Monday, May 13, 2002

It's worth repeating, because it's such a good article: Strategic usability: Partnering business, engineering, and ease of use. I read through it again this afternoon, and absolutely love the following approach to enforcing prototyping or early UI design as a precursor to development: One development team I worked with was such a strong advocate for prototyping and early ui design efforts, that they created a "screenshot only" estimation process: they would only talk to designers and program managers about feature development costs if the designer provided a set of good screenshots, or prototypes, for how the design would actually behave. They would literally tell people to go away, and not to come back until they could show their designs. They recognized the value of up front planning, and became advocates of a better design process, in part, to protect the entire team's valuable time. 3:51:50 PM

Jakob Nielsen has updated his Alertbox with an article that highlight his Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability. A few choice quotes, as he introduces his guidelines (bolding is his): "homepages are the most valueable real estate in the world," "the homepage is the most important page on most websites," and, "one of the first things [deep linking] users do after arriving at a new site is go to the homepage." I know that NNG does a ton of research, and I'd love to see the metrics that helped Jakob to arrive at these conclusions. The first is almost laughable. Just because "companies and individuals funnel millions of dollars through a space that's not even a square foot in size" doesn't make it the most valuable space in the world. I'd be more inclined to agree that a domain name is more valuable, but even that is likely to be only transitory, as increasingly accurate search-engine results prove to be the main point of entry for more and more web users, but I'd still rather have one square block on Manhattan Island than www.manhattan.com. Recognizing this, Nielsen unfortunately dismisses these "deep links" by asserting that users quickly go to home pages anyway. Maybe I'm just using myself as a guide, but I tend to hit the Back button before I try to locate a way to get the site's home page. If I've found what I was looking for, then there's no reason to waste more time reviewing a site's home page. If I haven't, then I'm back to Google to check more results. Frankly, there are only a few circumstances in which I care at all about a site's homepage, and most of those center around constantly updated content. Where's that guideline? #1: keep it current. The ability to search is #2. Everything else (look and feel) isn't irrelevant, but it is highly subjective. That's one of the things I love about Mark's site -- I'm able to pick and choose between various layouts, simply by selecting a different look and feel from a combo box. 1:40:01 PM

From Joel, a good piece by Jim Highsmith on creating a decent vision statement: The more critical the delivery schedule and the more volatile the project, the more important it is that the team have a good vision of the final desired outcome. Minus this vision, iterative development projects are likely to become oscillating projects -- going round and round in circles because everyone is looking at the minutia rather than the big picture. 11:28:10 AM