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126 pages PDF format (1.55 MB)


Best Team Practices for Designing User Strategy, User Experience, and User Interface for Web-delivered Applications:

Joseph Selbie
Michael Coombs

Study Advisor: Jakob Nielsen

You'll learn the best practices in 58 practice areas that will help you to develop user strategies, user experience, and the user interfaces that drive highly usable and highly productive web applications.

Summary

Over a period of 9 months, Tristream conducted a best practices study of applications and development teams across a spectrum of companies and application types.The size of the development teams varied from very small, five members, to teams over one hundred members. The majority of applications were B2B or for employees conducting core company business, but also included consumer applications. Companies varied in size from $36 billion to $10 million per year.

Regardless of company size, type of application, or development team size -- Tristream was able to clearly identify differentiating and highly successful core team practices that resulted in superior usability and productivity -- the best practices.

Who Can Benefit

Application team members in any web-delivered application development project will benefit from this tutorial, including stakeholders, project leaders, product owners, project managers, business analysts, UI developers, graphic designers, usability specialists, business process analysts, user research and user testing specialists. This report focuses on best practices for developing applications for intra-company or B2B business processes but is applicable to consumer applications as well.

Best practices for:

  • Determining business requirements
    • Maintaining structure and priority
    • Taking advantage of opportunities to improve work and task flow
  • Gathering user requirements
    • Informal and scenario based user interviews
    • Work and task flow workshops
    • Establishing a user team
  • Developing user strategy
    • Defining and analyzing user-type groups
    • Prioritizing features and activities
    • Developing global strategy and the global navigation shells
  • Developing the user experience
    • Conducting interface workshops
    • Developing modular screen elements
    • Establishing user experience interactive styles and conventions
    • Parallel development of display code
  • Developing the user interface
    • Optimizing the user experience through fine tuning screen elements
    • The importance of graphic design
    • Style Guide development
    • Display code development
  • Team dynamics
    • Achieving a 'holistic'- team view of the application
    • Fostering rapidly iterative processes
  • Team roles and their optimal skill sets for:
    • Project Leader
    • Programming Lead
    • Business Analysts
    • UI Developers
    • Project Manager
    • Stakeholder Champions
    • User Representatives
  • Documentation
    • Optimal document sequence
    • Optimal use of documents
    • Determining and prioritizing features
    • The ideal design specification
      • Use cases, wireframes, and tables