Mark Staplehurst

Developer, Designer / digital maker

Developer Doodles

February 01, 2012 / In The Cube / Permalink

Drama in Davos

This year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos is once again delivering drama from both within and outside its security fence. From the naked ambition of topless activists protesting in the alpine snow to the theatrics of the International Monetary Fund’s managing director suggesting that the developing world contribute to save the relatively rich eurozone, 2012’s edition is making a tabloid splash.

But it’s still too early to tell whether this year’s antics will break the high-water mark set in 2005. Just seven years ago at Davos, then-Prime Minister of Britain Tony Blair appeared on a panel with Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Bono. After the panel, event workers when tidying up came across some papers left behind on the platform near Tony Blair’s seat. The papers were covered in doodles: and the discovery sparked a wave of scandalous excitement in the press.

The infamous Davos Doodle

Handwriting experts were drafted in by the media to relate the drawings to the psychological state of the prime ministerial mind. Newspaper headlines delivered verdicts such as "struggling to concentrate" and "not a natural leader, more of a vicar". Alongside the heavy artistic scrutiny, pundits also sought to retake the measure of Blair’s focus. What was the world leader doing sketching in the first place? Doodling when the world’s elite are taking turns at the podium to grapple with serious issues was seen as trivializing the entire enterprise.

Days later it would transpire the page of scribbles in fact belonged to Bill Gates.

Doodling in August Company

Bill Gates doodles. Frank Gehry doodles. Thomas Edison doodled. Sylvia Plath doodled talking hot dogs and marshmellows. Fermat famously doodled his last theorem. Google doodles. John F. Kennedy doodled his favourite sail boat just below a ringed note to blockade Cuba. It seems nearly everyone doodles and contrary to our cultural biases studies are now beginning to show that sketching in the margins is anything but trivializing the complex.

Jackie Andrade, a professor at the University of Plymouth, published a study finding a 29 percent increase in knowledge retention by doodlers. And a recent article in the research journal "Science" proposed that drawing in education helps to accommodate individual learning preferences and motivates students to explore content in more meaningful ways. The popularity of the Doodling in Math Class series by YouTube publisher Vi Hart (recently hired by the Khan Academy) and the RSAnimate lecture transcripts are a great indicator of the interest in this new visual approach to learning through doodling.

Ecentricarts Doodles

In a nod to Bill Gates and to prove that everyone has an innate talent for doodling, I asked those willing of the developers at ecentricarts to donate their notebooks to the cause.

A compilation of doodles taken from the notebooks of various ecentricarts developers

Adding to the Findings

Inside each book scattered in and around the bulleted action items, curved along the paths of circled deadline dates and jotted on the endpapers, I found lines, dots and drawings that offered an unguarded glimpse into the owner’s wandering as they processed high densities of information. From system architecture to Moomin trolls, it’s apparent that developers doodle for a variety of reasons: it’s a way of maintaining a level of cognitive stimulation to stay engaged in information exchanges but it's also a tool to get clarity around a concept or to communicate and collaborate on ideas.

From my own jottings I know that doodling can also simply be an opportunity to relax, to take a line for a walk and see what shape it takes. And as I thumbed the pages of the notebooks I felt quite privileged to be working with other such regular walkers; it seems even those you least expect to express themselves artistically have the talent for fantastic visual literacy and imagination.

Sean Kozey

Responsive Web Design: Creating Better Online Experiences for Mobile and Tablet Computing, and More...

January 05, 2012 / Outside The Box / Permalink

The explosion of devices that people use to access web content (apps, smartphones, tablets, netbooks, web-aware gaming consoles, to name a few!) has many organizations wondering how to keep up with demands for more and more ways to engage with users online. The problem is that many of these new technologies do a tremendously poor job of rendering websites that were designed and built with the traditional desktop computer web browser in mind (try using a Blackberry phone to surf the internet and you'll see what I mean): unless a site has been specifically optimized for these types of devices, website features and functions often do not render or work properly, or the overall user experience is simply frustrating. For instance: the legibility of content on small screens can be poor; and interactive features are sometimes very difficult to use without a traditional keyboard and mouse.

Until recently, the percentage of users accessing the Web from devices other than desktop or laptop computers has been very low (in the single digits of overall Web traffic), so many organizations have chosen to not address the issue, or have built separate, limited versions of their websites to provide access to content and functionality on mobile phones. However, in 2012, you ignore this device proliferation trend at your own peril: credible industry analysts expect mobile Web access to overtake desktop browsing in as early as three to five years.

Responsive Design: Smart, Device-Aware User Interfaces

So, how to address this challenge? Build an app? Great, but how many devices do you want to build an app for? Android, Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Blackberry, Windows Mobile? Unless you are creating very simple applications for phone/tablet use, you're likely looking at building and maintaining separate solutions for each target platform, using different technologies. This can be prohibitively expensive; and you're still not addressing the fact that most users (regardless of their device of choice) will still be visiting your website, regardless of whether they have downloaded your app as well. A solution is still needed to create a "smart" website solution that works for our new multi-device world. Enter Responsive Design. Responsive Design is a new way to provide an optimized user experience for your website on any device, that does not require creating separate applications or websites for each platform you are targeting. Imagine a site that reconfigures its web page layouts automatically, based on how big the web browser window is on your desktop computer, or the size of your mobile phone's screen. Imagine a website where features that are designed for specific devices are shown and hidden automatically, based on what platform they were designed for. Imagine imagery and video content that dynamically changes resolution to match the output capabilities of your tablet device or laptop.

Responsive Design in Action

Well, better yet, let's experience it in person: the new ecentricarts' website was built using Responsive Design. If you want to see Responsive Design in action, either have a look at our site on your computer and your mobile phone simultaneously, or grab your desktop browser window and shrink it down into a narrow column. Voila! The site reconfigures itself automatically to match the format of your device or browser.

When we started our site redesign effort in 2011, one of our objectives was to deliver an optimized experience for mobile phone site visitors. Rather than take the traditional route of creating a completely separate mobile site, we instead developed one website (using our favourite content management system, Kentico), and integrated a responsive design interface with a default layout that supports desktop, laptop and tablet-based browsers, but that reconfigures dynamically when you view the site on a mobile device.

Key Business and End User Benefits of Responsive Design

While this approach introduced some additional costs compared to designing and building strictly for traditional web browsers and computers, the immediate and long-term benefits are clear: we have only one website to manage and serve all our visitors; a responsive design solution eliminated the need to build device specific apps; and the size of our potential audience is much greater.

It's important to point out that Responsive Design isn't the answer for all online requirements, nor is it exclusively a web-specific design methodology: device-specific apps have their place in our new, complex internet ecosystem, and apps themselves can benefit tremendously from the incorporation of Responsive Design principles. However, for making your core Web presence accessible and impactful for all your online users, it is a great new technique.

If you're interested in learning more about Responsive Design and how it can benefit your organization's online presence, get in touch with us. We'd be happy to share our experiences with this exciting new approach.

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