stakeholders

examples

resources

guidelines

experts

steps to follow

document templates

methods

You and your group are members of a design team from the young Web design company, rainbow.com, based in Centralville. Your job is to work together to design a Web site to suit a particular context. 

Your company has been given a job on the basis of personal recommendation from an ex-client of yours who happens to be a colleague of the conference organiser, Dr Bigg, of the University of Brighthelmstone, a one hour train journey from your offices. The basic requirement is for a Web site to publicise and complement a conference, the First European Conference on Researching the Internet, to be held at the University of Brighthelmstone on Dec 18 and 19th 2001. 

Dr Bigg is the local organiser for the conference, that is, the person responsible for practical arrangements. This is an important conference for him in terms of his career, and he has great hopes for the Web site. He will be your main contact. He has a lot to tell you on the Stakeholders page.

He is helped by an administrative assistant, Julie, who will also be an important contact point. Julie has the responsibility for arranging hotels and catering for the delegates, for arranging the rooms where the talks will be held and so on. She'll tell you about all this herself on the Stakeholders page.

You have a generous amount of time to take your work from outline brief to implementation - 3 months - together with a multiskilled team. You are also being well paid and your team is well resourced. You are determined to do a good job, using a user-centred methodology, rather than just throw something together in a hurry. 
 
 

The links on the left will help you research the site requirements and carry out the design and development process. The first set of links lead to information about this job. The second set are general sources of information on user-centred design. The final link is to your working space - check this page regularly for news.

 If you need convincing:

What happens when things go wrong

The transcript from the emergency call about the bomb incident at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics

A collection of things that don’t work well because the HCI design is bad

Flowers, S. (1996), Software Failure: Management Failure, Chichester: John Wiley. (Excerpt on London Ambulance example is from this book)

Perrow, C., Normal Accidents, New York: Basic Books, 1984

Petroski,  Henry, Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error  and Judgment in Engineering, Cambridge University Press, 1994. 

An analysis of the London Ambulance Service system failure