Software product success.
How do you debate how to build something you’ve been asked to build? There are several constraints which affect choices – non-functional requirements (NFRs), cost, capacity, and capability are easy ones to discuss. And while all of those are relevant, an altogether different factor has dramatically more impact on your […]
When companies first start off-shoring, they usually send the “low level” implementation work overseas first, to work out the process kinks and manage risk. Over time, your valued, domain-aware developers will perceive a lack of career opportunities with this limited role. Naturally, you will want to consider sending design work […]
Measuring the return on investments in design may be the hardest ROI calculation you can do. It certainly is one of the rarest. To measure ROI, you have to be able to determine what would happen without the investment, and what happens with the investment. The difference between them is […]
In our previous article in the series on the development of nexus, we discussed navigation and information architecture. We identified the challenge of filtering articles by category and by level of experience (beginner / expert), while also viewing the articles along a characteristic (most-viewed, highest-rated, etc). Between both url-creation and […]
Our agile project is to create a site that lets you rate articles. In our corporate goals, we defined the goal to make it easier for people to find and read great content. Last night I was doing some research on social networks and thinking about the nature of our […]
Joshua Ledwell wrote a short article expressing his perspective on designing software that is neither too simple nor too complex. He also links to some excellent other articles on the topic.
The wisdom of crowds helps us avoid stupid decisions. Unfortunately, it also prevents innovative, passionate, fantastic decisions. Collective Intelligence is collective insipidness. We need to keep the inputs of individuals in the mix.
There are 15 ways for someone to shutdown a laptop running Windows Vista. This adds unwarranted complexity to our software. How can we avoid the same problem in our software?
Kathy Sierra writes (another) great article at Creating Passionate Users. This time, she talks about why users don’t upgrade and presents ways to get users to install the latest version. We focus in this article on one way in particular – using goal-driven documentation to encourage upgrading.
