This Week in the Past on Tyner Blain [Jan 5]

reflecting
A look back at the best from this week in the past.

This week we look at timeless mistakes: usability mistakes, agile mistakes, and project management mistakes.

Crossing the Desert with Bad Project Planning

desert

Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough – how do we prevent it from happening?

Ten Common Mistakes of Going Agile

snowman

This concludes and summarizes our winter-holiday series on the 10 common mistakes of going agile. The ten mistakes that Levent Gurses identified in the Dec 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb’s journal. Here are links to the ten previous articles, and a summary of the mistakes:

Top Five Usability Blunders (And Fixes)

blunder

Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability

  1. Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold.
  2. Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users.
  3. Interrupt the user’s workflow with pop-ups and other modal interruptions.
  4. Limit expert users to following “new user” workflow, one tedius, repetitive step at a time when shortcuts would work.
  5. Don’t suggest solutions when an error message is displayed.
  • Scott Sehlhorst

    Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant with over 30 years of experience in engineering, software development, and business. Scott founded Tyner Blain in 2005 to focus on helping companies, teams, and product managers build better products. Follow him on LinkedIn, and connect to see how Scott can help your organization.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.