Design for Humans

Yesterday I came across this article that I thought really drove him some of the key points of consideration that web designers in their toolbelt. The article is called "Human to Human Design" by Sharon Lee. She makes a great first point by saying, we have to remember that the user on the other side of the computer is a human, our intended audience.  She basically gives a good case for using user case studies in your design. For example, you are creating a website that Loan Officers login to and check what leads they have to work with today. These are busy people who just want the information, but may want to be able to sort it by a couple of different yet common columns. Knowing that about your customer, you aren't going to want to have a large flash based splash page that takese 30 seconds to load and 60 seconds of play time. That's not what they want or need. They want to get in, get their data and get out. So thinking about them while designing, you end up designing a page that is lightweight and quick, gives them their data, the way the want it.  Anyhow, I think it's a great article and definitely worth the read.

Time for Accuracy

    As a Developer you always want your application to be fast, useful and well liked. It's great when things work well. However, things don't always work well. From time to time due to hardware or application performance the application is "slow". "Slow" is a word that most Web Developers just hate. Mostly because it is so subjective. 30 seconds may be perfectly acceptable to one user, while another will complain that it's too slow and that they just cant work like that. The subjectivity of time makes it really hard to see what the real problem is. This is where having something in place that takes the subjectivity out of the equation and add objectivity back. So I wrote a down and dirty little app that proxies a URL and times how long it takes the network to get that page, and then javascript is inserted on the page so I can measure how long it took the page to load on the users end too.  Fun Stuff.