Fluid Design Best Practices

[Daphne Ogle]

Hi all,

In preparation for the Summit, I've been thinking about a discussion  
on Fluid design best practices.  I think the goal of this discussion  
should be to come up with a short list of Design practices and  
methods we will follow in the Fluid community and perhaps a longer  
list of best practices to share with Sakai, uPortal, Moodle & Kuali  
Student communites to consider when they are enhancing and/or  
designing new functionality.  As with most things in design, "it  
depends" -- so not all practices and methods will work for all  
projects and environments.  I see these becoming part of our design  
toolkit.  I'm interested in ideas people in the community have for  
this discussion.  To get the juices flowing, here are some practices  
I've been thinking about:

Fluid design will include:

- Clear definition of problem being solved
- Outline of design goals (functional, usability & accessibility)
- Talking to real users
- Being driven by user goals and needs
- Designing for personas (may need further clarification about what  
personas and how we use them since this varies across our discipline)
- Early and frequent "check-ins" with development (iterative  
technical feasibility & design review of implementation)
- Early and frequent feedback from larger community
- Competitive analysis
- User testing (usability & accessibility)
- Use of design patterns where appropriate and creation of new ones  
where applicable
- Use of CSS
- Accessible semantic mark-up
- Other?


Other effective design practices:

-Goal-directed design (yes, OK, my personal bias comes in :) )
-User research
	-Contextual Inquiry
	-Interviews
	-Observation
-User and behavioral Modeling
	-Scenarios
	-Use Cases
	-Activity diagrams
-Task analysis
- Stakeholder "show & tells"
- Other?

Please send feedback on these ideas, and new ones!

Daphne Ogle
Senior Interaction Designer
University of California, Berkeley
Educational Technology Services
daphne at media.berkeley.edu
cell (510)847-0308



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