User Friendly Web Apps for the Clueless, the Creative, and the Technical
by Janae Cram
@naepalm
- Mindfly
and Erica Quessenberry @reddesigns - Mindfly
The Session
Web applications come in many forms and sizes, and they all focus on a specific audience. Using Merchello as a case study, we want to take you through our process of designing on top of Umbraco's back office - from defining user personas all the way through wire-framing, building out the design & interface, and finally discovering and iterating changes based on user feedback after release. Our adventures in Merchellowill give you tools and processes you can use to give your next app's users an exceptional experience.
The Speakers
Janae is passionate about pretty. As a child she used to dress her Barbie dolls up in fashion-wear and elaborately style her My Little Ponies' hair. And while she still has over a hundred of those little plastic ponies in her collection, her pretty radar has turned to clean, easy-to-use site architectures and beautiful code; by that we mean the most succinct, modern, and standards compliant code possible. It's this passion that makes her websites some of the best functioning and most user friendly ones out there.
People watching in new-to-her cultures tops the list as one of Erica’s favorite pastimes. Combine that with her love of color and a craving for order and efficiency and you get our resident UX and visual designer. If you think she’s watching you, you’re probably right, as the cumulative knowledge of studying many different types of people and experiences - both in life and on the web - gives her the fuel to go head-to-head with both clients and developers alike, advocating for the end user to make sure they receive the best possible experience on the web.
Janae and Erica both work at Mindfly Studio, an Umbraco Gold Partner located in Bellingham, WA, USA, and comprised of an eclectic and passionate team of Umbraco enthusiasts, designers, and developers who not only enjoy working together, but push each other to design more effectively, solve more creatively, and think more progressively. And while we are a small web shop, we make up for it in our out-of-the-box thinking, our dedication to provide our clients with the best long-term and maintainable solution, and our fanatical devotion to web standards.