Guidelines are a tool: building a design knowledge management system for programmers (5 years old but still applicable)
1. Designed for developers. Programmers are the users of guidelines. The structure of a tool for them should be built around their needs.
2. Focused around tasks, rather than design elements. The practice of writing software is different from that of designing interfaces, and should be reflected in how documentation for it is structured.
3. Specific, not principles. Programming is an applied art, and specifics address developers’ needs better than theories. Examples that resemble the current situation make it easier to understand the theory and make applying the guideline easier.
4. Prioritized. Design and development is a web of choices, and explicit prioritization helps make some of those choices. Not all guidelines have equal impact.
5. Succinct. Extra words won’t get read and supplementary diagrams will not get examined when the reader is in a hurry, and the reader is always in a hurry.
Originally a case study describing the creation of an internal design knowledge management tool for web developers as a means to encourage user-centered development practices.
From AIGA: American Institute of Graphics Arts
Download the full case study here.
http://www.e-pao.net is a great website on the small state of
Manipur situated in the north-eastern part of India. The website acts as a portal for all thoses Manipuris staying outside the country as well as quite a large number of internet users from the state who are spreaded across the country.
The website features the current news, happenings and updates in the small state apart from national and international news. If you want to know more about Manipur,
e-pao.net is a good start.
Through the e-frenz section, you can make friends with lots of users from the state and the chat room is, despite of the usual numbers of persons from the state who are active users of the internet, active throughtout the whole day and you’ll meet someone to talk too… and one more thing to mention, unlike yahoo messenger or others, u won’t meet any bots that imitates human and chat with you!!
Screenshot of the e-pao chat room
I’ve been working on developing every bit of the
NERIST Training and placement website . Being an official website, I’m not allowed to do what I use to do with my own sites. I’ve developed and launched a dozen other websites but they were done on my own interest and I’d run a few other blogs running sponsored posts but this time, web administration has make a turn for me because of the responsibility i’ve put into.
If you are a web administrator, you prob’ly know how it’s like to maintain such an active website under your own moderation. The site is strictly moderated just to ensure that only NERIST students are registered and moderating every students is a tough task coz you hardly know all the 1200 students on campus.
I have used the ever popular Joomla CMS there and I just installed the Fireboard forum. I’ve had enough experiences running this component and some others while i was on my own XAMPP server at the early developing phase and I kinda like Fireboard. Let’s see how the users respond to this new forum. The reason why I’m saying is that, hardly people know the use of forums. Everybody is busy with social networking sites or youtube and thats one reason why i put a poll at the homepage
“Does tnpnerist needs a forum?”
