There is definitely a need for practical, reusable heuristic patterns like this, and it’s good to see other people spreading wisdom as it is gained.

Later on this year, you should consider reading my upcoming book, “Designing the Obvious”. It is all about some of the same types of ideas found here, except it focuses more on proactive, application-level patterns found in many great web-based applications and discusses how to achieve them. The simple elimination of things implemented because of internal politics and such can make an application better by default, but there are many other factors that contribute more directly to the success of a project. Designing the Obvious discusses these things in depth.

Anyway, it should be out in September/’06, so keep an eye out for it.

It all comes down to a well formed information architecture and simplicity and actually practicing the dogmas…

As long as you have a standard to begin with, you have to come up with an argument to depart from it as opposed making up a rule on the spot or being at the mercy of the most charismatic person on the team when it comes to what and why something finds its way onto a page.

It’s not going to solve all your problems and compromise is part of doing business. However, you’d be surprised how often you can close a discussion by being the person in the room with an external basis for a point of view.

The dogmas are stating the obvious, but that’s what dogmas are for. As a consultant I feel I’m stating the obvious for my clients every day, but sometimes you need a guy with a higher oomph factor than yours truly to state it too for the CEOs out here to hear it.

Come on – shout it out.

http://www.blackbeltjones.com/dogme.html