Next month, we will stop supporting IE6 in conjectPM. This means getting rid of all those “if it’s IE6 add 2 pixels to the y-position”, deleting lots of CSS hacks, throwing away all spezialized stylesheets… we’re already counting the days (great that February s such a short month) and think about having a “hooray, no more IE6!” party.
Or, to cite this month’s ThinkGeek newsletter, “Hearing the news was just like being in high school and getting a pass out of P.E.” (that was about Google stopping IE6 support for Mail and Docs)
In the past year we noted a heavy decrease in performance, espescially for new featueres we introduced. That’s because our standard testing and sign-off process did not include performance tests and we have not yet had any good ideas (that means, realizable with an adequate amount of time and effort) how to automate it.
In the last couple of months we spent a lot of time to get back to our old standard (which we even managed to outperform in some cases), take care of not ruining the performance again by testing it before releases and treat freshly introduced performance issues with the same priority as post release bugs (that means, fix them immediately). >> more…
Recently out interaction designers Maria and Franzi told us about paper prototypes and how to use them when finding out what customers will like and what they won’t understand. The idea behind it is, that customers (or whoever gives you feedback) are more willing to criticize when they can guess that not too much work already went into development. On top of that, it saves the time to create “real” prototypes.
I already liked the paper prototypes very much, because there’s always one in the team acting as the computer (that means, he scrolls the paper when you tell him, lays a new “screen” in front of you when you pretend to click somewhere etc.). I actually never saw it, but I imagine it to be pretty amusing. >> more…
