I have been working for quite a while to devise a method for assessing web sites and the ability to provide two things. First, I want to assess the ability for a user to perform an action they want to perform. Second I want to assess the ability for the user to complete a business goal while completing their own goals.

Before we start down this particular rabbit hole, there’s a bit of a prerequisite for our discussion. It is important that you understand Fitts’ Law and its generalization, the Steering Law. These are critical to understanding how much time a user will be willing to dedicate to your site the first time they arrive, or after a major overhaul, before abandoning their goals and leaving the site.

Google has some pretty neat toys for developers and CakePHP is a pretty friendly framework to quickly build applications on which is well supported. That said, when I went looking for a Google geocoding component, I was a little surprised to discover that nobody had created one to do the hand-shakey business between a CakePHP application and Google.

That is, I didn’t find anyone, though they may well be out there.

I did find several references to a Google Maps helper, but, that didn’t help too much since I had an address and no geodata. The helpers I found looked, well… helpful once you had the correct data, mind you. Before you can do all of the maps-type stuff, you have collect the geodata and that’s where I came in.

Last night I was working on integrating oAuth consumers into Noisophile. This is the first time I had done something like this so I was reading all of the material I could to get the best idea for what I was about to do. I came across a blog post about oAuth and one particular way of managing the information passed back from Twitter and the like.

This person will remain unidentified as I don’t want gobs of people spamming his site, nor do I want to give his poor judgement any extra exposure. That said, the basis of the post was, it is preferable to make users authenticate with Twitter every time they logged into the system as opposed to storing the keys and remembering who the users of the site are.

The take-away message was, paraphrased, “it’s a simple back and forth between your site and Twitter each time they log in. It won’t bother the user and it is preferable to storing all of those authentication keys.”

I’ve been tasked with an interesting problem: encourage the Creative department to migrate away from their current project tracking tool and into Jira. For those of you unfamiliar with Jira, it is a bug tracking tool with a bunch of toys and goodies built in to help keep track of everything from hours to subversion check-in number. From a developer’s point of view, there are more neat things than you could shake a stick at. From an outsider’s perspective, it is a big, complicated and confusing system with more secrets and challenges than one could ever imagine.

Years ago, I built a project tracking system for the Creative department at my current company which they use for everything. More projects come and go through the Creative project queue than I had planned on, but it has held together reasonably well. That said, the Engineering director would like to get everyone in the company on the same set of software in order to streamline maintenance efforts.

In theory, this unification makes lots of good sense. Less money will be spent maintaining disparate software and more will be spent on keeping things tidy, making for a smooth experience for all involved.

My last post was about finding a healthy balance between client- and server-side technology. My friend sent me a link to an article about SEO and Google’s “reasonable surfer” patent. Though the information regarding Google’s methods for identifying and appropriately assessing useful links on a site was interesting, I am quite concerned about what the SEO crowd was encouraging because of this new revelation.

It is important to consider search engines during the site building process, however I feel the SEO guys often get carried away. In this article it is suggested that you de-emphasize navigation and forget footers along with lots of other questionable advice.

These two suggestions alone are enough for me to consider this article, at best, a crackpot spouting extremist ideas. SEO experts often seem to forget a very important element on the web: the user.

Earlier this year I discussed progressive enhancement, and proposed that a web site should perform the core functions without any frills. Last night I had a discussion with a friend, regarding this very same topic. It came to light that it wasn’t clear where the boundaries should be drawn. Interaction needs to be a blend of server- and client-side technologies.

Ultimately, it is rarely clear where boundaries are in a project. What is too much, what is too little? Somewhere between too much and too little is just right, much like what Goldilocks wanted in her porridge. We know that even the most limited of users should be able to access our sites within certain considerations. A photo gallery is, ultimately, little use to a blind person, but alt tags should still be in place. Sound clips of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra would be useless to a deaf person, though a caption or indication as to what each sound clip is would be quite handy.

Coming back to the point, finding a balance point is critical to providing rich, meaningful interaction between your user and your site. Perhaps the first question which should be answered is “can this be done without Technology X?”

Since I am an engineer first and a designer second in my job, more often than not the designs you see came from someone else’s comp. Being that I am a designer second, it means that I know just enough about design to be dangerous but not enough to be really effective over the long run.

When I say I am a designer second I mean I am, in fact, a design school dropout. I went, I learned just enough to “get it” and then I ended up dropping out. I did go back to school and I got a math degree, but that is a different story for a different day.

If there is anything I learned from design school, it was that everything in design is done for a reason. Mind you, this is when design is at its best. Every designer that is working to solve a problem and communicate with the viewer has incorporated elements and done things so a specific message comes through.

It’s always great when you have the opportunity to built a site from the ground up. You have opportunities to design things right the first time, and set standards in place for future users, designers and developers alike. These are the good times.

More often than not, sites are already built and deployed for the world to view. Moreover, there are probably unintentional standards in place which get in the way of your best efforts to do right by the site, the content and the user.

It can be said that, much like user experience is either good or bad, there is no such thing as no standard, there is merely a good or bad standard. Once a project is underway, if there are no standards to work from, they will create themselves.

Pretty soon you find yourself in the corner holding a roller and a can of paint with a confused look on your face.

I am big on modularity. There are lots of problems on the web to fix and modularity applies to many of them. A couple of posts ago I talked about content and that it is all built on or made of objects. The benefits from working with objectified content is the ease of updating and the breadth and depth of content that can be added to the site.

Something really exciting that came from my previous post was that functions are objects. By this, I mean, site function does not live in a separate world, outside of the content object ecosystem. Functions should be and ARE integrated right into the website.

This is the beauty of the modern web. Since functions are merely objects which can be included in pages, they can be built, tested and deployed independently and then integrated seamlessly into the web application. Typically we think of this kind of function as a plug-in, though plug-ins are merely objects in their own right.

Hagan Rigers (@haganrivers) is currently part of the Web App Masters Tour. Without giving too much away about her talk, she discusses managing site (and application) navigation as a function. She breaks navigation out of the system and handles it as a separate function of the site, independent of the content. If we consider this approach, then we can see something really important:

Navigation is a function.

Through all of the usability, navigation, design, various user-related laws and a healthy handful of information and hierarchical tricks and skills, something that continues to elude designers and developers is pretty URLs. Mind you, SEO experts would balk at the idea that companies don’t think about using pretty URLs in order to drive search engine placement. There is something else to consider in the meanwhile:

The user.

Several articles I found talk about the SEO benefits of pretty URLs and whether it is very important to consider using them with a site as they don’t encourage a major boost anymore. “It’s ten years too late,” they say. It’s never too late, I say.