[Sigia-l] A rather large effort

[Stew Dean]

On 17/04/07, Melanie Kendell <melanie.kendell at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I was in the UK I did a brief stint in at BT and this doesn't
> surprise me at all ;-)
>
> Nor does it surprise me that after all that time there are still
> fairly major flaws (eg using the search to find a person with a common
> name in London, which could return a very large number of results,
> gives no indication as to how many pages you are going to have to
> trawl through).

I think most contractors in London worked on this at some point,
including myself. The most ironic thing about it is that BT was for a
while preaching 'business agility' - not really the same as taking 5
years to do a site is it?

It also suffers from slight 'home page fixation' as well, which doesnt
help much'.  The real stuff home users want to sit is sat behind an
enegmatic link called 'Overview'  -  at term I've seen used that
usualy means - "we should have taken people to the page to start off
with but our we got our navigation structure wrong".

It's very easy to see these mistakes from outside I have to admit. I
can imagine the wrangling with the client and presentation of multiple
front pages over time only to get sign off on a kinda compromise but
in terms of focus it has to be said that that first list presented to
you when you hit 'home' is visual mush and has 'new customers' next to
'BT Broadband talk' mixing modes and not given any clear indication
why. The user really has to start thinking at this point to work out
what they want when all they need is the next page. To let this get
through there must have been some overly specific usability testing
scripts.

Stewart Dean











-- 
Stewart Dean