Who is going to use your product? – Using persona’s to stay user focused.

Persona’s help to focus on who the product is aimed at.
Ask questions like:

• What does this type of user need?
• What do they want?
• What do they like?

The answers can help to keep the team focused on who they are building a site for, ensuring that the user is at the forefront of the peoples mind when making design and build decisions.

Treatments

Treatments bring the mood boards and wire frames together to give an idea of what the website, application or other product should eventually look and feel like. Early on they allow for a creative space for experimentation, providing the designer with an opportunity to explore different solutions. In my view a designer will throw away about 80% of what they produce

Why are Mood boards useful?

Visuals communicate things that words cannot. In conjunction with wire frames and prototypes, mood boards contribute a vital role in delivering a product that looks like your client wants it to. A picture is worth a thousand words and mood boards help you create that picture.

Why use Wire frames?

A Wire frame describes a web site or application using black and white lines, text and boxes. They are an extremely fast way of developing the layout, navigation and usability of a website or application. They are quick and easy to change enabling the creation of many variations at minimal cost. They can be created using anything from a pencil and piece of paper through to sophisticated software such as Auxere, Visio, Expression blend and Power point or with many free applications that are available.

The advantage of using wire frames to aid the discussion of functionality, navigation and site hierarchy is

Defining tasks using ‘Stories’ and ‘Scenarios’

‘Stories’ are a great way to describe requirements. In defining these stories you also define tasks that need to be completed by the development team and give the tester an idea of what they need to test. The writing of Stories should help keep the understanding of what a task is simple and accessible to all. Written in non-technical language they follow a simple format:

Title

As a…

I want…

So that…

 

For example:

Add ‘Artist’ filter to search.

As a user

I want to filter my search results by ‘Artist’

so that I find the CD I want more easily.

 

Expressed like this anyone in the team or wider business can discuss the task without specific technical knowledge.

Requirements capture through Brainstorming

When capturing requirements from clients or stakeholders a good way to start  is to hold a brainstorming session.  Asking people to contribute to a brainstorming session for a new product or feature is a great way to gather information and get people involved and emotionally invested in the project. Invite all stakeholders and key representatives from each area of the company that the product will effect. Try to ensure that everyone invited gets the opportunity to contribute. The greatest insight can come from the most unlikely of participants and gathering input from every department will help to get a more all encompassing view of what is required.

Why prototype?

Prototypes can be used to explore how a users navigate through a site or reach goals using a feature. They provide a great way of testing usability before development starts.

• Help to gather user (or business) requirements
• Enable you to think through different scenarios and possibilities
• You can try out different solutions
• Aid communication with users, developers and business owners
• They can reduce the risk of needing to rework and redeploy a completed element.

A good prototype will use a sample set of data and simulate as closely as possible how the finished feature will work.

Create a draggable windowless WPF in Expression blend

1. Open expression blend and design your WPF
2. Follow this tutorial to create a windowless WPF with a close button:
   http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc188959.aspx
3. Follow this tutorial to create a windowless WPF with a minimize button
   http://blogs.msdn.com/danteg/archive/2008/01/16/getting-the-vista-minimize-with-windowless-applications.aspx
4. Then to make your windowless WPF draggable type this into your XAML:

Designer and coder or Designers and coders?

I am at a web development company that splits up the work flow thus: Illustrators, Designers, Front End coders, Developers, Producers, Beggar man and Thief. I am contracting as a Front End coder. I spend my days coding XHTML, CSS and a little JavaScript. I miss being involved with the design aspect of developing a web site but have little to complain about as the position was clearly advertised for what it was when I applied.

The power of taking notes

I advise to always take a notebook and pen into meetings and take notes. It helps to keep focused and the ink will not fade unlike memory. The notes can be a great tool to help review the meetings content and as a reference should you become unsure of anything. Taking notes also helps to maintain an efficient work flow as you will not have to interrupt other peoples work with questions about what was agreed in a meeting that you attended.