Achieving Erudition in Designing Experiences via Empiricism
and the Circumnavigation of Pedagogically Abstruse Instruction
Louis St-Amour
2012 Digital Media BAFaculty of Science & Engineering, York University, Toronto, Canada.
lsta@yorku.ca, LouisStAmour@gmail.com or (647) 801−LSTA (5782)
Abstract: Who the heck is Louis?
Louis creates interactive experiences for web, mobile or desktop. With 12 years experience designing websites, he is an expert at creating web applications. From web design and programming, Louis has expanded into software experiences on both large and small multitouch screens. Last summer, he worked for York University on an unreleased iPhone app and over 12,000 people have downloaded his free TTC Mobile app. In March, Louis made a 50ʺ multitouch screen (Fig 1) as part of his Digital Media BA studies at York University.
Keywords: community, leadership, UX design, personas (Cooper), mashups, HTML5, CSS, ECMAScript (JavaScript/ActionScript), PHP5, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, C#/.NET/WinForms, Java/JavaEE/JavaME, Silverlight, Flash, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver (incl DWT), InDesign, Flex/AIR, Objective-C, C, OpenCV, OpenGL, Max/MSP 5, Processing, Arduino, Windows Server 2003, TCP/IP, Linux, Mac OS X, SSH/SFTP, Python, Google App Engine, iPhone/Android/BB/mobile apps, storytelling, podcasting, Sony Reader/epub/iPad, multitouch.
Introduction: Entranced by community building — even as a high school dropout.
Before achieving erudition, I began circumnavigating pedagogically abstruse instruction. Just as I began grade 11 studies, I left high school for “a year” (four, actually) to learn more about technology. I reasoned, at that young age, that I would learn more about technology and web design from technology itself rather than at school. Through blogs like Zeldman’s, web magazines such as A List Apart & companies’ websites and products, I watched eagerly as the web grew out of its bubble and into today’s community-driven web 2.0 landscape. Community particularly drove me, with books like Design for Community by Derek Powazek (LSTA Blog, March 2010), how forum and blog software created P2P conversations, and even how Microsoft Office 2003 Beta 1 had SharePoint, which was like Facebook-in-a-box for enterprises.
I was also playing Counter-Strike (CS) 24/7, over and over. Why? The conversations I would have. In fact, I learned to touch type by playing CS in the dark and wanting to type out full sentences before dying or respawning. Frustrated with being banned from a forum for a server I played at often, I decided to set up my own site, CSpotkill.com, in late 2003. It was a forum with forced registration, and teasing people to visit in-game was enough to get people to visit, and sometimes, sign up. Once registered, people would read what was already posted and emulate it, in a “Chat about anything” forum, which eventually led to other categories of discussion such as Music, Books, Photoshop and Tech Support. This kind of natural, people-driven evolution is something I intuitively understood, even as a game-playing, high school dropout.
Method: Small apps, done well.
By 2005, entranced with 37signals’ transition from a web application design consultancy into full-blown web app makers, I began playing with their Ruby on Rails framework. Now, I had some previous technical experience, first by running CSpotkill.com out of my bedroom on a PC running Windows Server, and later by using PHP to modify/hack the forums into something friendlier. I’d experimented with Linux also, eventually migrating to my current web host DreamHost, with SSH and now Private Servers (for Rails). By 2006, I was writing custom Ruby/Rails scripts to receive UDP log data from a CS server (where I was a Director) and filter what people say to spot cheaters or admin requests when not playing. I designed it specifically for the PSP web browser, so you could monitor all 8 servers while playing full-screen in one of them.
This madness of designing custom apps to improve my productivity continues even today, as I write iPhone apps for myself like TTC Mobile (iTunes Listing, free) or apps.to, a Rails-powered database of scraped TTC info mashed up with municipal & federal street data for intersection coordinates, and Wikipedia articles for subway stop geolocation.
It also means improvising with what you have. Such as last Summer, when I had to reformat a third-party webpage to fit on a mobile device and improvised a JavaScript-injection solution. I later ported this from the York University iPhone app to TTC Mobile to reformat ttc.ca pages. Or two years ago, when I was working on a Faculty of Arts webpage and needed two indecisive clients to agree on colors—I made a quick drag-and-drop Adobe Kuler color application tool in JavaScript.
