The best forms ever!

posted by ryan on April 13th, 2007

So a big requirement for FACTOR is that the application forms are easy to modify as they change from year to year. So I tasked Hampton with creating a form builder that would allow me as a PM to add/delete and edit the forms quickly and easily. What he came up with is pretty awesome.

Welcome to the new FACTOR

posted by ryan on April 9th, 2007

So we are very proud to announce our latest project for FACTOR. We built their original online applications system back in 2004 and last Wed we launched the latest and greatest version of the system. We are super stoked about this new version since we got to take the last 3 years of feedback and experience and roll it into this new version. The feedback so far has been really positive and they have had 230 applications started in the past 5 days. Over the next week I will be highlighting some of the cool features starting with the feedback form.

Skin and Bones

posted by watts on April 3rd, 2007

Sometimes we designers get a little too caught up on how something looks – that is, we spend all our time in CSS Land prodding and poking our markup until things look perfect. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing – it is part of our job after all. But I think we sometimes forget about the underlying structure of our applications – HTML.

Lately I’ve been asking myself this question whenever I am building a new page: What will this page look like unstyled? Will the page be usable without any CSS applied? Is it readable? Are the various sections in a logical order? Do the tags I am using make semantic sense? These questions have been shaping my design strategy recently and I think they have lead to more usable, more accessible, and cleaner web sites. In the good ol’ days, I’d always create a mock-up in Photoshop first, then figure out how it all goes together. But reworking that way is sort of like trying to build something in reverse.

Our approach to design involves getting the meat and bones in place before the skin. Our first step is to do a quick pencil sketch of how the page should be laid out, and what needs to go in it. This is meant to inform us how to create the layout and gives the developers a reference to work from. Working this way forces us to really look at the HTML we are creating and question ourselves about the mark-up we are writing. The result is clean and usable HTML, and we’re less likely to go about creating tons of spans and divs in order to get things looking right based on a visual design. HTML should inform our design, not the other way around.