Alexander Parker — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:01:43 GMT

Fred, thankyou for the interesting article, it certainly made me think about using heuristics where I work.

The company I work for has dealt with clients who are very paranoid that we are ripping them off, or trying to “upsell” things that people don’t need (would you like fries with that?). It is quite possible that we could say, for Appropriate Structure, “This strongly deviates from the heuristic, so you need to totally restructure the site”. They are likely to think “why”, and we would have to explain to them the reason why their site does not have the right structure for their content and intended audience. Quite a few of our clients are non-technical people, and even after explaining all the factors involved, as one customer recently put it after my boss diligently explained the items that would be invoiced, “This is bull****!! I don’t understand a word f-ing word of this! How do I know you are not just making it up!”

I find people understand things like “Your site is getting 20% more hits this month, you are ranked number 3 on google”, but try to explain anything more subtle and their faces turn blank, and they mutter something about just wanting a website, “I’m paying you to work that out”. Ultimately if we DO work it out for them and they don’t like it, we have to do it all again. So any tool that can reduce this likelihood would be a godsend.

I think the ideas presented here are great, anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that the points you mentioned are essential factors in the process of analysis and development, and there will always be people skeptical of anything that smells of subjectivity. I personally believe there is a lot of validity in a qualatitive study which should be used to complement quantative results. Communicating such results to the client is another issue entirely, and one which I am still trying to work out.

Thankyou Fred.

Sorry for my rambling post… First day here.

Alexander Parker — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:24:39 GMT

Hey Christina, great article and awesome website.

I’ve recently turned from pouring cement on construction sites to programming and developing systems for a local up-and-coming web design firm. Talk about 90 degree turns… What prompted the change? It was a change in attitude. I was unhappy doing what I was doing, and decided I was going to visualise a job in front of a computer. So strong was my will that the universe folded in on itself and created the job for me (or so Intention Manifestation pundits would have me believe).

Anyway nice article and very relevant.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Alexander Parker