[Sigia-l] A rather large effort

[Stew Dean]

On 17/04/07, Jonathan Baker-Bates <Jonathan.Baker-Bates at lbi.com> wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org
> > [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Stew Dean
> > Sent: 17 April 2007 12:46
> > Cc: sigia-l at asis.org
> > Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] A rather large effort
> >
> > 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.
>
> I was seven months on the broadband, lines and calling features order
> process screens. That was almost three years ago, so the stuff you see
> there now is only partially mine.
>
> NDAs forbid me to elaborate, but if most people were told of even half
> of the machinations that were necessary to get signoff on the home page
> (and search as well, incidentally) - let alone the rest of the site -
> then their heads would likely explode. Suffice to say that in that five
> years there was very little idle time.
>
> Jonathan

I whole heartedly believe it. I've been very lucky with the clients
I've worked with - and the few times there have been political issues
I've had enough of a buffer for me just to get on with box drawing.

My take on this is there's usualy two types of work I have to do, one
is the actual architeture of the site (even the largest websites can,
in theory, be done in three months if all you are doing is getting the
site working, including user research) and the other part of it is
stake holder communication and ensuring buy in. There's also the
arbitary changes from the client despite your best intentions and
research findings.

 I have to thank Steve Krug at this point of helping reduce the amount
of arbitary changes in the past as his book 'don't make me think' is
great for reasuring clients and getting them to be user advocates - I
used to bulk order them from Amazon.

Meanwhile I empathise with those that did the BT site, I'm sure there
where many good ideas that crashed and burnt due to the complexity of
explaining it to the client and convincing them when their 'common
sense' was telling them otherwise.

Cheers

-- 
Stewart Dean