What you'll learn

Ryan Singer designs user interfaces at 37signals. We flew to Chicago to learn how he works, first hand. We gave him a small task and watched him design a user interface out loud and on paper. The result is possibly the most insightful, educational, and thought provoking video we've produced so far. In this 72 minute video, you'll watch Ryan sketch out a user interface for a single page of a web application. He doesn't write any code (that comes next), but he thinks through the issues and follows several possible paths before coming to rest on a solution. You'll benefit from watching him learn about the problem domain, evaluate his own ideas, and combine user interface metaphors into a plan for a prototype. He describes his process as clearly as he thinks about it, which makes for a great video whether you're a front-end designer or a back-end programmer. First, Ryan teaches about sketching and thinking through the problem. Then Ryan implements a prototype in HTML and CSS.