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lately I've been asked to do a UI or UX audit and to be honest I truly don't know how to charge people for this... The story is that I've used some portal X and I've started complaining about how unfriendly it is and they asked me to do a full audit for them... so I did... It took me 8h of writing a doc about what things are good and what are bad - just in general, since we've agreed to sign a new contract for a detailed audit (with graphics, talking with people etc.) if they'd like the general one.
In short:
How to charge it? I can do something like: price * hours. But it's like I've used that portal for about two months so I didn't have to get to know it and I don't even know how to measure that. It took me 8h of writing the doc... I've charged them about $200 but I didn't do that kind of stuff before (not in commercial space) so I can't show any recomendations or anything... and I'm feeling like that's gotta be worth a some real cash since this is really hard and often people get it wrong... like... really really wrong...
Would be great to hear what people in the UI/UX business have to say about it.
TIA.
I am a professional UI developer, and I can tell you that we handle this many different ways depending on the situation at hand. If the job is "in the bag" then we will do a lot of the pre-planning work (not user surveying) for "free" up front then make it back on the cost of the actual work. On smaller jobs I will even go so far as to do several wireframes as part of the planning and bidding process. For some clients, I'm asked for semi-working mockups, in which case there will be separately charged "spec" and "design" phases. One million dollar account I worked on hired my team to develop the requirements to begin the planning process, which seemed a bit overboard.
I'm often asked to design or build something I've never done before, so don't let that hang you up in pricing. The important thing is to put out a quality product in the end that you're happy to put your name on. Experience is nothing compared to results.
One hard and fast rule I follow. If I can see a "challenging" client coming, which I've gotten very good at, then the charge is always billed at an hourly rate with no exceptions. I have the flexibility to "give" them a few extra hours if things are going well, but if the client begins to take advantage of the situation, I can still get paid in the end.
Regardless of the process you take, the key to success in this business is documentation. Put in writing your fee, change management strategies, warranty period, etc. GET IT SIGNED! I've been burned by clients trying to use me for a site and then inserting a low-ball contractor into the equation, so don't be afraid to spell out who will do what, when it will happen, and when deliverables are due from each person.
There are hundreds of resources about this subject on smashingmagazine.com. It's the UI person's go-to for this sort of information.
Good luck!
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I know this may not be exactly a coder question, but I feel it is still related to programming because I'm sure many developers have come across this before and might have some insight on how to resolve this or have advice. There is an actually programming question though.
My issue as a developer.
I work in a small company, roughly 15 people, 5 of which are developers include myself, the rest are tech support and management. Problem I'm having is, when we get a SOW (Statement of Work), our clients give us a rough description of the project they are requesting, which usually is a 1-3 page brief description, usually including a Visio document, now as a programming, I'm responsible for going over the document and relaying a time-line on how long it should take me to complete the project.
Unfortunately, there have been times, not only me, where we under-estimate the project because we didn't fully get into it till we actually developed it, which ends up slapping ourselves in the face, because my boss is upset because he is being hounded by the client, who is now upset because we missed our promised deadline.
My question is, how do you guys handle organizing basic project description when you need to give deadlines on more concept, and do you have any ideas on how to organize it.
I'm thinking of going to my boss and suggesting, instead of always pushing a estimated deadline to our clients which expect us to hit that, we should write up a detailed document that is more step-by-step (more like what to do) on how to develop the application they want, it may take a lot more time, but least if the project is moved to someone else it is laid out for them, and when I usually get back to it 4 months later, I don't have to refresh up again, I can just follow the steps I wrote.
What do you guys think? Ideas? Or better ways to handle this?
If you switch your development to using an iterative methodology (Agile, XP, Scrum, etc), then the customer will see results much earlier than any deadline you feel you have to promise - usually every 1 or 2 weeks.
The moment they see what you've developed, I can pretty much guarantee that they'll make changes to their initial requirements as they now have a visual representation of the product and it may not be quite what they were thinking of. Some of their changes might be quite radical, so best to get the feedback as early as possible.
