The last post on quality of design and development seemed to get a lot of traffic (hopefully for the right reasons). The "Q" word being such a loaded proposition I wanted to now go a little deeper into how agile practices and quality are inter-related.

Click "read more" for the goods...

I recently needed to optimize around 30 photos that I exported from iPhoto. These files are huge and not ready for the web, but saving all 30 manually seemed a task for the mundane.

I then remembered Droplets, a little known feature of Photoshop to convert any Action (save, resize, filter, etc.) into an icon that you can drag and drop files to, and have it perform that action automatically - a productivity booster indeed.

Learn how to create a Droplet in Photoshop by checking out my video tutorial and article here:

Bulk Image Compression with Photoshop Droplets
A word of caution, always check the results to ensure quality and filesize are in total harmony!

You've worked hard, sacrificed nights and weekends, your site is out there for users to click around in, the beer from the launch party is now flat. And yet, there is an outstanding list of design bugs that goes around the corner. Columns are uneven, colors "off" from spec, fonts the wrong size, links going to the wrong places if working at all. Hmmmm... Obviously, something is wrong. Everyone is saying the site is live and celebrating, but it looks... unprofessional and not representative of the team's best work.

I'll state the obvious that this is not where anyone wants to be in this business. So, how to deliver quality each and every time? This post looks at each major role in the creation process and posits the questions that need to be asked individually to keep professional-level design a strategic priority.

Jonathan Meyers, the Program Manager for AOL News, passed on this great tip that we have posted an open competition cash-reward for an Elections experience. You can see it in the screen shot above at the bottom. All of the basic requirements are listing on the page.

For the uninitiated, TopCoder Studio is "the meeting place for clients who need creative work done and creative people looking to compete for that work." Nice to see an AOL project posted in an open marketplace like this.

In AOL Programming we have a document that should be used at kickoff meetings to align multi-disciplinary teams to the mission at hand. It is our take on the classic agency document called a creative brief. Briefs serve the purpose of aligning team members around core strategic principles without inhibiting their creativity in finding a solution.

Click "read more" for my take on the Creative Brief.

When working with remote development teams in Bangalore with business hours that barely overlap with ours, we need to employ new techniques to enhance our communication to create greater efficiencies.

A Senior Art Director on our team regularly captures screenshots of issues that need to be updated and includes notes in a PDF for absolute clarity (see example above). These visual instructions are key to great communication.

Back in March, a group of us at SxSW had a conversation about some other ideas on how to maximize our remote collaborations:

> Try having designers brainstorm and sketch during the day and have developers craft a prototype overnight as an example of very agile development.

Click "read more" for more ideas >>

This week, we launched a redesign of ParentDish.com, a site that offers great insights on parenting topics.

The project was one of the best-run and most efficiently-produced design efforts I've seen. This is attributed to the team's focus on:

> clearly defining roles and responsibilities between our varied teams at the onset,
> crafting a solid creative strategy + moodboards with buy-in from all key stakeholders before developing design solutions,
> conceptualizing a significant suite of identity options, and
> fostering ongoing communication amongst the design and development teams to bring about a fresh take on a compelling site that helps raise kids of all ages.

Kudos to the team on their great work.

I'm thrilled to report that we have seen tremendous growth across our AOL Living sites over the past year with AOL Body increasing page views 760%, Food 319% and Home 475%. Overall, AOL Living is the third-highest-ranked women's network of sites on the web.

How did we do this? Our editorial team's strategy has been to offer practical, solution-oriented and highly relevant content to increase consumer engagement.

Our creative team has augmented this strategy by keeping a close eye on user behaviors/needs on our sites and competitively. We do in-depth user profiles and varied mood boards at the beginning of our projects to ensure every design decision we make is tied back to core user needs and the message we plan to share.

Our design team continues to dream up rich design experiences that reflect a welcoming, inclusive tone to resonate with and deeply engage our audience. And the results are stunning.

At the SxSW conference, I enjoyed hearing Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert share best practices for design critiques. Here are some key takeaways:

1) Introduce your varied concepts without interruption

2) Introduce the team discussion by asking "What works? What doesn't?"

> Keep the conversation moving, as the team may get hung up on details. At this early stage however, it's best to capture overall feelings instead of tiny details.

> Make sure each design is discussed adequately. Sometimes the team will say "that's the one!" and not chat about the other designs, but much can be learned from what is/isn't working in the other designs to help the refinement stage.

> Stay "problem-focused" as the team will likely share solutions instead since it's easier for them to articulate those. A typical "solution" is to take one thing from the first concept, another from the second and yet another from the third. Recognize that if you say "yeah, we can do/change that" during the review, it may screw up the design when you actually try it out. Say that a potential solution is something you'd like to explore, but you'll keep the actual problem in the forefront and will solve that in the refinement stage.

Click "read more" for more tips.

Our AOL Food team launched several new features last week, including a series of Get Cooking videos, enhanced search functionality and category sorting. These incremental improvements lay the groundwork for many great features that we have in our pipeline to launch in the coming months. It demonstrates the team's ability to break down large ideas into iterative launches to get great features in the hands of our audience quickly.

