Trust the team, trust the team, trust the team!!!!

This will be the first in a series of posts covering my thoughts on web design.

Recently I found myself knee-deep in a redesign of a major website. This has caused me to look at other sites, ones that I visit during my usual surfing of the web, with a very critical eye.

What I found astounded me!

I can’t believe how many sites ignore, or seemingly intentionally flout, what I deem as the basic principles of web design.

Now, I don’t claim to be the Messiah of design; however, I have been involved in designing and building sites for the past 13 years for a major financial institution. As a consequence I have seen and been involved in the good, the bad and downright ugly.

So I thought I might post some of what I’ve learned for anyone who is interested. I’ve been told many times that web design is easy and there’s not much to it. I mean, how hard can be to put a few pages on the net?

My answer to that is always: You’re right, it’s not hard put up a website. The skill is in actually making it usable, stable and, from a business point of view, a profitable asset.

Good web design is combining all of the elements to work in concert to deliver a site that is simple to use, coherent and aesthetic.

I know it’s a cliché, but I have to say it. When building a site, my approach is always “Less is more”. Any time I design, create or add to a site I refer to this mantra.

Why? Let’s think back to circa 1999 in web history and sites employing javascript effects ,DHTML ,Java applets and the whole nine yards of drop down, drop in and tune out (little rock’n'roll sixties metaphor there) widgets, menus ,plug-ins and objects.

We did it because we could , Not because we should.
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“Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been 12 days since my last post.”
“Take two verbs and describe a noun.”

Let’s talk device convergence. Recently, while acting as members of a panel at the Smart Services Conference (2009), we were asked where we thought the evolution of mobile devices was headed. Many points of opinion were raised, here are my thoughts and predictions that I shared that day.

I believe that the mobile phone capability will move towards miniaturisation of the handset yet expansion of capability and gesture interactivity.

This demonstration at the TED conference only serves to validate this position. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look now. It only makes sense that we would seek to remove the reliance on carrying devices and seek the freedom of movement this technology offers.

This, however, leaves us with a conundrum: How do we cater for the need for a device which allows portability, yet also supports the expanded capabilities we require (such as web browsing, eBooks, and multimedia)?

I believe that the year of 2010 will be the year of the Netpad/Slate. Early prototypes I have seen are very promising, such as the Microsoft courier and the crunch pad. However, as they tend to do, Apple promise much with their unnamed version, which will surely be based on the iPhone interface.

Google, of course, has a finger in the pie and I believe this will be the vehicle they seek for their Chrome operating system.
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A wonderful new application goes live. It has been tested and it does what it’s supposed to do. But within hours the issues start to roll in. Fingers are pointed…

“The development team didn’t build it right!”

“The business requirements are wrong!”

We’ve all been there, right?

In my experience, there have been many times where I have discovered that the root cause is not the requirements nor the application’s implementation. The issue is that the both the requirements and the application itself have been styled over the top of a flawed business process.

So here are my thoughts:
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I am sitting here thinking why it is always so complicated. When it comes to technology – whether it be a web application, the code behind it or the technology itself – why is it that we allow ourselves to let it become so complicated?

I say this off the back of a terrible experience I had on a Federal Government website. Now I like to believe I am a fairly savvy user of the ‘Net. Little did I know how wrong I could be! This site confounded me and drove me to confusion of the highest order. Read the rest of this entry »