11 Cult of Personality ... or Something

I see a few more benefits to this model:

1. It gives your site some personality – it is easier to hone in on what the site is FOR and what it ISN’T for.
2. It gives the designer direction and can provide a sense of completion when the goal is attained. This is not very possible in a situation where there are no defined goals.
3. It gives the site functional usage (the site does something tangable for someone). You can always add more functionality to it later, and you can send separate invoices for these services.

Question:
Designers are often in a situation where they are moonlighting and don’t have time to set up these types of scenarios – the client wants a site redesign YESTERDAY and don’t care to listen to our use cases. Let’s face it…a well designed site takes longer to create and could potentially cost the client more money in the short-term. How do we handle client expectations while delivering a quality product from a usability perspective without staying up until 2am every night and under-charging for our services?

posted at 06:29 am on March 7, 2005 by Mark Priestap

12 Green Belt

Such things are the first things you learn in a project-mngt course.

At work (I’m a junior process engineer) I’ve got the luck to have a Green Belt-training.

The first lesson: The Project Charter: the most important piece of paper, with the terribly important section: project scope!

posted at 07:09 am on March 7, 2005 by Bert

13 Laziness

Quote: Designers are often in a situation where they are moonlighting and don’t have time to set up these types of scenarios – the client wants a site redesign YESTERDAY and don’t care to listen to our use cases. Let’s face it…a well designed site takes longer to create and could potentially cost the client more money in the short-term. How do we handle client expectations while delivering a quality product from a usability perspective without staying up until 2am every night and under-charging for our services?

Exactly. I’ve had clients put money in, pull money out, put money back in. You spend more time planning than anything but the deadlines remain. I guess this works well in the public sector because too many chiefs need bits of paper. Private sector wants results.

posted at 09:39 am on March 7, 2005 by Ed

14 Re: Cult of Personality

I agree with this in that there is an inherent problem with web development: it is too easy to go down the Rapid Application Development route. In fact it is too easy to setup a basic web site, full stop. Simply knock something together, give it a nice polished design and sell it to the client in half the time it would take to develop a proper use-case scenario.

I actually think many clients don’t have the money to pay for things to be done ‘properly’. Using UML, Use-cases and what-not takes time and money. Clients see the guy down the road offering superficially the same service but at half the cost because they ignore all the project management techniques and just ‘get on with it’.

Many clients don’t have the faintest idea of software development of any kind. They won’t see the point and therefore the long term financial benefit to getting their site developed by competent software engineers rather than someone who knows a bit of HTML and is good at design.

posted at 09:34 am on March 9, 2005 by Robin Massart

15 Fantabulous is Really a Word

What would be fantabulous would be some software that could scan through bare-bones html (especially forms) and 1. Suggest accessibility/usability enhancements (like a spell check), 2. Automatically insert code where told (label tags and other annoying things we do so maticulously), 3. Proofread for validation errors. I could see this being a real time-saver. Maybe there is software that does this, but I don’t know of it. I’d program it myself, but alas…I am but an artist.

posted at 02:07 pm on March 9, 2005 by Mark Priestap

16 Try HTML Tidy

This is a good place to start if you want your HTML cleaned up so it will validate. It can also do a number of usability/accessibility tricks (such as add alt attributes to img tags), but this is to be discouraged, since accessibility especially is not something that can be solved via an automated process.

http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

What you’re really asking for is a Frontpage/Dreamweaver application which actually produces valid, usable and accessible mark up. The holy grail of web development and one which will out many people out of a job! Although I am actually very surprised this sort of tool doesn’t exist yet…

posted at 04:15 am on March 10, 2005 by Robin Massart

17 RAD HTML tools

Are RAD HTML tools good or bad?

I would say that they are bad. If they did not exist, no one would be able to develop websites with just some design abilities by dragging around some images and having their tool spit out invalid HTML 3.2 People would have to learn HTML more than what is needed to operate some HTML RAD tool. hopefully that would result in them picking up some good things. Most importantly, having no RAD tools would increase the demand for advanced web developers, and there would be no way to be lazy and slap a site together in some tool.

Of course, that is not the case and will never be so as people like writing such applications…

posted at 12:17 pm on March 11, 2005 by Philip Nilsson

18 flowcharts

What about the use of flow charts. Is that parctice still usefull in designing dynamic websites or it’s no longer in use or was it never in use?

posted at 07:22 pm on March 13, 2005 by zee

19 Microsoft Killed the WYSIWYG Star

Just a follow up…

I wasn’t suggesting so much that it would be neat to have a tool to wysiwyg-ify accessibility, but that it would be neat to have a tool that scans your code and suggests things that we can say yay or nay to.

For example…

Software: Scans your code…then says, “Your form fields do not have labels. This will cause a validation error. Would you like to add labels in front of each field?”

You: Click “yes”

Software: Inserts blank labels with no extra code.

You: Edit the labels as needed, save time typing.

Microsoft: Buys software and ruins it because she hates the web.

posted at 12:53 pm on March 14, 2005 by Mark Priestap

20 Wireframes before, after, or in parallel with Use

I’d be interested to hear experiences about how wireframes/storyboards fit into this process. I’ve heard different opinions about it.

posted at 10:03 am on March 17, 2005 by William