Fresh

Rule #5 – Ask someone else’s opinion.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” – D. Adams

Finally, like a fish cannot survive without water, a large project cannot survive without outside perspective.This perspective comes ultimately from the end-users but long before it reaches the end-user, it starts off in the theoretical realm by some progenitor (the client) and then a facilitator (the agency and/or developer). It then evolves as the developer manifests the vision into something tangible. While this sounds like a pretty good evolutionary process, there really should be more people involved even at the theoretical stage. Things that sound like a good idea to one person and on paper may not hold to scrutiny when a larger sampling of opinion is taken. Don’t mistake this for design by committee as this can be equally disastrous but at the minimum a sampling should be taken from the target audience as some use cases could surface that haven’t been considered. The doomsday scenario for any website is one that has had tons of resources poured into its development and deployment only to fall on its face because the real users don’t want to use it. In conclusion never develop in a vacuum as its imperative to get feedback at all stages of development.

Stay tuned for rule #6: “Don’t get too attached.”

RULE #4 – Ask yourself WWGD? (What Would Google Do?)

“The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.” – T. Cargil

Every large development program will experience growing pains and bugs that you can not anticipate. One lesson we learned is let the actual end users be your ultimate QA team. By providing them with tools to easily communicate feedback and bugs you will have a lot more time to work on the issues instead of trying to find them.

Before Google got big it was unusual to label a site as ‘Beta’ which essentially is a cue to users that the site should work as advertised but expect occasional hiccups and refinements. It has almost become an subject of humor that Google’s popular service, “Gmail” would remain in beta forever and never become a “real” product.

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Rule #3 – COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR END USERS DURING THE WHOLE PROCESS!!!

“See what we have here is a failure to communicate.” M. Payne

We could have avoided one catastrophe we experienced a while back by simply talking with our client and their “employees” during the whole build opposed to just talking to one person until we assumed we were finished. In turns out the actual administrators and end users had other changes and options in mind which made turned the project into a development nightmare with hurt feelings on both sides.

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Rule 2: The project will NEVER be finished.

“Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week! No job is too big, no fee is too big!” – P. Venkman PhD

Please read the  rule above until it is committed to memory… now that you have this committed to memory,  let’s move onto the first questions you should ask yourself when you are scoping out the project.

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Welcome to the first part of an 8-part series, “8 Development Rules on how to Fail Less”.

This series is a collaboration between a project manager and a developer, who together have built some massive design and development projects landing on both ends of the spectrum of success. We’ve experienced apocalyptic fails and epic wins, and we’ve also survived assaults from scope-creep monsters controlled by unreasonable budget aliens. We have even been thrown under a couple fully-loaded Greyhound buses headed toward Albuquerque. So what’s the point? It’s that all of these tragedies and successes have been great learning experiences for us. Since we care deeply for our fellow web magic makers and dreamers of dreams, we have come up with the 8 rules to live and die by when developing huge web applications or websites in an effort to help you fail less. Please note that we are not experts, we just live this $@%! every day.

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It’s funny the odd times when inspiration can strike. For instance, last weekend I was playing a marathon amount of Super Mario Bros on my SNES at home. It was a much needed break from a really busy work week!

All of a sudden, I was struck by the sweet color palette on world six:

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I am so in love with this project from Bill Zeman: Tiny Art Director. It’s a blog that documents the paintings and drawings he does that are directed and critiqued by his daughter. It started when his daughter was two years old. She is four now, and a very opinionated art director!

Tomato Monster by Bill Zeman

There are a lot of dinosaurs. Be sure to check out “poo poo airplane” for a good laugh. It is also hilarious to see how many pieces he lists as “rejected.” Love, love, love it!

Via Owltastic

Often here on Fresh we bring you what we’re digging and what inspires us. We give ways to make what you create easier, ways to solve development issues creatively, and generally anything that we think you’d value. Sometimes we find problems that need to be solved that are staring us right in the face and we don’t even realize they exist.

After visiting An Event Apart this past month, I came face-to-face with one such situation. Have you ever wondered why sometimes when you create a website for a client, launch, then hand over the keys – things go haywire? All of a sudden the format is broken and the copy no longer makes sense, and all you’re left to do is shake your head and pray you took a screenshot before they took the reigns. Before you know it, the client is back at the drawing board wondering if they should’ve just changed that background color or moved things around on their home page a bit. Should we simply resign ourselves to blaming the client and moving on to the next project? I think not.

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This panel at SXSW was really interesting for a couple reasons. Jared Spool from UIE is such an engaging presenter! He had us all laughing; I was thoroughly engrossed the whole time. Also, the panel was really awesome because it challenged a few ideas that I generally don’t think twice about.

One of the primary points from the panel was that there is no evidence that user centered design has ever worked. I was really surprised to hear this! One of the anecdotes that he used was based on Apple and Microsoft. Spool claimed that apple hardly does any usability tests, while Microsoft does them constantly. (and we all know whose designs are better!) He didn’t have any numbers behind this, so I’m not sure of the validity. But really interesting none-the-less!

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Last week I was lucky enough to play a small, but fun, part in cool project. To enhance a video that was created for a promotional piece for a client, I was recruited to produce some audio effects and voice-over editing. This is extremely exciting as most of my job entails fishing for leads and writing content for bait.

So, the video in question consists of several frames of copy, explaining the process of creating a community website. It was decided that the video could have a greater impact if a voice was saying the words as they appeared, but finding the right voice was a challenge. We wanted to convey an air of sophistication, mystique, and intrigue, which would compel the reader/listener to wonder what exactly this site was all about. We also wanted them to feel special that they were among the elite artists selected to be a part of it.

Charles and I met with Mary McDonald, a renowned voice actor, at her home studio to be the voice of the project. Mary is best known as the voice of On*Star, and also as Lady Jaye from the GI Joe cartoon. After giving her some direction, Mary laid down 8 takes in about 30 minutes. She gave us a couple conversational takes, a couple British-flavored takes, and a couple mysterious espionage-flavored takes.

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