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
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
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)
Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability
- Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold.
- Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users.
- Interrupt the user’s workflow with pop-ups and other modal interruptions.
- Limit expert users to following “new user†workflow, one tedius, repetitive step at a time when shortcuts would work.
- Don’t suggest solutions when an error message is displayed.
