf grew, I found our strategic partnership with Three Pillar software increasingly important to delivering full service product strategy and development to our shared customers.

As an integrated service in the Three Pillar product strategy offering, I feel we are best positioned to add value to our customers and further develop the innovation that made us what we are today.

You can read the official press release on the Washington Business Journal Website.

Patrick Sheridan
Founder, CloverLeaf Consulting

There are a lot of people out there trying to compete to be your front-end Ajax/ web 2.0 framework of choice.

In the midst of technical framework comparisons, ask yourself, "Where is the RIA Industry Going?"

We feel the future of RIA's is the 'Next Plateau' where frameworks are absorbed into IDE's and online content management tools.

Web 2.0 UI toolsets are falling into two major categories:
1. Visual Effect frameworks - transition effects for content display
2. Application Frameworks - layout management and ever growing widget libraries

One of the things I like best about the current state of UI libraries like Ext JS or Flex is that they allow for prototype driven analysis.

As user story definition replaces traditional use cases, competent user interface designers can BEGIN analysis discussions with functional prototypes.

In traditional paper wireframing approaches, user's tend to hesitate until they can see something concrete.

Just a quick shout to say that our UX blog is featured on the Alltop UI front page! http://user-interface.alltop.com/

After viewing the tag cloud of President Obama's inaugural address compared to the tag clouds of Bush and Clinton's addresses, I realized that tag clouds only really show you one dimension of information. 

Extending the idea to say LinkedIn Proffiles or resumes, you can add multiple layers of information on top of the basic size relevance of tags.

First lets look at my resume as run through Wordie.

test tweet

Rich internet application architecture changes the very foundation driving user experience design to date. The gist of it is that user interface designers are no longer the aggregators and owners of the user interface per se, rather they are architects of a Framework for end user to define their own unique user interface.

I believe this fundamental shift scares most user interface designers out of their pants. Why? Well, the perception that the skillset is now obselete for one!

A quick warning to user experience professionals. Do not allow yourselves to become the rope in an organizational tug of war. As organizational awareness to the practice of user experience design grows, the first questions to be asked are, "Who does what?" Project teams and customers are familiar with traditional requirements gathering processes and business analysis teams may feel threatened by a new way of engaging customers and gathering information.

The mantra of User Centered Design is "involve users throughout." To a manager concerned about time, budget, and the project plan, this can seem like a logistical nightmare. For internal application projects this can mean business analysts and interface designers are directed to get requirements by proxy from end user's managers. Too often, this approach leads to analysis and design failures not caught until user acceptance testing at the end of the release cycle.

Let me start by saying layout and design are important. For the casual observer, usability means a visual design that is pleasing to the eye. Historically, web designers came primarily from print design backgrounds and as such, focused their talents on the static visual design aspects of early websites; headers, icons, logos, backgrounds, etc. While important, the implied focus of web design is too heavily weighted on expressing the individual creativity of the designer than it is on satisfying the needs of the customer.