Dee Sadler talks about “Design Thinking for CFers (10 tips for better apps)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.
Episode highlights
- Design thinking
- Hands-on UX problem solving, human-centered,
- iterating loop
- Ideating, prototyping, development, usability testing
- Goes well with Agile
- MVP (Minimum Viable Product) vs perfect
- So get user feedback
- Design for future vision and plan vs Frankenstein piecemeal design
- Solving user problems/workflow vs adding features
- User stories
- Business needs + user needs – pain points
- User interviews
- UX > UI
- Keys
- 1. Empathetic
- User avatar(s)/persona(s) and demographics and motivations
- 80/20 focus
- Always be observing (users) in the wild
- 2. Contextual
- You want the user to be aware of where they are in their journey.
- 3. Human
- Friendly, trustworthy, transparent
- 4. Discoverable
- Make things obvious, purposeful and discoverable.
- Fewer buttons, colors
- Clear CTA (Call To Action) on each page
- 5. Intuitive
- Easy to use
- Strong visual hierarchy
- 6. Clear and Concise
- Remove irrelevant information or tools before reaching the user objective — get to the point
- 7. Learnable
- No one wants to use a product that is ridiculously difficult to learn — dumb it down!
- 8. Efficient
- Fast to do tasks. Including on different device
- 9. Delightful
- Using your app is fun and has nice surprises
- 10. Better
- Constant improvement
- Constant usability testing
- 1. Empathetic
- Storming a hill method
- Who = user
- What = user task
- Wow = measurable and time-bound success
- → epics and stories
- Why are you proud to be UX director?
- WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.
Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.
What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.
And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.
You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.
All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.
Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.
No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next
ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist
Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.
√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production
√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading
√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF
√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!
Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.
Mentioned in this episode
- 10 UX Design Fundamentals Developers Should Learn
- Design Thinking — Not Just For Designers
- 11 reasons why a developer should learn design
- Designing for developers
- UX Design for Developers
- The Designer-Developer workflow conference (no longer running, site closed)
- Her podcast D2WC
- CFUnited
Bio
Dee has been in the UX world for 20+ years doing all aspects of User Experience from front-end, visual, interaction, and research. She recently was at IBM Watson Health where she was responsible for the Designers in Cambridge, the Consumer Health pillar and Watson for Genomics. She loves mentoring new UX’ers and is involved with the greater UX community and on the Board of Directors for UXPA LA. Currently a UX Director for Cox Automotive in New York.
Design links
Interview transcript
Michaela 0:00
Welcome back to the show. I'm here today with Dee Sadler, and you may know from CF united where she spoke many times all about design things, which Guess what, that's what I'm going to do about today. Design Thinking for ColdFusion developers. And we're going to learn 10 tips to make your apps totally amazing. And if you don't know Dee, she used to run a whole conference on design, as well as speaking at ColdFusion conferences. She's been doing UX work for 20 plus years. And from the front end visual interactive research. And she's now in charge of herding cats. I mean, now she's in charge of a whole UX team of designers who are very easy to work with.
And she is in based in now in New York City, though she did a little stint in in Boston recently. So she's currently UX director for Cox automotive, and she's also on the board of directors for UX PA, whatever. What is UX PA, Dee?
Dee Sadler 1:04
It's a UX organization national. I mean, it's an international organization.
Michaela 1:09
Oh, alright. You're the Big Cheese, then?
Dee Sadler 1:12
No, oh, no, no, no, no, I just, I'm on the board. I'm on board of directors, or the LA chapter.
Michaela 1:21
Great. So we're looking at how to use design thinking for ColdFusion developers. And maybe we ought to just start off with what the heck is design thinking, because not everyone may have come across that and and then we'll look at why CFers should be using this.