Here's a quick checklist of some of the things that I often find myself doing in the course of a client engagement.

The Usual Suspects: Legacy Issues

Here are some of the most common problems I've found in existing websites.

No Summary Overview

You are allowed (or required) to work with a broad range of attributes but are given no concise overview.

You have to scroll through a looooong page in order to find out what's there.

There are no references, no clues and no context.

Redundancy

There are several versions of the same feature.

• They all looked similar
• They all performed variations on the same function
• But they each had different titles.
  

Inconsistency

You see the "same" page at different places in the service - under a different name - but it operates differently in each case.

Action buttons have different names and appear in different positions from page to page.

Terminology varies across the site.

Scale/Scope

Some choices have literally hundreds of items to choose from. But there were no filtering tools to assist in making the choice.

Extraneousness

The navigation structure imposes unproductive pages and extra mouseclicks on vital processes.

Incompatibility

The legacy site maintains totally different - yet functionally incompatible - versions of a feature. This meant that you could perform certain functions on one, but not on the other.

• different management tools
• totally different behavior
• totally different page layout & design

Poor Layout

Many of the pages in the legacy site are simply badly designed. Some of the most common offenses:

• Excessive white space in the upper regions of the page wastes valuable presentation area
• The focal information area is crammed to the bottom and overflows the page boundaries
• Disjointed layout of data boxes
• Distracting use of color (colorful boxes draw attention away from the focal table of information)
• Inappropriate use of color emphasizes information that is not really important
  

Obscurity

There was often no way to tell what to do next - or where relevant tools/information/assistance might be.

The Usual Suspects: Common Design Mistakes

Reduce the visual dominance of the menu areas relative to content area. My focus should be on the content materials.

Break the items in the Navigation menu into sensible and manageable groups. These do not need to be labeled, but should be at the very least separated.

CSP loses the organizational context of the selected document. When you click on a document within a MegaProcess, the Navigation menu sidebar reference item changes to "Index".

Use the ellipsis (".") in button labels appropriately. Use it when the software calls up an "interim" form that requires user intervention (s.a. New, Edit, Move and Copy). Maintain consistent terminology between control label (buttons & hyperlinks) and the title of the page it invokes. The labels on buttons and hyperlinks are often contradictory, redundant, inconsistent and confusing. Every page should have a title that confirms what it is. Every page should have visual "design clues" that let you know where you are. Employ appropriate shortcuts. For example: Currently, the New button is context-insensitive. If I am in an Activity document and click on New., I expect to create a new Activity document. Instead, I am taken to a form where I must choose the "type" of document I want to create - and the default selection is not even "Activity".

The Usual Suspects: Interaction Patterns and Use Cases

The Best Practices “standards” document captures the bottom-line operational attributes of the system from a UI perspective.  Much of this behavior can be described as “patterns” that recur again and again.

By identifying and capturing the commonly recurring “patterns” we can reduce the workload, increase effectiveness and ensure consistency. Such a Behavioral Use Case (BUC) is “global” in the sense that it is re-used throughout the site.  Laboriously redefining the BUC again and again is inefficient and inconsistent: the BUC should be defined as a separate Use Case.  Once this has been done it can be easily referenced when appropriate.

UXP is in a unique position to identify interaction patterns.

Behavioral Use Case

Here are some of the use case interaction patterns that we see regularly throughout our sites:

Describe a commonly used pattern as a guideline by writing a use case for that particular workflow “pattern” of interaction.  The Behavioral Use Case Guideline demonstrates the “best practices” for writing a use case for a similar pattern of interaction.  The use case guideline that describes a pattern of behavior should always

• use consistent terminology
• contain specific, relevant information
• describe process in a predictable order