This Thursday over 20 different speakers are all set to inspire the audience on various different subjects. Divided over the three session tracks there are speakers such as Dave August from OOO-ii, Ralph Hauwert, Group94, Layar, Hanazuki and our good friend Tobias Mannewitz from KARAKTER. Not to forget the Adobe Evangelists Serge Jespers and Jason Levine who will hopefully show some cool new stuff from Adobe. And to top it off there are also three tracks of workshops where you can get your hands dirty with Unity 3D (Paul Tondeur), FDT (Maxim Zaks), Photoshop (Deke McClelland) and much more.

Obviously we are very excited that we are amongst the group of people who are presenting during the Adobe User Group XL. During the Monster session, Paul and Ferdi will talk about and show Blackbox. We will go into design decisions we have made over the last couple of months, what direction we are going into with Blackbox and will lift the hood a little to show how Blackbox actually works.

We hope to see you at the meeting next Thursday, if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet you better hurry since the event is almost sold out, which was to expected considering the very good price of only € 75,- for the entire day. You can read more about our session here (dutch). If you are there, please come and roar at us Monster style!

July 3rd: Paul speaking at the 14th Adobe User Group meeting "Young Talent". Photo by Roy del Vecchio

We’re looking for little internship Monsters. Little Monsters that want to learn how to roar, learn how to find the best hiding places under a bed or behind the curtain and scare the hell out of normal people. Being a Monster means you’ll be wearing a fictional (we’re working on this) Monstersuit. This means you get to eat Monster food, drink Monster drinks, make Monster jokes and do what you like all day long. As a little Monster you’ll be working on Blackbox, our Monster flagship.

Currently we’ve got three ‘official’ internship descriptions:

• Flash Developer
• Interaction Designer
• Web Developer

Don’t feel sad if the description isn’t fully about what you can or want to do. De Monsters are always on the lookout for little Monsters with the following talents or interests: Flash, Flex, AIR, AS3, C++, iPhone, Interaction Design, data architecture, Visual Design (or graphic design), web frontend, web backend, usability, user research, design processes, data visualisation or software architecture.

Do you think you’ve got what it takes to become a Monster and work together with other Monsters on Blackbox? Leave us a message at Paul [at] deMonsters.com or call Paul at +31 6 1500 4448.

Don’t be afraid, we won’t bite.

GRAWH!

Flash at the Lake is an initiative by the Swiss Flash User Group and is organized by Andres Lorenz, Marcel Vogt, Michel Wacker and Tiago Dias. During the two day conference at the Rote Fabrik flash designers, developers, project managers, graphic designers and JAVA/C developers are invited to join some interesting sessions and workshops. Of course we can expect some great parties as well. 

But for De Monsters it is serious business as well as we will be roaring about some of our greatest passions: Blackbox and development in AIR and beyond. 

Paul will give a session on Blackbox titled: Making of Blackbox, the next application by De Monsters, the description of the session is:

During the projects that we all work on, creativity is key; finding the right solutions for the problems we face every day makes or breaks a project. But this creative process is  very difficult to grasp and even harder to communicate about. When your team grows this becomes even more difficult as different disciplines sometimes seem to work on different wavelengths. And with the waterfall model in place, essential elements of design and development decisions get lost and the overall quality and fun goes down.

De Monsters have been working on this problem of mapping a creative process, showing where you stand and base your decisions on and communicating about it with your entire team. In this talk you get to see how we do this, where we base our design decisions on and what you can expect when you can get your hands on Blackbox.

Ferdi will host not one, but two four hour workshops where he will share some of his experience in working with and extending Adobe AIR. 

Advanced AIR Workshop
If you’ve heard the buzz and played around with Adobe AIR, this workshop will bring your skills to the next level by creating a fully functional email client in Adobe AIR. You will learn how to work with socket connections, native windows, offline data and file formats. Note: The coding in this workshop will be done with FlexBuilder 3.

Extending AIR Workshop
Although Adobe AIR is a great product, there are times where you need some extra desktop functionality. While fighting the headache from the awesome party the day before, this workshop will give you a complete and practical guide to extending the functionality of Adobe AIR by using the Qt SDK (an open source cross-platform application and UI framework). During the workshop you will create an Adobe AIR application that is capable of doing the two most requested features: Making screenshots and opening files with their native application.

To check out the descriptions for the sessions by the other speakers you should check out the official speakers page. The final schedule is expected to follow soon, so keep an eye on http://www.fatl.ch and FlashAtTheLake on Twitter.

