SlickRicky Design

Listen to Google’s Design Tips

Richard Kersey — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:55:57 +0000

When it comes to design you often feel like you’re doing a crapshoot. You test, try out different placements, different colors, etc., but unless you can afford research groups you’re always going to feel like you don’t know for sure. So, what should you do? If you can’t afford research groups, and multiple studies, then you’re best best is to listen to people who can. Google definitely has the money, and is gracious enough to share the info. So when looking to decide if a design is good look at the rules Google follows, because they obviously know how to create a user experience that talks to millions and billions of people.

Official Google Blog: What makes a design “Googley”?: “er interface design, visual design, user research, web development, and user interface writing—set out to articulate the principles that ought to guide Google designs worldwide. What are the fundamentals that all Google designers and researchers accept? Which approaches to design are particularly ‘Googley’? How can we encourage teams throughout Google to dream big and make smart design decisions?

A small team gathered to discuss these questions and define the Googley Design Principles:

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.”
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

These UX principles flow naturally from the Ten things Google has found to be true and the UX group’s stated mission: to design products that satisfy and delight our users. We described the principles as “Our Aspirations” for two reasons:

* We have a lot of work to do when it comes to implementation.
* Every real-world product will have to strike a balance between all ten principles.

Still, we don’t want to waffle too much. These principles represent the User Experience group’s declaration of beliefs. With “Satisfy and Delight” stitched on our leotards, we’re determined to get up on the tightrope and start juggling principles. Please applaud or boo, as appropriate, so that we can make the next act even better.

Searchme -The Visual Search Engine

Richard Kersey — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:51:30 +0000

A visual search engine with results primarily in a visual format(of course) with an image of the site. Are you a fan of Apple? Then this site might look familiar as the results are displayed in a way that is similar to browsing through albums in iTunes.

They say that there server holds/indexed about 1 billion + pages which is nothing compared to Yahoo claiming 20 Billions pages. More than that it reminded me of an application I downloaded sometime back called spacetime..

The difference is spacetime does much more stuff than Searchme… more on spacetime later…

Searching on Searchme…

Logging in gives you a clean page with a black background,

Which is the night theme and can be changed to white-day Theme.
A simple keyword search like software developer will lead you to many pages but nothing on resumes.
Boolean doesn’t works so adding more keywords is the only way for filtering what you looking for.
I input “software developer resume j2ee” and voila it brings me a lot of resumes. Choosing the work & career category didn’t help me much.

Check out the video belong to see its working on what I did…

Is it worth checking out? .. yes …
Is it a good source for resumes?..,.. nah don’t think so as the engine is till at very infant and will take time to grow.

A great engine if you like visual learning or scroll below to see the actual links.

Don’t forget to check out spacetime.. I am sure they won’t be happy to see this product as a search Engine.

Searchme- Still a baby campared to other engines.

Article By: Rithesh Nair

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

What is the Volere Process?

Richard Kersey — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:53:45 +0000

The Volere Requirements Process is a full lifecycle method for gathering project requirements.Requirements Types

Functional requirements are the fundamental or essential subject matter of the product.
Nonfunctional requirements are the properties that the functions must have, such as performance and usability.
Project constraints are restrictions on the product due to the budget or the time available to build the product.
Design constraints impose restrictions on how the product must be designed.

Managing RFC’s(Request for Change). If you can’t lock in your stakeholders to some basic delivery guidelines you could be headed for a requirements gathering nightmare.

Article By: Resume Help, Career Advice, Interview Questions!

SSH Commands

Richard Kersey — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:53:57 +0000

After spending too much time looking and searching for various ssh commands as I needed them, I finally realized that having the entire list of commands to look at was much easier than searching Google for them. So just in case someone else needs it here is a PDF file with “all” the commands.

FreeBSD SSH Commands

Website Managers Role

Richard Kersey — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:19:35 +0000

A website manager is an online content producer and editor. Despite the fact that content is everywhere, the job is not an easy one because so many different areas of an organization have a different vision of what role content should play on the company’s website.

You have senior management who often does not understand web strategy or how social the web has become. Then there is the IT department that may push website features that are unnecessary. The marketing department can expect graphic heavy content and may not understand usability issues.

The Web Manager has a lot of responsibility but may end up feeling like a glorified secretary when he or she is pulled in five different directions by different departments within the organization.

