Design Sapling.com

Months ago at work, I proposed a design methodology based on Alan Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design as featured in About Face 3.0. This was the first step of my current goal. Things are going well!

We’ve started to implement usability testing into our application development process. Unfortunately, the project that we’re doing usability tests with was started before we had created our design process.

However, the results from the tests have been very positive; I think this is because I tried to design it with the user in mind.
However, I didn’t have a style guide, which would have made delegation of tasks much easier.

I believe planning is essential for a successful project. I did plan the functionality of the project. However, without proper usability testing BEFORE production began, things changed late in the game due to clients requests after seeing things in action. This caused further delays.

In the end, I’m very happy with the final result and the usability tests we did DURING the end of production show that the end users would be happy with it and indeed this has been the case.

For our next projects, we will fully implement our design process. We’ve already implemented an organization of resources for the development of the products. Currently, I’m creating a company-level style guide, which include things such as best practices for coding, file naming conventions, variable naming conventions; as well as a project-level style guide template. Additionally, I’m developing documents that will make it easy to follow our design process. This goal has definitely moved in the right direction!

Just a few projects to prove its 100%! With the design process not only documented, but easy to use and remember thanks to the templates, guides, and checklists, I think things are going to go very well for this goal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 5:04 am and is filed under Design, Goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.