Summary web style guide
Chapter 1 – strategy
Strategy is the art of sensible planning to marshal your resources toward their most efficient
and effective use, over a significant period of time. A good strategy is flexible, and shows
proper humility in the face of challenges. It favors step-by-step progress toward your goals.
Strategic Planning
Strategy is an attempt to identify and take the right risks at the right times.
Three-step process for creating a coherent strategy:
• Diagnose your situation
• Create guiding principles
• Design a set of coherent actions
Diagnose your situation
Identify your business goals, and let go of past practices and commitments. Strategy starts
with the facts as you establish them through research, diagnose the top few problems and
needs to address immediately, and then form an overall plan of action.
• Be forward-looking: Strategy is inherently about the future. Keep the discussion
focused on the future, defining what resources and tactics you will need to attain your
goals.
• Stay focused on priorities: A good strategy doesn’t just create new things. It
actively plans for decommissioning the old and outmoded, and pares away mediocre
ideas and marginal priorities.
Create guiding principles
Make every decision align with your road map. Every project plan is basically an answer to a
series of questions: What do we need to do and when do we need to do it to step closer to
our goals? Successful long-term projects are always built one strategic decision at a time,
incrementally and iteratively moving the team forward toward purposeful work in support of
business goals.
Design coherent actions
Consider your strategy a portfolio of options. A good strategy is not a predetermined set of
choices. It is a set of options that do not limit your tactical flexibility to respond to changing
conditions. These options are often generated in advance by working through scenarios for
how your project will respond to particular challenges that might arise and potentially change
the budget, schedule, or deliverables of the project. Your strategy will succeed if it is rational,
flexible and based on solid data and research, and if it takes advantage of the working
knowledge of the team. The successful product is the goal.
Shaping the strategic plan
To put a plan into action, you first need to identify the people involved and their roles, then
create a map to follow, through these processes:
• Define roles and responsibilities with project governance
• Adopt a user-centered approach
• Draw a strategic road map with a project charter
Define roles and responsibilities with project governance
Structure your team for a successful outcome. You must clearly define goals from the start,
and each person involved in the project must understand where she has authority to make
decisions, and her accountability for the decisions she makes.
,Participants must also understand their responsibilities with respect to project activities. To
determine which governance model best suits your project, determine who has authority,
responsibility, and accountability for different aspects of the project. Some aspects may
involve multiple people; always identify one person who has primary responsibility. Some
possible questions include:
• Who has the authority to initiate the project?
• Who is responsible for defining strategic direction for the project?
• Who is accountable is the project fails to meet stakeholder needs?
The key in the strategic planning phase is to construct a solid governance model, and
communicate roles and responsibilities to everyone who has a hand in the success of the
project.
Adopt a user-centered approach
Focus on user needs and perspectives. Web sites are developed by groups of people to
meet the needs of other groups of people. Unfortunately, web projects are often approached
as “technology problems,” and projects can get colored from the beginning by enthusiasms
for particular web techniques rather than by human or business needs that emerge from
engaging users in the development process. People are the key to successful web projects
at every stage of development. If you listen only to management directives, keep the process
sealed tightly within your development team, and dictate to supposed users what the team
imagines is best for them, be prepared for failure. Involve real users.
Draw a strategic road map with a project charter
The most critical requirement of this initial planning activity is to ensure all project
participants are on the same page and working toward the same goals. A project charter
document provides a conceptual framework and serves as a basis for decision making
throughout the project life cycle. A project charter includes the following sections:
• Purpose: What purpose does the product serve?
• Goals: What outcomes does it need to achieve?
• Target audience: Whom must the product appeal to and work for?
• Success indicators: How will you know you have achieved project goals?
• Strategies: What approaches will help to realize the goals?
• Tactics: What activities might help to realize the strategies?
One of the best ways to ascertain the goals and objectives for a project is to envision what
changes will occur if the project is successful. A strategy is a general approach you might
take to help you reach your goals. Each strategy has associated possible tactics—specific
activities to support the strategy. Finalize the project charter before moving to the next phase
of the project, with the understanding that the charter is a living document that may change
over the project life cycle. The project charter is a concise statement of goals, values, and
intent, and it drives the direction for everything that comes after. A well-written project
charter is a powerful daily tool for judging the effectiveness of a development effort. It
becomes a compass to keep the team firmly pointed at the goals established when you
started the journey. A good project charter becomes a daily reference point for settling
disputes, avoiding “scope creep,” judging the potential utility of new ideas as they arise,
measuring progress, and keeping the development team focused on the end result.
Accessible User Experience
user experience, or UX, is a lens through which to view the whole range of site
production tasks, from the earliest strategic planning and research to finished
graphics. The quality of user experience is measured by how usable and enjoyable a
site is for people to use. Core attributes of good UX include:
, • Learnability: how quickly van first-time users learn what they need to know to
find the information, services or products they need from your site?
• Ease of orientation: can users confidently and correctly judge their locations
within your site’s navigation system?
• Efficiency: how quickly can users perform their browsing, searching or other
interactions to complete their tasks?
• Memorability: can a user who has not visited for a long time quickly
reestablish proficiency?
