FAQs or frequently asked questions were initially created for email list serve venues. For that purpose FAQs made sense, since the list managers were constantly answering the same questions day after day ad naseum. Since they worked well for email lists, they are used in many other applications. The FAQ has become de rigueur in … Read more
“Will this bring us money right away?” versus “Is this an excellent product?” One of the ongoing challenges between UI design, and the business world is the tension between cost and excellence. Most times the “money right away” wins the debate. “We only have 6 customer contracts for this product we cannot justify the effort … Read more
Moving out of the dark ages of mysterious software, we come to a time when users without programming training outnumber those with it. We succeeded beyond our expectations. Hooray! For our interface users, it is extremely frustrating to click an action button and find it doing something other than what they thought it would do. … Read more
Have you ever pressed a “Cancel” button and had the whole window and form disappear? Not just a cleared form, but the whole page, and you end up on a page you have never been on before? Yes? In my opinion that is definitely not optimal usability. Cancel is an interesting term when used on … Read more
User Interface Engineers are creative people. They may use some interesting color choices and choose layout idiosyncrasies that seem challenging to the designer, but bottom line they are just as creative as the visual UI designer. I have worked with quite a few engineers in my Internet career of 25 years. Some have been stellar … Read more
Often cutting costs, in the short term, can be more expensive over time. One place this is often forgotten is the internal tools built by and used within a company. Your employees tools and procedures should both be bought and built with forethought as to how they will make your workers more productive. Most companies … Read more
Agile is the catch phrase and somewhat new technique for software development. Having worked on Agile teams I can see the benefits. In my experience the Agile process, when managed well, truly builds a tighter team and captures problems earlier in the development cycle. I think Agile has succeeded remarkably well even with the resistance … Read more