Bring Me Back Home

August 21st, 2008 chris

Have you been inside a Gigantic Mall that has a lot of passage ways going to the other sections of the establishment. Feeling like the Athenian hero Theseus inside a Labyrinth and feeling lost. Well, do not let that happen to your users when they are already deeply inside your site.

Follow the following guidelines to bring them back home:

1. Tell users where they have arrived and how they can proceed to other parts of the site by including these three design elements on every page:

   • Company name or logo in upper left corner

   • Direct, one-click link to the homepage

   • Search (preferably in the upper right corner)

2. Orient the user to the rest of the site. If the site has hierarchical information architecture, the best way to do this is usually a “breadcrumb trail”links that indicate the user’s current location in the context of the site’s hierarchy and allow users to backtrack or move up the hierarchy. Also include links to other resources that are directly relevant to the current location, but don’t flood the user with links to all site areas or to unrelated pages.

3. Don’t assume that users have followed a drill-down path to arrive at the current page. They may have taken a different path than what you intended and not have seen information that was contained on higher-level pages.

Posted in Design & Usability

Three Choices in Design

August 21st, 2008 chris

There are three types of design you can follow when building your site or user interface. They are the following:

1. Standard: Eighty percent or more of Web sites use the same design approach. Users strongly expect standard elements to work a certain way when they visit a new site because that’s how things almost always work.
2. Convention: About 50 to 79 percent of Websites use the same design approach. Users expect conventional elements to work a certain way when they visit a new site because that’s how things usually work.
3. Confusion: With these elements, no single design approach dominates, and even the most popular approach is used by less than half of Web sites. For such design elements, users don’t know what to expect when they visit a new site.

Choose at your own risk.

Posted in Design & Usability

Standards are Standard in Design

August 21st, 2008 chris

Standards are very important in design especially in the digital world today. It ensures that users:

1. Know what features to expect
2. Know how these features will look in the interface
3. Know where to find these features on the site and on the page
4. Know how to operate each feature to achieve their goal
5. Don’t need to ponder the meaning of unknown design elements
6. Don’t miss important features because they overlook a design element that is not standard
7. Don’t get nasty surprises when something doesn’t work as expected

Posted in Design & Usability

Alien Nation - Users and Developers

August 21st, 2008 chris

Users and developers are typically from different worlds, may even speak different languages, and have different backgrounds, motivations, and objectives. Communication gap between user and the developer accounts for the fact that understanding user needs remain one of our largest problems.

The problems are the following:

1. Users do not know what they want, or they know what they want but cannot articulate it.
2. Users think they know what they want until developers give them what they said they wanted.
3. Analysts think they understand user problems better than users do.
4. Everybody believes everybody else is politically motivated.

The solution:

1. Recognize and appreciate the user as domain expert; try alternative communication and elicitation techniques.
2. Provide alternative elicitation techniques earlier: storyboarding, role playing, throwaway prototypes, and so on.
3. Put the analyst in the user’s place. Try role playing for an hour or a day.
4. Politics is part of human nature, so let’s get on with the program.

Posted in Requirements

The Real Goal of Software Development

August 21st, 2008 chris

Thousands of software development teams worldwide are engaged right now in developing widely different software applications in widely different industries. But although we work in different industries and speak and write in different languages, we all work with the same technologies, we read the same magazines, we went to the same schools, and fortunately, we have the same clear goal:

“To develop quality software on time and on budget that meets customers’ real needs”

Posted in Requirements