Amazing how working eats into your blogging time. Off the top of my head:
- Articulate user requirements to focus on the necessary.
- Consider individual and organisational incentives for (not) sharing.
- Map information flows within and between individuals/organisations.
- Where possible, bind to existing processes as a starting point.
- Keep tools simple, usability the focus and end users the goal.
I would say that following these would give anybody a good chance of success. Any others?
Related posts:
Some old-skool IM heuristics:
- start with the barest minimum scope you can, and build outward only as required
- test, learn and iterate as much as you can without pissing everyone off
- try to agree on bare minimum standards for data collection
- decide on ownership of the information that is gathered
- think about how you should go about including or removing participants from the system
- agree on what “confidential” means before collecting information
Explain to people what you’re doing. Repeatedly.
Always,
- simple simple SIMPLE simple stupid
- listen to what someone’s not saying: “you want me to enter some new kind of data I don’t collect or use myself in a web-form. Uh huh no, but I’ll nod and say yes to you until you go away, as you’re paying for my lunch.”
Also,
- consider the paper fallback
- changing process and behaviour is hard: make sure that there are incentives to use new systems. You have to answer “how does this make my life/job easier?”
- design and usability testing MATTERS. Really. It can be make or break.
- how will you fix things WHEN they break/go wrong? Can someone locally do it?
- how will you upgrade/deploy a new version/revision? Really? You’ll do it all remotely?
- Understand the current situation fully. allocate more than enough time for analysis and eliciting user needs, most of the time the user don’t know what exactly they want.
- don’t test the patience of the client repeatidly.
- Know your client and deal accordingly.
- Arrange meetings and presentations to keep the cliend informed.
Determine who holds the big enforcement stick (and carrots) and whether or not the process is important enough for them to wield it repeatedly, forcefully, and either periodically or whenever it’s needed.
Unless the process is owned by someone and they’re willing and able to enforce it, no amount of cajoling/UI prettiness/design elegance will institute the change.
If there is no one in the client shop with the authority/responsibility/willingness to take this on, this needs to be the first point of discussion.
Thanks to all – I’ll leave this standing so that we can refer back to it…