For this reason it is important to hire an adaptable individual as your organization’s Website Manager. You want someone that plays well with others, can accept direction, but can also take the self-initiative to prioritize requests.

A Website Manager must also be able to wear several hats. He or she must be a fluent communicator, and have an excellent grasp of the English language.

Since most websites maintain blogs and community forums, the Web Manager must also have the ability to moderate incoming messages from the user community. This can translate into customer service and relationship management. The Web Manager must also be able to discern when it is appropriate to delete user generated posts, and when it is appropriate to respond.

The Web Manager must also keep abreast in website usability issues and keep up with what is going on in the web industry (such as social networking).

Goal Focused Design

Richard Kersey — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:17:50 +0000

When we talk about “design” we are not just talking about how to make something “good looking”. Design includes how to make something “useful”. IF you’re impressed only with how a website looks, then you have lost sight of the purpose behind even having a web site. Priority number one is the GOAL of your website. What action do you want people to take when they land on your page?

Are you looking to educate?
Are you looking to sell?
Are you looking to get a phone call?
Are you looking to collect email addresses?
Are you looking to provide a web experience?

Once your goal (or goals) have been defined it quickly becomes important to prioritize them, and even more important to not lose focus on those goals. Many people begin a web project by defining features. They say, “I want my website to have a chat room, a forum, a place for people to email me”, and on and on it goes completely losing focus on what the reason is for having those features. Without a properly defined set of user or customer focused goals its impossible to prioritize, your feature set.

What this lack of focus leads to, is unnecessary project “scope creep”, and often the feeling that your project will never be done, because you can’t see the end goal when you get little pieces here and there. For instance… you may have an unstated goal of… “Selling Cars”. Then you contact a designer and the conversation goes something like this…

“I need a website.”

reply - “Can you give me some details about what you want.”

“I’d like some pictures, a contact us form, and a way to update my prices and pictures easily.”

reply - “Thats no problem at all, we can start right away.”

That doesn’t sound like a problem, but then two weeks into development you decide that letting users leave comments on your car photos would be a great feature for your website. You’ve possibly just wasted two weeks of development time, and your photo tool has to be completely be reworked from scratch. What has happened is that focus on the end goal has been lost, and refocused on getting this one “feature” put in. The schedule has been pushed forward, and the “overall” vision is not visible.

The beauty of great a great project and great design is that you focus on the end goal, make a nice shell that is usable. Why?, because you can add “features” anytime you want. But if all you have is photo tool with comments after 2 months, when your actual goal was to have a place for users to get information and contact you about buying a car, then you’re not happy, your users are not happy and the person working on your site is thinking they did everything they could to please you. All of the sudden you have a project that broke down, and you’re looking for a new designer who can meet your real “GOALS”, that were never the focus in the first place.

When you know the goal, you make the end goal visible from the start, and then fill it in with features.

When you start building features first, you can’t see the end goal at all and you may never get there.

Agile or Waterfall?

Richard Kersey — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:36:34 +0000

Funny thing, I’ve been discussing various forms of project management and scope creep as it pertains to project failure. I argued that it is always better to modularize your development process into small deliverables and to have a core deliverable that would not succumb to change requests but would be delivered regardless. And to my great satisfaction, this approach is even a formal PM methodology also known as Agile.Agile methodology focuses on short effective iteration of a project rather then the long more traditional approach of the Waterfall model. The project is effectively split into smaller modules and developed much faster then Waterfall with RFC’s implemented instantly rather then waiting for the development cycle to conclude.

I have always considered that if I could deliver a small but functional core to the client and then treat the RFC’s as plug ins, the project will cease to be a behemoth and become a much more manageable affair.

Article By: Interview Questions? Recruiting Help? Need a Job? Visit Us Today!

Protected: Goals

Richard Kersey — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:56:57 +0000

Protected: Manager Responsibilities

Richard Kersey — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:17:35 +0000

Does Google’s Indexing of Your Site Show Dead Links?

Richard Kersey — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 02:23:59 +0000

Google has made a great tool for webmasters to find out what Google thinks of your site. Including errors , not found, timeouts and more. In order to get the most extensive reports you’ll need to verify that you in fact have access to the site which you’re looking for info about. Head on over to: Google WebMaster Tools and see what the Google robots have to say about your site. If Google sees your site as perfect, it has got to be better for your Search Engine rankings.