Creating Good Administration Systems

I will be spending this week going flat out on finishing the online administration systems for the two big projects we're working on currently. Running both in tandem has been a useful experience as there's been a good deal of cross-fertilisation between both projects that has improved the design and operation of both. This symbiotic evolution is quite normal for us as we multitask across a variety of projects at any one time.

Turning Commonsense into Code. Good user experience comes from clearly understanding needs and expectations.

Both these projects have a sophisticated data architecture underneath the systems that are being built, all of which needs to be easy for the clients and their customers to use. Attaining simplicity and ease of use is normally the result of tons of hard work to distill the design and user interface into something that is intuitive and can be understood with just a little common sense. We always assume that whoever uses our systems is a complete novice when it comes to using web-based administration or content management, so we write clear instructions on the site and accompany that with simply written illustrated user guides that take a step by step path through the key tasks that are carried out on the system. As new features are added these guides are updated and revised.

All this amounts to a big investment in time and effort to understand our clients' needs and expectations, understand their clients' needs and expectations, and then deliver a system that meets these needs and expectations in a way that works effectively and efficiently on the internet.

Published: 22-06-09 by Jon Sloper