You may think you’re saving time and money by skipping (or skimping) on discovery and requirements gathering, but what you’re really doing is pushing that step until after the product’s built, when changes are much more expensive and frustrating to all involved.
— Me, all the freaking time.
Requirements are actually Hypotheses and your Projects are really just Experiments. Realizing this should be liberating
User interfaces designed to trick people, or how to detect if the website you’re visiting was built by dicks.
A question that inevitably comes up very early in the process of designing a new app is this: should the interface refer to the user as “your” or “my” when talking about the user’s stuff, as in “my profile” or “your settings”? For a long time, this question ate at my soul. Which is right?
I’m firmly in the yours camp. /via cameron moll (also a yourser)
Noah Stokes on Bold’s Project Inquiry Form:
Some of the questions are standard, what is your timeline, your budget, what are the final deliverables. But some of our other questions are more targeted towards seeing if the client can articulate their project goals. Questions like “What tasks do you want visitors to achieve when they visit the site”, and “How will you measure the success of the site” let on to how well the client knows what their goals are, and let us know exactly what we would be working to achieve. If all of those answers line up, we follow up with the potential client and request a phone call.
Nice, it’s like a boiled down version of usability.gov’s kick-off questions I’ve been using (and modifying) during my discovery work over the years.
I’m not sure what I like more about this Caleb Clark article. The fact that there is an open hot tub somewhere in Oakland that you can gain access to as long as you know the secret pass code. Or the idea of managing an online community by killing it and starting over from scratch. (via trivium)
It’s an initiative for knowing the people behind a website. It’s a TXT file that contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website.
Great idea. Here’s an example.
Imagine building a website with no internet:
Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort’s mission: to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access.
Well, not completely without Internet, the team could hike thirty minutes up a snow covered hill to catch some tubes at the Airport.
Old castles, no distractions, and a lot of talent seems to have worked well judging by the final product: spacelog.org.
