Scalability     What are you going to do tomorrow? How to design for scalability Monday, October 3rd, 2005: 12noon Pacific Time   Technology becomes obsolete every year. Fashion changes every season. Diet fads change monthly. It's impossible to predict what tomorrow has in store, but we can prepare for these changes-- design to easily incorporate them when they happen. Good design and effective implementation can allow websites to be modified and expanded with minimum effort. It's essential to design your site to be constantly relevant to a target audience and at the same time get your message across. You don' t have to compromise to create a scalable design that will keep your site relevant.   Presented by: Mohan Dasannacharya, Senior Designer, User Experience   Mohan Dasannacharya is an integral part of the OnlineFocus interface design team. He has over 8 years of design experience in different disciplines including architecture and product design. He has designed websites and applications for a variety of companies, including FedEx, Sun , and LSI Logic.   One of Mohan's key designs was for the FedEx "Rate Finder" application that helped improve the accuracy of rate quotes provided to the users. Mohan's design improved accuracy, streamlined the user interface, and enabled the application to be ported to FedEx's international sites once the rates infrastructure got integrated at the backend.   Speaker Notes So what are you going to do tomorrow? Wake up, have breakfast, drive to work, start worrying about where on your site does the new product information go, and you don't know where to start. If you had a scalable design, you would not spend time worrying about it, you would spend time creating relevant content. Scalable designs help you save time and money, allowing you to concentrate on the work you actually like to do or maybe better things like say planning your weekend.   What is scalability with respect to the web? Why should you design for scalability? When to redesign versus, adapting new items into your current design? What are the considerations for scalable designs? How do you design for scalability?   When we talk about scalability for the web we mean that the design allows for changes with respect to new content and work methods. The medium of the web allows companies to put more information on the site when required. The designs companies create for their websites should utilize this value appropriately.   A site designed to accommodate new information and features reduces maintenance time and costs. It is much more expensive and time consuming to redesign than to update your site.   From a scalability perspective keep in mind when there is new information to be incorporated into the site you have a clear identifiable location for the information and make these locations evident to content owners, for e.g., when we analyzed www.sun.com/edu 2 years ago, different sections of the site had whitepapers, press releases, event listings and other such resources: they were scattered everywhere.   These could be grouped together to make it easier for the customer to locate. All events are now listed under a separate section though they may be accessed from different locations. The same is true for white papers and press releases.   The key is to finding the right point to present the relevant information and not losing the audience.   For a scalable design we need to consider how we can classify the site from a users perception of the company, its products or services and the customers interests. The reason this helps in creating a scalable design is that sites are often based on internal divisions of a company or (companies acquired by the company). Creating a classification from the customer's perspective allows content to be added to sections based on the customer's expectations allowing for easier avenues for growth, unless the customer base expands to include a newer target audience that views the company differently.   Register   Telesymposiums are free to join and your level of participation is up to you. Sit and listen or share your experience and expertise.   Register now         © 1996-2006 Onlinefocus, Inc. | Contact Us | A UCI Web Group Company. All rights reserved.