Include a cancel order button

Whilst purchasing some yoga kit – I struggled so much with the suppliers website www.yogamad.com  (the payment process was not functioning correctly) that I inadvertently ended up with 3 orders for yoga mats and blocks.  It wasn’t the best of experiences especially as there was no obvious way to cancel the orders and guarantee that the transactions had not gone through. I had to wait till the following morning to call the company, who were very helpful.  A simple delete order button may have eased the experience, saved some time and reassured me that I hadn’t spent a small fortune.

grab of yogamad order page

grab of yogamad order page

Reusing patterns and components to creating a more holistic approach to the design

The reuse of patterns and components creates a more holistic approach to web based application where products can be scaled up more quickly. The idea is to continually build on current knowledge and not reinvent the wheel. Designing a set of standards which provide the foundations that designers can build on.  This approach is not as rigid as reusing templates – it’s more designing the concept of a component which can then be recreated in a number of different situations. There can be issues that this restricts creativity but as outlined in the Components versus Patterns article but you don’t need to be creative 100% of the time. Not everything requires innovation, novel ways of getting people to login aren’t necessary and the aim is to focus innovation on key areas.

http://www.uie.com/articles/components_vs_patterns

links for 2009-02-19

  • Agile Alliance: Article List
    Resources for writing user stories. Following on from various discussions with software I'm not convinced that there is a difference between writing user stories from a technical or design aspect. My view is that they're the same thing – from user goals we get user scenarios, which in turn are relevant to ux and to software, however software need to break these scenarios down further to more granular stories for testing.
    (tags: agile user-experience scenarios user stories)

Interactive framework

1. Product form and input methods. What is the form  of the product – where will it be used? Will it web based or in the physical world. If in doubt refer to the personas and the scenarios.

2. Functional and data elements. Data elements are broken down into the key elements, such as email, photo, contacts, messaging –  whilst the functional elements are the key functions that the user needs to undertake.

3. Functional groups and hierarchy
4. Interactive framework
5. Construct key scenarios – Outline the frequently used pathways through the system – based on the user tasks.
6. Check design with validation scenarios

[ref Cooper About Face]