Agility and the User Experience

It’s easy to think of a web site in terms of the teams who participate in the project: content, design, information architecture, hardware, platform, application development. But it’s the user who ties all the parts together: the user experience is the end-product of a web application.

This is why people freak out about user experience design, or UxD, these days. We can define and justify and normalize everything we do during the course of a web project by referring to the user experience, and we can keep this experience in mind as a theoretical model to help us make decisions along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Dangerous Phrases: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Now, we at Helen Marie think the web is very cool. That’s why we’re in this business.  We get excited on a daily basis about all manner of new design and interface ideas and technology.  (Personally, I discover a new way to love jQuery almost every day, and that’s exciting.)  It’s this constant fascination that energizes each one of our projects, and that we hope to find reflected in our clients.

Part of our job is to focus this enthusiasm into disciplined decisions about how best to serve a particular client and a particular project.  We have a lot of healthy arguments that start with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”  The question is often followed by, “I agree, but we shouldn’t do that in this case because….”  Or, just as often: “That’s great — but let’s consider that for phase 2.”

We go through this in order to avoid three big pitfalls: building more than the client needs or can immediately use, rejecting new approaches or techniques because we’re unfamiliar, and committing to unreliable approaches or techniques because the coolness factor affects our judgment.  We wrestle with these issues so you don’t have to.

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