In which I finish making a strategy for measuring what and how I’ll determine the usability and web best practices.

Reboot: Intention and Strategy, Part II

451 words about creative — 17:30 · 23rd Jul 2020

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:

  1. Test the old design (Taking Stock)
  2. Test your competitors’ designs
  3. Conduct a field study
  4. Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them
  5. Refine the design ideas that test best (and test again)
  6. Inspect the design relative to established usability guidelines whether from your own earlier studies or published research
  7. 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.

You’ve just read Reboot: Intention and Strategy, Part II.

In which, 4 years ago, I wrote 451 words about creative and I covered topics, such as: web design , and behind the scenes .