José Mota — Web engineer & architect

Archives for April 2010

Tear up your client’s proposal in half!

Just picture it: you are about to welcome your client into your office for a first meeting. You are excited to know what he wants. He brings his suitcase. Both of you happily sit down and he takes the project briefing out of the suitcase and hands it to you. This is what I want. Please take a look., the client happily states, confident in his effort to provide a solid brief for you to work on.

Take the briefing and tear it up in half!

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April 26th, 2010 — Leave a comment!

To show or not to show [registered user only actions]

Last week I struggled with a design decision that really caught my attention. Consider this:

  • You have a user driven app on the web.
  • You also provide some actions for guests.

What you would do? Either:

  1. Don’t show the user only actions? (my opinion: this one reduces clutter on your interface).
  2. Or do show them and when the user clicks the links/buttons, the user gets a login redirected page for every new click?

My pick would be number 1. Why?

I’d rather have a welcome page that showed you what to use in case you signed up. Actions such as creating a new item on a product list and message sending that apparently require a sign up are confusing for a guest. Besides, clicking on such an action and redirecting you to a login page several times is not that much of an engaging experience.

Feel free to add up on this thought.

April 20th, 2010 — Leave a comment!