Oh, hmm... that doesn't look right! Is that dark background #040108, per chance? This is a screenshot from CSS Edit's preview window.

Hello there, I've been invited to write on ControlShift, so I best get to it! My name's Dave Balogh, I've been working here for over 3 years and had the pleasure to work on many of the various channels here. I currently reside on AOL Body, AOL Home, and help out on many of the other AOL Living channels. As AOL has transitioned to the open web, our workflow and process has undergone many of its own transitions. Over the last year I have been taking on CSS duties for my specific channels, with the intent to make our content more solid than ever. This can be seen most prevalently on AOL Home, where I had the opportunity to work tightly with my Art Director, Web Techs, and programming team. What I want to highlight is what my process is, and how it may work for your teams. Read on!

We recently launched a redesigned Home experience (http://home.aol.com), highlighting decorating, entertaining and do-it-yourself tips from many of the content leaders in this space. Our redesign has increased monthly page view traffic by a whopping 2100% since launch (and almost 800% since this time last year).

One of the biggest internal successes of this project was how we fine-tuned our design process to save a ton of time while ensuring a more satisfying work experience and tested our creative concepts to ensure we would resonate with our audience. Here's how we did it (click "read more")

Last week a few of us headed to the IxDA conference in Savannah. It was a great time and now that I'm back, I will be sharing some of the happenings with you. The first session we attended was a pre-conference workshop on Agile methods, given by Jeff Patton (at AgileProductDesign.com) and Josh Evnin of ThoughtWorks.

It was a very basic primer on Agile, and included information on other methods of process, such as the waterfall method and the snowman method. You can read about all things agile at Jeff's site (link above). Much emphasis was on speed to market, and how Agile methods can support a faster turnaround on product completion.

We did a "real" agile project, where teams had to work with a "User" to define and develop a product end to end, splitting up tasks appropriately. The products were cars, and they were drawn on a puzzle board so each person could take a piece and then put it together at the end. We were of course terrified of the Homer Simpson factor, an incredibly accurate depiction of what you may end up with if you rely completely on what users think they "want" without reality checks.

The Homer Car:

After a meeting with our "user" (confession, it was me), the team went to work and the "user" got to sit around and wait for the finished product...

Sorry about the delay in getting the promised software round-up from Macworld out, but not only did I comeback from the conference with a suitcase full of new goodies, I also came back with a head full of a nasty virus that kept me in bed asleep most of last week.

The first product I want to talk about has already started to change the way I'm sharing design comps for feedback. On the face of it, Skitch is just another very cool screen capture tool for the Mac. It lets you capture all or part of the screen, as well as click on interface elements (such as a window or the Dock) to capture them isolated from all other elements on the screen. Once the screen is captured, the image is brought into the Skitch interface, where you have some simple drawing tools that allow you to add labels and then save the final results to your desktop.

And if that were all Skitch did, it would still rank as one of the best screen capture apps I have tried. However, Skitch goes one step further, by giving you single button publishing of the image either to your own .Mac account or to the Skitch.com, which works a lot like a YouTube for still images. You can email out the link to your screen capture and get feedback directly on the page or the viewer, if they have the Skitch application on their own machine, can download the image, add their own comments directly and then (with the press of a single button) put their changes back into the originating Skitch.com page.

The up-shot of this is that, rather than passing around screenshots in emails with bulleted lists of vague comments underneath, we can use the image to enter a running dialog with each other with the image being the focus and, hopefully, provide more accurate and meaningful feedback during during development. I've only just started working with Skitch and it is still in beta (although seems perfectly stable), so there may be some bumps ahead as I try to integrate this app into my work flow, but I invite everyone on the Blog to download Skitch and give it a try.

The auditorium at the Rem Koolhaas designed Campus Center in Chicago was the perfect setting for a discussion about design process. Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), Jason Fried (37signals), and Carlos Segura (Segura Inc. ) lead a "presentation and discussion on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration."

Lately, I find myself focusing on creative process. How to create great work, keep the team inspired and avoid some of the pitfalls that happen to a creative team while working at a large organization. So, I headed out to the Seed conference in Chicago to get an outside perspective.

It was a strong group of speakers, and I enjoyed the range of disciplines. I was inspired by the broad range of work from Carlo Segura's design studio, and the high level of design he maintained over the years. The redesign of Corbis is briliant. But, I really went to hear Jason Fried from 37 Signals talk about his work process. Jason Fried's work philosophy centers around the principle of working with small teams, but I still took away some basic concepts I could apply to the AOL entertainment design team.

A few key points from Jason presentation that hit home:

Ship when the core product is ready. Nothing is worse for team morale than long development cycles.

Your work expands to fill the time available.

2 or 3 people work on a core product. If that team can't do the work, they scale the work back. They never add people to the team.

Interruption is the enemy of productivity. At times, collaboration can be considered an interruption and a fragmented day is not a productive day.

Meetings are symptoms and not solutions. Meetings should be a last resort as they require preparation that people aren't going to do anyway. Meetings shouldn't last more than 30 minuets.

"I would rather people grow out of our products rather than not be able to grow into them." Jason Fried