Curious on what a fellow colleague has learned
For the past few months I’ve been collaborating with a colleague who I also consider a good friend on what would be my first public web application. Technically I created a public web application (PURL Application) a few months back - however the most the public does with it is fill out a survey. I consider that application more of a mini-app rather than anything major.
While working on this application I’ve done a lot of things which I’ve never done before and have been learning more which is great. Granted most of it is technical - however I’m interested in finding how what my colleague has learned in the process of collaborating with me on this. You see - in school you don’t learn half of what you will learn in the real world (however somethings you learn with school will stick with you forever) so if you’ve only designed mock ups and never had any design work in designing a real application you soon learn that you have to take in account a lot more. For example - Form Fields. Most of my non-application sites didn’t have a form field in the mock-up but when it comes to a web application now you know there is going to be a form field. Some sort of textbox, checkbox, radio button, drop down menu, etc. etc.
Another thing you start to learn is how you display error messages (and/or validation messages) along with showing error messages that is useful to the user rather than show a message which tells the user an error has occurred but not why it has occurred or how to prevent it. So I suppose I should do lunch with my friend and pick his mind to see what he learned.
