Uproot

We’re seeking some talented people to join our team.
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We’re excited to release the Toronto Budget Data REST API and example data visualizations designed around it. The API provides easier access to the city’s current budget data, made available through the Toronto Open Data initiative.
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The team here at Uproot are a week-deep into using Google Plus so we thought we’d share our initial impressions.
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You may have noticed Responsive Web design, the practice of using CSS media-queries to style content appropriately for device and context, is becoming more prevalent. In fact, at the time of writing this post, MediaQueri.es, a blog dedicated to showcasing Responsive Web designs was a trending post on Twitter.

Among user experience practitioners, this adoption is a welcome movement as we move into an era where digital consumption is happening on a growing range of devices – from smart phones, to tablets to even large area displays like televisions.
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We usually don’t discuss the changes we make in our process as they are often very incremental and temporal. However, one recent change that we’d like to share is our decision to move away from producing page-level wireframes and toward creating prototypes as part of our Interaction Design practice. This is an approach widely discussed in our industry and certainly not novel to Uproot, but still in its infancy.
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Photo courtesy of Red Dot

The stars aligned last Thursday night and the entire most of the Uproot crew (sorry Chris) were able leave the studio in time to attend Dan Saffer’s lecture at OCAD. Dan is a highly respected author and Principal of Interaction Design at Kicker Studio in San Francisco.

Dan’s talk, The Complexity of Simplicity in Design, was focused on how to achieve simplicity in design. There are few user experience practitioners that don’t strive for simplicity but, as Dan pointed out, it isn’t easy to achieve.
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Behind the beautifully designed and crafted Microsoft Arc Mouse lies a great story. In this video (requires Silverlight plug-in) Young Kim, Senior User Experience Designer at Microsoft, discusses the process of going from concept to completion through numerous iterations and refinements.
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As a user experience practitioner, your day-to-day tasks will not always involve the fun stuff: ideation and sketching. Sometimes it’s about QA, managing client expectations, or drafting specification documents. Though essential, those activities can really drain you creatively and leave you less than ready to take on the next challenge.

That’s why I’ve taken up “sketchercising”.
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Connecting in Hong Kong by Stuck in Customs

Unless you’ve been under a rock you know the uproar from travellers passing through US airport security has been at a fever pitch in recent weeks. Jon Gruber has probably the most startling stories linked up at Daring Fireball. All the related articles are worth the read to gain insight into what’s happening.

There’s an honest debate to be had about how far we need to go to secure our safety. However, going through the screening myself last weekend at JFK International the one thing that crossed my mind was what UX folk like myself can take away from the security flow at most airports.
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This is gonna get a lot of press. Announced at DemoCamp 27 today (which featured guest speaker Fred Wilson, from AVC and Union Square Ventures), TaskAve is an app that allows you to set reminders for specific locations (e.g. “Remember to pick up milk” shows up as an alert on your phone up when you drive by Loblaws).

Judy Sims, who had the benefit of attending DemoCamp today has a great summary here.

Oh, and it was built (including the business model, based on offering sponsored promos based on your location) in 48 hours.

That’s creative technology.

Follow @TaskAve to keep updated.

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