Engineering Decisions
I’ve written an article over on The Usability Blog at Usability.com that discusses the concept of drawing a line between “engineering decisions” and “usability decisions.” In large part, I’m dealing with this quote from Jakob Nielsen:
“As long as each user sees the appropriate design, the choice between these implementation options should be an engineering decision and not a usability decision.”
–Jakob Nielsen (emphasis added)
You can read the article here.
http://usability.com/2012/04/24/compromise-happens/
Basecamp’s new loop-in feature works too well
The creative folks at 37Signals have provided a new feature in the new Basecamp called loop-in. The purpose of the feature is to make it easier to track communication with folks outside of the project on matters related to the project. The idea is to seamlessly communicate with a non-project member via the normal project communication tool. Based upon my brief experimentation, the feature appears to work too well.
The New Basecamp, New Coke, and New Decisions
There is so much to say about The New Basecamp that reviewing this release is going to take several posts. So, for starters let’s talk about the big picture decisions related to this major new release.
Know What You Know
“80% of all usability issues are ‘duh’ issues.”
Matthew Lamb (@SFDCMatt) – via @klrichardson
Are ‘duh’ issues ruining your product? Do you even know about the ‘duh’ issues in your product? If you are not usability testing your site with real users you are likely missing a lot of easy things that you could fix.
The Second Way To Skin A Cat
You know the season of a t.v. show when you realize that they’ve run out of plots? One of the most common signs is when the characters start reversing roles. Suddenly Sylar is a good guy, or Dharma stops being a hippie and Greg stops being a Republican. You know the gig is up when that happens.
This week I’m left wondering if a software company is “done” when it starts releasing products that compete with itself. Google has had me a bit confused with Chrome OS and Android for a while. But this week things hit closer to home for me when the makers of FogBugz, a project management tool, released Trello, a project “organization” tool.
The Baylor Shakedown
In the standoff between Texas A&M, Baylor, the SEC, and Oklahoma, the interesting question is “How much money is it going to take?”
Bradley
