2. You are an IT company with no experience and expertise in the area but you know human resource is cheap so instead of getting the job done through proper person you hire few fresh graduates (if you are a true businessman you hire interns without paying them a cent) and get the job done through them.

I think the proper way is to hire a consultant to give away the project and have him over look it in both the scenarios, but then in Pakistan every body becomes himself a consultant and the team hired by the consultant is usually his close friends or relatives and result remains the same.

From what I understand – you’re saying that this can work if the client requirements either have the mockups needed or explicit definition of the flow and information items on each page etc?

I suppose if there is enough time an explicit information architecture phase must be part of the project and for most projects with front-ends this should be part of a standard price and the client shouldnt be expected to pay more if the information architecture is to be documented.

But then that’s not practical.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how many users would go through the same experience as the above – when I do usability walk-throughs I’m intentionally trying to be an annoying and demanding user, but I’m always surprised at how forgiving many users can be…. which is to say that even if they do internal user tests (or user tests from people who arent particularly concerned about privacy or terms of use matters) its likely to get inaccurate results.

One way of specifying these quality attributes is in the form of quality attribute scenarios, which basically gives concrete scenarios, which the product must fulfill to be considered that it has a certain quality attribute.

This method takes away the confusion and vagueness of requirements such as ‘the product must be easy to use’. This requirement is not measurable or testable. ‘Easy to use’ means different things for different products. Quality attribute scenarios help in making these requirements more concrete.

I guess to even just specify their own requirements in this level of detail, companies need to be tech savvy and aware of these pitfalls …

* After working for 3-5 years / making half a dozen websites, an average web-developer (lets call him A) usually knows about these mistakes (though he learns them the hard way) – as soon as that happens, A is ready to take off to the US, UK or even Dubai.

Since formal training/mentoring/apprenticeship is not exactly the foremost priority of the ‘Sayth’ IT firm owners, the void created by A is filled by A`, who is just like A, minus the 3-5 years of experience, and is bound to make the same mistakes – reminds me of a twilight zone episode where Hell was supposed to be about making your worst mistakes over and over again.

* A big corporation working in a non-IT domain hires a temporary in-house team, but forgets to hire a software development manager to act as a mediator. Since it is an in-house team, so requirements are not frozen, feature creep is allowed, which results in a ‘spaghetti product’ not unlike this one.

* Lots of firms bid for an attractive medium to large sized project, and the most qualified firm does not always win the project. Sometimes, the winning firm does not really have in-house expertise for that particular domain, and sometimes the bid-winning firm is small and has all the needed ambition but none of the expertise. So they quickly assemble a team and hire people not very different from A` – the team manages to develop a half-baked solution for the client that ‘covers all their requirements’ but one that does not solve the client’s actual problem, or the that of the system’s users.

But the website you’ve described in your review (which by the way is down right now, its giving me a “This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.” error) has some particularly glaring mistakes (I found your narrative to be extremely hilarious, my cheeks are still sore from the laughing fits):

1) 1 tag?! what in God’s name?! I believe the designers over at Samaa (or to whoever they outsourced this to) need to read this book. I’ve personally skimmed through this book and it would be very useful for them to actually know what tagging is all about.

2) I’m guessing the site is a quick ASP.NET drag and drop job, which could be one reason why you found it sluggish. I hate such sites. They should ban .NET in Pakistan. It’s being grossly misused.

3) The fact that it doesn’t work in Firefox could really cost them because I’ve got a feeling that their target user base (socially and technologically aware youths of Pakistan, who know how to hook up their digital camera to their PC) might predominantly be Firefox users.

4) Login leading you to profile page was a common mistake that I used to come across on the Net 3-4 years back. Sites have gotten smart enough to stop doing that. SamaaTV should smarten up as well.

5) In the Aza Raskin Google Tech Talk you posted last month, he mentioned that forms are a very lazy way of interacting with the users. Its something developers use to make their work easy and user’s work hard. I agree with your recommendations. The website should do a mixture of not asking for something at all & predicting user input.

6) LOL @ the terms of agreement. Is it just me or does it seem they’ve probably ripped off some parts of the TOA from some US website (hence the parts about US copyrights…). And are all TOA sentences really in ALL CAPS?!

7) From the level of maturity of the interaction design of the website, I’m willing to bet that there’s ZERO processing and filtering of data happening. They’re probably just putting everything in folders and databases without recording any meta data about the media that is uploaded. One telltale sign is the repeated popping up of the license on every upload. It’s a classic case of leaving something complicated in the hands of the user. If this is the case, they will NOT be able to manage/police anything that is uploaded. I’m pretty sure someone will upload objectionable content on the site, and it will get taken down (maybe that’s why its down right now :}).

Wow, I really should have made a blogpost out of this comment . Great job on the review, they really should be paying you for this

But the things that’s bothering me more is why? Why does our industry keep spewing out crap like this (speaking purely from a software engineering point of view)? These are mistakes (in usability, privacy etc.) that the world has identified and remedied. Why are we still making them?!

jafferhaider.wordpress.com (too lazy to sign out of my GreenWhite account )