Appropriate order of actions:

Setting Goals before Taking Action
Understand Problems before Generating Solutions
Designing before Writing Design Documents
Validating Designs before Investing in Code
Steak before Sizzle

Values:

Validated Data over Expert Opinion
Quality of Data over Ease of Data Collection
Complete Workflows over Long Feature Lists
Achieving Results over Writing Reports
Collaborative Design over Design by Referendum or Design by Fiat
Ease of Use over Ease of Coding
Well-designed Critical and Common Workflows over Complete Coverage of Every Possible Workflow

Ironically, I was just about to begin an almost identical process with my team next week. We are having our first “UI Roundtable” with development and “Design Guiding Principles” is one of the topics. I plan to take John’s team’s list into consideration when developing ours.

Related posts:

1. 4 Step Simple UI Design Process
2. Prioritizing Design in Successful, Legacy Applications
3. Can you name which design or usability principles this violates?

No related posts.

Anton Ego, Ratatouille (2007)

In many ways the work of a critic is easy.  We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and themselves to our judgement. We thrive on negative criticism which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

No related posts.

Okay, so maybe it won’t get me a mention in Businessweek, but what I was trying to capture and communicate was that software design in particular is largely about taking unglamorous tools and making them functionally robust and efficient, rewarding to use, and aesthetically pleasing.  We aren’t artists, but we are creatives.  We aren’t rocket scientists, but we’re smart and talented. And every day we have to use our creativity, smarts and talent to design the best tools for people to use. 

So I’m interested… in 10 words or less, what is software design to you?  Enter more than one if you like (as separate comments).

Related posts:

1. What do we mean by software design?
2. Prioritizing Design in Successful, Legacy Applications
3. Challenges to world class software design

Each time I visit amazon.com, and I visit too often, if I’m not already logged in, I stumble looking for the Sign In link. I would expect the “Sign In” text at the top of the page to be a link taking me to a Sign In form.  Or even better to automatically display a Sign In form on the homepage.  But instead you are required to click on something that would only be available to you once you ARE signed in – e.g. “personalized recommendations”, “Your Lists”, “Your Account”, etc.

This seems like such a fundamental flaw that it had to be done on purpose.  But why?  Why break with convention and force people to take an extra cognitive step? Did they conduct usability studies and find that this was superior somehow?  I’m very curious…

No related posts.

If you burn your feed through Feedburner (like I do), you can display the number of subscribers (i.e. FeedCount) by inserting some Javascript anywhere on your site.  The catch is that you have to accept their presentation with very few styling options:

Francesco Mapelli created a Wordpress plugin called Feedcount 1.2 to do just what I was looking for – extract the Feedcount number and let me style it however I like.  But when Feedburner moved over to Google, it broke his plugin (the feedcount always reports “0″).  Fortunately, Adam Mclane changed some links in the plugins files and fixed the problem and republished the plugin as version 1.2.1.

To get the number of unique visitors out of Google Analytics I found a plugin from Spiral Web Consulting called Google Analyticator. The plugin inserts Google Analytics code on all of your Wordpress pages and also provides a widget that you can insert in your sidebar or place anywhere you like.  You have to enter your Google Analytics UID and Profile ID and a few other options.  The Profile ID was difficult for me because the instructions seemed to be wrong and I didn’t understand the difference.  In case you don’t know, the Profile ID can easily be found by clicking “Edit” on the profile for any site you follow – far right hand side of the screen – and then it appears in the upper left of the screen right beneath “Profile Settings”.

The difficulty with Google Analyticator is that if you want to change the styles (except for a few color changes which can be made through the Settings interface in Wordpress), you have to modify the PHP directly.  Again, I didn’t want to be limited to their way of presenting the data.

But with some direct edits to the inline styles in their PHP, I was able to achieve what I wanted.

So there you have it, Feedcount 1.2.1 plus Google Analyticator 4.3.1 and some styling hacks and it can be done!  You can see the (currrent) result by looking at the bottom left corner of my site:

No related posts.

Results:

Prefix Rank (most preferred to least):

1. User Experience
2. Interaction
3. User Interface
4. Usability
5. Web
6. Other

Suffix Rank (most preferred to least):

1. Designer
2. Architect
3. Engineer
4. Developer
5. Other

Conclusion?

“User Experience” and “Designer” were the preferred terms, but not necessarily in conjunction.  Although this doesn’t surprise me, I continue to question the long-term survival of “user experience” as a title term.  To me it is so ambiguous that it is essentially meaningless, an opinion that is supported by its misunderstanding outside (and within) our circles.

No related posts.

http://tables.googlelabs.com

Related posts:

1. Google releases Page Speed

IAApps organizes all the different tools into 4 categories:

1. Interface Modeling
2. Prototyping
3. Screen Capture
4. Usability Testing

Each category is then further organized by OS platform:

1. Mac OSX flavors
2. Windows flavors
3. Web

I found the navigation somewhat clumsy.  Rather than navigate the menus, I’d prefer a tool “site map” – a single page with all of the tools listed under each category and operating system so that I could quickly scan for what I want.  You almost get that “Show All Listings”, but not quite.

Aside from that, I think the site can be a valuable resource by providing a definitive directory of all the software applications user experience professionals need, and a way for us to rate the tools.

I’m going to head over there now and rate some of the tools myself.

Related posts:

1. Review: 16 User Interface Prototyping Tools
2. Rapidrabb – an online prototyping tool
3. Design Tools

Similar to YSlow, it looks pretty cool.  I noticed immediately that it helps to identify unused CSS selectors (something I’m always wanting to clean up).  I downloaded it and ran it on Dexo Design and here is a screenshot of the results:

Screenshot of Page Speed

Related posts:

1. We’re up and running!
2. Google launches “Fusion Tables”
3. Can you name which design or usability principles this violates?