Patterns can help with consistency, and design heuristics, tenets, guidelines, walk throughs and critiques can all help in improving a design; but I don't see anyway to truly evaluate quality of interactions without actual testing.
I suggest setting measurable design goals at the start of a project - for task success, time on task, user reported satisfaction, user confidence in task completion, etc. - so both qualitative & quantitative measures. Management / clients can review and signoff on the goals at the start as being the desired set to achieve, and the goals can be tested against throughout as the design matures - from wireframe to early functional prototype, alpha, beta... For an updated site or service ideally the current offering would be benchmark tested against the same measures so improvements (or losses) against the set goals could be tracked. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=37385 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