• Accessibility: can users with physical or sensory challenges use the majority
of your site’s content or services efficiently?
• Error forgiveness: is your site forgiving of common user errors and how
often do users make errors in using your site?
• Delight: do users typically enjoy using your site or is it a chore?
The core user experience concepts of learnability, orientation, efficiency, and accessibility
should influence every stage of site development, from the earliest concept sketches to site
maintenance and continuous improvement. Today responding to the usability challenges of
the web is more important than ever. Usability is a measure of quality and effectiveness. It
describes how well tools and information sources help us accomplish tasks. The more
usable the tool, the better able we are to achieve our goals. I
Human-computer interaction (HCI) pioneer Ben Shneiderman defines universal usability as
“having more than 90% of all households as successful users of information and
communications services at least once a week.” Accessible user experience is informed by
several initiatives, primarily accessibility, usability, and universal design.
Web accessibility: Since the World Wide Web Consortium established the Web
Accessibility Initiative in 1999, the imperative of web accessibility has gained the attention of
individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide. wai promotes best practices and
tools that make the web accessible to people with disabilities. They also safeguard universal
web access by providing expert input for development initiatives to ensure that accessible
designs can be accomplished using current and future web technologies. Web accessibility
is a critical element of universal usability.
Usability and user-centered design: Usability is both a qualitative measure of the
experience of using a tool and a phenomenon that can be quantified as a concrete means to
judge a design’s effectiveness. Quantitative usability metrics include how quickly we
complete tasks and how many errors we make in the process. But usability can also be
gauged by qualitative measures, such as how much satisfaction we derive in using a tool.
“Learnability” is another important measure: how quickly we learn to use a tool and how well
we remember how to use it the next time. The most common method for achieving usability
is user-centered design (UCD). UCD includes user-oriented tools such as task analysis,
focus groups, and usability testing to understand user needs and refine designs based on
user feedback. Universal usability arises from user-centered design, but with a broad and
inclusive view of the user.
Universal design: Universal design incorporates access requirements into a design, rather
than providing alternate designs to meet specific needs, such as large print or Braille
editions for vision-impaired readers.
Creating an accessible UX strategy
The first step toward the goal of universal usability is to discard the notion that we are
designing for a “typical” user. Universal usability accounts for users of all ages, experience
levels, and physical or sensory limitations. A broad user definition that includes the full range
of user needs and contexts is the first step in producing universally usable designs.
, Next we need a design approach that will accommodate the diversity of our user base, and
here we turn to the principle of adaptation. On the web, universal usability is achieved
through adaptive design, where documents transform to accommodate different user needs
and contexts. Adaptive design is the means by which we support a wide range of
technologies and diverse users. The following guidelines support adaptation.
Flexibility: Digital documents can adapt to different access devices and user needs based
on the requirements of the context. The success of this adaptation depends on whether the
design supports flexibility. The web environment is flexible, with source documents that
adapt to different contexts. When considering universal usability, we need to anticipate
diversity and build flexible pages that adapt gracefully to a wide variety of displays and user
needs.
User control: In many design fields, designers make choices that give shape to a thing, and
these choices, particularly in a fixed environment, are bound to exclude some users. In the
web environment, users have control over their environment. Flexibility paired with user
control allows users to shape their web experience into a form that works within their use
context.
Keyboard functionality: Another crucial component is interaction, which allows users to
navigate and interact with links, forms, and other elements of the web interface. For
universal usability, these actionable elements must be workable from the keyboard.
Text equivalents: Text is universally accessible. Unlike images and media, text is readable
by software and can be rendered in different formats and acted upon by software. When
information is presented in a format other than text, such as visually using images or video
or audibly using speech, the information can be lost on users who cannot see or hear. Text
equivalents allow universal usability to exist in a media-rich environment by carrying
information to users who cannot access information in a given format.
Content Strategy:
Content strategy governs and defines how the content you develop will meet your business
goals. Editorial work has always been concerned with the purpose, form, development, and
integration of all kinds of content assets. Content development today has to contend with
additional layers of complexity. The flexibility in the various ways content might be deployed
requires much more structure, modularity, and metadata than print-only publications.
Content strategy seeks the flexibility to move beyond a single medium and a single fixed
presentation narrative so that your content can work effectively across the breadth of your
communications channels. Today content also needs to be as visible as possible to search
engines, and also accessible to all audiences. In this new multichannel media universe a
comprehensive content strategy produces a road map to guide the whole content life cycle,
from needs assessments and business strategy alignment to development, deployment, and
revision or deletion. Content development is an ongoing process, and it is never “done” until
the site goes offline and is archived. A good content strategy explicitly acknowledges that
today’s shiny new site or app will one day seem painfully dated, and that content begins to
drift out of date from the moment it goes “live” online. As content strategist Karen McGrane
says, “It’s not a strategy if you can’t maintain it.” A good content strategy also looks both
backward and forward, working with site managers to create and measure benchmarks and
performance metrics - gauging the success of your content and assessing its current
strengths and weaknesses at meeting the needs of your audience - and uses those metrics
to establish priorities for fixing, revising, or updating areas of content.