One of the greatest things about the conference is the fact that pricing is very reasonable. Tickets for the conference are on sale for only €135,-, which is an absolute bargain for a conference like this. So go to http://www.fatl.ch  and get your tickets, it would be great to see you there and have a couple of beers together. We hope to see you there!

GRAWH!

The main challenge for us in this project, and I think in most projects like this, is that we had a number of very different yet vital roles to take upon ourselves. Besides being the designer for the project, we were also stakeholder and in our case also the user. This is both a blessing and a curse as these roles can have very conflicting goals and interests. In theory this situation sounds ideal as you should be able to perfectly align these different roles. In practice it is not, in fact it can be quite hard to get a clear understanding of what your schizophrenic self actually means and wants. The starting point for us was to set a list of basic guidelines:

• We are part of the intended user base
• The product should be a starting point for other interesting projects
• The product should be ready by September 2008 and be in beta by July 2008
• The product has to be presentable
• Level of success has to be measurable over time
• An established working method is to be used
• The product should be an online product but it is important that it has an application feel
• Keep upscaling in mind. (This was added after we had some good discussions with our project counselor David Garcia, currently Dean of Chelsea College of Art & Design)

While these guidelines did not define what we were going to create, it did close off a whole range of possibilities, making it easier to select a focus. When we formulated this list we did so from a stakeholder’s perspective. As mentioned before this was only one of the roles that we had during the project, but the goals that you set as a stakeholder have a big impact as they define the main boundaries that you have to work in as a designer.

To make sure that we did not influence each other too much with these goals we decided that it would be better if we created them individually. We wanted to know our individual expectations and goals, so we created a set of questions (download in PDF) that an independent individual (thank you Marijn Laming) could use to interview us. While the questions were very basic, the interview setting allowed for a lot of free roaming for the three of us. Marijn did an excellent job at asking relevant questions that made us think hard about what we actually wanted from this project. It resulted in a long list with goals and ambitions from which we extracted the main goals that were listed above.

Working as a team
During the first weeks of the project we put a lot of emphasis on the team aspect and how we saw ourselves as individuals in this team. While this is always important, in this particular situation we believed it to be more important than ever as our supervisors had to be able to evaluate us on an individual basis, you simply can’t graduate solely on group results.

So to kick off our project and get to know each other even better than we already did (we have known each other for four years now and have worked together on various projects), we made a short trip to a peaceful, quiet and inspirational environment: Austria. The 450 years old place we stayed at doesn’t have a TV or internet, combined with the good beer and nice snowy weather this was a situation where we could really kick start the project. A lot of the material that is discussed in this article has its roots in the four days that we stayed there. It was such a good experience that we repeated it last December to define a strategy for the coming year.

One of the key results of the trip to Austria was a list of guidelines that we set for ourselves to help us is our design process as a team. The main goal of the list was to make sure that we knew where we stood and were able to understand why we made certain design decisions without having to go over them endlessly. The list looks like this:

• The state of the design should be visible and understandable at any time
• Make sure the entire team has overview of the project
• We should be able to compare different iterations
• There has to be insight in the knowledge that we gather
• Knowledge should not be lost along the way

For those of you who know what the prototype of PEF is all about, some bells may start to ring after reading this list. In fact we discussed these points at great length and were going back and forth on how we could make this happen. Our conclusion was that while it was possible, there weren’t many tools available to assist a design team with these points and that it would pose some very interesting challenges to overcome if you wanted to design something for this, a challenge we were looking for. For us the decision was an easy on to make, we would focus our project on coming up with a product that would support this list of goals.

At that time we had already decided that we would use a user-centered design approach and more specifically: Goal-Directed Design by Alan Cooper.  To further determine the scope of the project we added another set of goals before we actually started our user research:

• Users should be able to have different backgrounds, goals and views
• Communication of design between different agencies/companies should be as efficient as possible
• The product should give insight in ideas
• The product should give insight in expertise
• The product should help to collect knowledge on design
• You have to be able to share individual knowledge
• The product should give insight in the flow of projects
• The product should help to show focus in projects
• There should be efficient use of prior knowledge, no blind copying

Combined with the guidelines that we set before, this gave us a clear enough path to start with our user research which we will cover extensively in future posts. For us this meant that the project finally was kicked into higher gear, but looking back at those first weeks, they have been more important than we realized at that point. Starting up a new project is never easy, but the structured approach and explicit definition of goals and expectations helped us a lot in getting it going.

What are your experiences with starting new projects?