Web Page Ethiopia

Successful project management is crucial to seeing a user-centered design approach succeed. Why?

Without good project management, usability is unlikely to be factored into the process as problems arise.

Effective project management responsibly makes tradeoffs to ensure a rational decision-making process.

The key is to remain accountable to your own usability goals. When a project runs into trouble, a common solution is to remove usability processes from the project.

Nevertheless, project managers who keep the big picture in mind can see the real cost of removing usability reviews, user testing, and so forth, and can therefore effectively optimize project activities.

Tradeoffs
A total project plan must satisfy needs beyond usability, such as profit requirements, technology limitations, and workforce satisfaction.

The most important project principle is that design is a process of resolving tradeoffs. You shouldn’t get tied up on one principle at the expense of every other concern.

Keep in mind that every design has to make certain sacrifices because of limited time and budget.

It’s okay to take shortcuts and make compromises, as long as they’re attentively considered.

Effective tradeoff analysis requires listing the pros and cons of each alternative, weighing their relevance in your design situation, and then making a decision appropriate to the context of your problem.

There are a few design guidelines that can be viewed as absolutes. Instead, an appropriate rationale needs to be developed for each application of the guidelines in each circumstance.

The following are some key principles for making effective tradeoffs.

The 80/20 rule: This is a principle for setting priorities. The idea is that users will spend 80 percent of their time using 20 percent the web site, so you should put 80 percent of your design effort into that same 20 percent of the website.

In other words, decide what’s most important, and put your effort into getting those things right.

Design for manufacture: This is a common principle of industrial design, which says that design must take production needs into consideration, including the capabilities of the production tools, the skills of the production staff, delivery limitations, and the cost of materials.

Design for evolution: Design also needs to take into account the possibility that the web site you’re developing will grow and evolve over a long period of time.

Long-term maintenance means that you’ll need to make the navigation flexible and facilitate adding information with minimal coding.

Stakeholders
Design is a tem endeavor, drawing from many different areas of expertise. Numerous people have a stake in any design decisions.

While we put users first in importance, any design that doesn’t account for the other stakeholders is likely to be unsuccessful.

Common stakeholders embrace the users, your client, your management, your design and development team, your marketing team, the press who will review your work, the customer support team, the shipping department, the system administrators, and so on.

All of these people have an interest in and are affected by any design decision and must be considered.

One of the most difficult aspects of resolving tradeoffs is being accountable to all stakeholders.

Many of the stakeholders may not have usability as a top priority. As a designer, you have the responsibility to educate the teams you work with to ensure that usability is factored appropriately into the decision process.

Report This Post