After deploying a budget tool for the Employee Retirement System (ERS) of Texas and aggregating the results, Design For Use learned that the tool proved successful in accomplishing what it set out to do. The major goals of the project were to: 1) alert members that changes to their healthcare plan are imminent, 2) show how each potential change to the budget has a different impact on savings, and 3) offer users the opportunity to provide feedback around their preferences in making changes to the plan. Overall, users understood that the...

Interactive Budget Survey Tools With federal, state and local governments proposing severe cuts to remedy major budget deficits, public sector websites all over the country have launched tools and widgets inviting users to balance the budget. Whether agencies are seeking feedback from their constituents in a goodwill effort, or to educate the public about upcoming changes, online budget calculators are becoming a major tool of communication between the government and the people. Federal Budget Tools For example, The New York Times’ budget tool offers users the opportunity to balance the federal budget. The...

Old Habits Die Hard One of the most insightful panels at South by South West was a presentation by design guru Steve Krug. Specifically, Krug touched on the importance of performing usability tests quickly and often during the design process. Some of his ideas seemed contrary to standard usability testing practices: recruiting loosely around the core user group, testing only 3-4 users at a time, conducting tests weekly, bypassing a comprehensive usability report for fewer more directed findings, and conducting tests in-house, rather than reserving a space at a neutral...

Why Stakeholder Interviews? At the beginning of each new project we undertake at Design For Use, members of our team conduct a series of interviews to establish the scope of a project and ensure that all of our client stakeholders have a shared vision. Interviewing each member of the client team helps the consultant (us) and the client alike understand and agree upon the following: • Goals and Vision “What are the objectives of your team and the organization at large from this project? What are your top business goals?” • Success Metrics “What are...

In this post, we discuss some of the basic steps we typically use to create compelling visual design compositions or mockups from the wireframes developed by our IAs. Ideally, a visual designer should be involved with a project from the onset. However, the reality for a service firm like ours where we are usually running multiple projects simultaneously, is that the graphic designers often begin their magic only after the wireframes are nearly finalized. We have tried to create a format for our wireframes that leaves a lot of room for...

We are huge fans of the tools developed by 37 Signals that support our client work without requiring a significant learning curve or generally getting in the way of our basic workflow. Backpack has become our knowledgebase of choice but there are some presentation quirks that really bug us. With a little help from our friends, we’ve come up with a hack that overrides the two-column layout on the “All Pages” page. Hair - hopefully, would repeat herbal viagra have proportion in cialis online tried prefer strengthens everyone a viagra...