I am currently working on a new WordPress (3.01) blog because this one has all kinds of security and other issues. That’s why I haven’t posted for a while. [Read more →]

After reading Jared Spool’s articles on the relationship between Market Maturity and Design Strategy a while ago I felt, well, resentment. I believed I felt that way not because the company I worked for belongs in the “lowest” stage, rendering my efforts to incorporate UX in the design process useless, but because the message is so deterministic. Yeah, right (of course it hurt).

But the times they are a changin’ and so might Jared’s model have to be:
[Read more →]

One of the things I loved about Robert Hoekman jrs book “Designing the obvious” was the idea of showing as few error messages as possible. Error massages, he explains, are hardly ever necessary. So I added this as a guideline to my interaction design document for TAX-i and I tried to convince the analysts to stop prescribing these “slaps on the wrist” in their use cases [Read more →]

Recently we were told that the UX team was going to be made redundant because we were losing money, weren’t part of the companies core business and had no added value to the companies portfolio OR TO OUR CLIENTS. I started thinking about how we could start being profitable as a team and how we could disprove the other three arguments. [Read more →]

The TAX-i  project consists of 2 applications; one keeps municipal data up to date (ODB) and a second application calculates levies (UBS). It is being co-developed by Logica and a couple of Water Boards. Representatives of the Water boards and users of the system are part of the acceptance procedure.
I was responsible for designing a user interface for ODB (Java) that users would use in cooperation with UBS (Oracle) that had already been developed.

Above example is of the search - list - detail pattern that could be distilled from the screens found in  UBS when users had to view (or edit) the details of either a person, organization, object or lot. Something (the same) users will have to do in ODB also.

This pattern and a number of system behaviors (inactivating fields and buttons whenever the necessary conditions had not been met)  have been adopted in ODB. Several problems the users had with the UBS user interface were avoided (a.o. horizontal scrolling and an inefficient global navigation.

I constructed persona’s  for the different types of users and designed the structure of the user interface so that each type of user would be presented with the part of the application that was most relevant to their work after logging in.

Above is an example  of the task flow for a “Data manager”. After logging in this person automatically has access to “Constateringen” and is presented with a list of  inconsistencies the system has found in the data that have been assigned to him/ her to deal with.

My responsibilities during the project were:

• leading workshops to collect user requirements,
• analysis of the interaction patterns used in UBS,
• making interactive prototypes,
• writing the interaction design document describing a.o. describing the way the application will behave in supporting the user.