One of the most difficult elements to remove from any website redesign or software development project is assumption. Repeatedly, designers, developers and the client fall into the trap of seeing what they want to see. Failing to look at the project with fresh unassuming eyes.

One of my favorite methods for removing assumption is the persona. A persona is a profile of someone who will be interacting with a website. A best practice is to develop and define several user personas to gauge user interaction. A good persona is based on market research, or current customer profiles. For instance; in designing a website for denture cream you wouldn’t use the persona of a 18 year old male, who is an avid video game player. Personas provide a reality check. A good persona will put you in the shoes of your users.

Personas do not only apply to web design or software development. Personas can be used in any design process, from coffee makers to building design. How do you remove assumption from your projects?

Let’s hear what you think. Input, will be an ongoing feature of Insights where we look beyond our office walls for thoughts, advice and perspectives on projects we have in the oven.

In the hunt for information I stumbled on a report from Consumer Reports WebWatch and Stanford University on how people determine if a website is credible or not. While the report is a bit dated (2002) I believe it is still relevant today. As the report states, what consumers say is important and what they actually deem as important are two very different things.

Not unlike Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink people are quickly evaluating credibility based on impression. Almost solely on the design / organization of the site consumers will determine if they are dealing with a reputable website.

Click here for the report website

For sometime now we’ve talked about building a simple tool to track user mouse movements on a site. We never got around to building that app but ClickTale has. From the preview on their website it appears to be a nicely built hosted application. Beta testing is over, so I’m eagerly awaiting the final release. ClickTale would be a nice complement to EyeTools, which builds software to track user eye movement.

EyeTools tends to be on the pricey side of user testing. ClickTale should help make usability testing more accessible for smaller web projects.

We just installed this WordPress blog on our servers and I must say, it is beautiful. Well implemented, easy to use, well documented. In my search for blogging software I thought I would find a few options for an ASP.NET package… I only found one, .TEXT at http://www.gotdotnet.com

Being an ASP.NET shop I was floored that there were not more options to select from. Why is that? I’m not trying to start a flame war with PHP, JSP and ASP.NET all of these languages have their merits and their flaws, but why hasn’t the ASP.NET community delivered some nice open source blogging software?