Siolon

The paradigms I’m going to contrast are how we view the entire development process. I will refer to two different paradigms: the first is the “work-down” approach which I will contrast with the “value-up” approach. I read about this in Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System concerning the new Microsoft approach to software development including an introduction to the Agile SDLC. However, I’m not here to promote Microsoft Team System or Agile methodology; instead, I’m here presenting a paradigm that is pertinent regardless of your chosen SDLC or technological platform.I will start by defining both (read more...)

Usability testing is often overlooked to the peril of both the developer and the consumer. I was convicted reading Steve Krug’s book on usability to go ahead with testing even if it’s small and cheap. In doing this for the recent design of this site I wanted to share how I did usability testing for all of $60. Feedback Form The first thing I did was create a form in Wufoo, a powerful form building application, to receive feedback. I made it simple and short (I had to keep it to 10 fields in the free version). (read more...)

I just came across a fantastic document published very recently from the W3C that talks about “best practices” in web design. The document is called “HTML Design Principles,” and I believe it contained a few things that I left out of my last list. Internationalization Under the heading of “Support World Languages” is the topic of internationalization. This is extremely important especially if you want your product/application to be usable by the vast majority of the modern world! This doesn’t mean that you need to translate into every language, but there are certain principles such (as mentioned) supporting Unicode (read more...)

I gave the following presentation at my day job, and I thought others might benefit. That, and I think that SlideShare is a cool app! | View | Upload your own (read more...)

Before I left college the only experience I had in software development was as a one-man team. I did all the design and back-end development. There wasn’t a conflict of interest between designer and programmer, because they were both one person! As I left college and got into the “real world” I found that it was impossible to do large-scale software development by oneself. All of the sudden there were information architects, program managers, user interface experts, database administrators, technical writers, and on and on. I came to realize the value of specializing in one field. (read more...)