Continuing on the idea of creating a living document of my multitudes, I want to talk more about the intentions and the strategy that follows.
So, to quickly recap:
Egography. Stories. Standards (I covered two already). Intentions.
Intention without strategy is chaos Kim Crayton
No chaos. Need strategy = Measure and hold myself accountable.
Onwards.
Usability
“How usable is my website?”
I don’t know.
I’m not even sure I know how to measure this.
This also feels like the wrong question to ask.
Whilst I have so many opinions about what I consider to be good usability, I’m realising that I’m quite inexperienced in this discipline and that I will need to take a moment on this one.
I’ve found this article, which seems sensible Usability 101: Introduction to Usability and outlines the main steps to take during the design process—which I should probably review again.
I’ve taken the liberty of condensing their steps here for my purposes:
-
Test the old design(Taking Stock) - Test your competitors’ designs
- Conduct a field study
- Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them
- Refine the design ideas that test best (and test again)
- Inspect the design relative to established usability guidelines whether from your own earlier studies or published research
- Implement the final design, test it again
I guess I need to figure out who my competitors are next.
Web best practices
Answering the question of, “Is my website following best practices?”
First of all, I’ll use Google Lighthouse to run automated tests on my old website and this reboot.
My benchmark is that I want this reboot to follow more best practices than the previous one. This includes investigating the possibilities of enhancing my website with native-like capabilities, reliability, and installability while reaching anyone, anywhere, on any device with a single codebase—commonly called Progressive Web Apps (PWA).
Additionally, I’ll have quality control on my programming languages via hinters, linters and validators.
Laravel and PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
Used for server-side and site foundation.
Quality control: TLint
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
Used for structure and meaning.
Quality control: Nu Html Checker and Heydon’s Revenge
JavaScript (JS)
Used for behaviour and interaction.
Quality control: JS Hint and JSLint
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Used for presentation and layout.
Quality control: CSS Lint and Specificity Graph Generator
Right, I think that’s enough strategy for now.