To make it less “dry”, to add more “living” feeling to this blog, and also to reflect current status and expectations regarding it, I think it is worth to share some personal thoughts about present and future of Protraktor.
Academy
First of all, I’m trying now to add more materials in “Academy”. My time is limited because of other things, first of all my permanent job affairs, so I am not able to make it systematically, and as a result I’m jumping here and there writing some draft articles about communication theory, human vision and combining physical controls and digital HMIs. In my opinion, this is the most important content of the blog at the moment, because it will uncover some topics that are rarely touched in more popular UX publications, and many designers I know struggle with these topics and miss fundamental knowledge — just because it is rarely shared. Also I plan to add some other content, like designing systems for multiple screens and information GIS data visualization principles.
Once I get sufficient coverage, I will restructure these posts and also try to make some videos — I understand, that nowadays it is much easier to perceive the materials by using multimedia format, than by reading plain text, even if it has illustrations. But it will take time, the critical mass of content is far away from being reached. My estimate, that it will take approximately 3-6 months to have something more or less ready.
Reference
I dedicate less attention to this part, but I really want to “extract” from my brain all the nuances of working with basic controls that are beyond straightforward and, again, mass-market approaches. Professional systems quite often have very specific requirements and limitations, so there are many specific use cases, particular details of interactions and look and feel even of standard components like buttons, so I hope it will be an useful collection of both general information and some tips.
Blog structure and design
It could be easier to use existing wordpress themes to make this blog with all ready-made features, but it doesn’t give me enough control, so I slowly improve the theme and design of Protraktor. Again, I don’t have enough time to implement all the ideas quickly, but content is the king, so commenting, more pleasant look of academy courses and reference publications, support of dark and red night mode by illustrations is not something that will happen soon, but some stuff will be occasionally updated or released.
General vision
Maybe i had to start with this section first, but without aforementioned practical details it could be too abstract. But general vision is to move from current “starving skeleton” to more fat- and content-rich project, that I can proudly share saying that “this is all about dark matter of professional systems UX that I know and consider as valuable”.
Of course, I would like to monetize it once, but at this moment it is too early.
I still have some doubts regarding the project, that with growing usage of AI system to get answers and, moreover, proposals, the epoch of such niche websites is passing away. But I believe, that only when we learn some topics systematically, at different levels of abstraction, then we are able to work more effectively with complex systems and even use AI more effectively, because to ask the appropriate question (to AI, to users, to experts and so on) it is actually good to know already something wide, generic, that covers more extent of domain, than narrow details.
Hope I will have enough motivation to continue. Follow the updates in social networks, that are mentioned below in the footer or at the home page.
Thanks!