In all the projects where i've insisted we do this, the customer was delighted - they saw the results early, could influence the project outcome, and we hit their end deadline. Unexpectedly, a whole load of features got left behind and - guess what - the customer did not mind at all as they got the top features they wanted and put the project/product straight into production as they'd had lots of time to refine it to suit their business, so they were already familiar with it.
It takes a lot of effort to get management, sales, creative, etc, to all buy-in to an iterative style, so you may need to implement a hybrid solution int he mean time, but in my experience, it is well worth it.
If a complete shift to iterative is not possible, split your project into tangible milestones and deliver on those milestones. As others have said, inflate your estimates. My previous manager doubled my estimates and the sales team doubled his too.
Inflate your project deadlines. It's something that most programmers should do (and I quote the VP of Freeverse, the company that I work at):
It is a well-known fact among people
who work in the software industry that
the last 5% of development always takes the longest.
If possible try to divide the higher level tasks as much as possible so that you can get a better approximation of how many man hours that sub-task would take.
Also, adding hidden buffers to your task execution helps in covering some of the unseen contingencies.
cheers
If you mock up (balsamiq or whatever) with your customer, you will get more details. Armed with those details and some experience, your estimates will be more accurate. And then double it and add 4 (hours,days,weeks,months)
First, unless you systematically under-estimate, your boss should not get upset. It's his job to answer to the client, and he should know that by definition, an estimate is NOT the future. Statistically, sometimes you should deliver earlier, sometimes later.
Personally, I think that the frame of "how long will it take" is not exactly the right discussion to have. Software development is a risky business, and change/surprises happen all the time. One approach which helps is to focus less on the "right" number, and more on the volatility. Look at the project, and consider the places where you are pretty clear on how long it will take (you have done it before and understand it well), and look at the places where you have uncertainty (unclear requirements, new technology), and for these, think about how bad it could go, and why. That will help you get not one number, but rather boundaries: what you think is reasonable, a worst-case scenario, maybe a best case scenario (which the client should never see :) ) - and convey that information to your boss, so that he can manage accordingly.
Additionally, this will allow you to identify the danger points of the project, and you can then prototype accordingly - look into the uncertainty points as early as possible, so that you can tighten up the timeline fast, and have early warnings for your boss and the client.
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If you are the lead programmer at a company and you need to complete a project that would require skills/knowledge that no one at the company currently has, what do you do?
I am not talking about something simple you can ask for help on stack-overflow for but for complex problems that you do not feel comfortable tackling and would take a significant amount of learning to be ready.
So at the point whats the best step to take?
Be honest with your management team, make sure they know. Don't ever try to mislead people about the scope of your knowledge - it doesn't impress them and only causes you problems.
Work with your team to evaluate your options - it may be possible to change technologies, or perhaps someone else in the organization can help mentor or support you. Changing course earlier on is easier and less expensive than later.
Adjust your project timeline to take into account the potential risk and delays caused by working beyond your core strengths. If you don't have enough knowledge to estimate the risk, be very conservative in the confidence factor of your estimates and timeline.
Look for an expert in the domain/technology and see if you can engage them either as a consultant or advisor on your project. Nothing makes a bigger difference than prior experience in a domain.
Take some time to try to create a simpe prototype or proof-of-concept in the domain/technology you will be working on. Look for possible issues that could emerge. Sometimes unexpected problems surface when you try to create a simple prototype - this can help steer the effort when working on the real thing.
See if the scope of your project can be scaled back. If you are already "behind the curve" the best way to improve your odds of success is tackling something smaller, rather than larger.
Seek out advise from people you trust. Especially people whose expertise and knowledge has some bearing on the problem or technology you're taking on. They may be able to give your more specific advise or ideas.
You have to take it outside the company to someone (person or consultancy) that can complete it. This means a contractor/consultant that will be with you for a temporary period of time. If possible have them work in house with your and your team and make part of their responsibility to train you.
You may have to explain to management that without this, the project could fail and will probably be late and over budget. Don't worry about outsourcing some projects - you and your team will still have lots of work.
Temporarily hire someone who has the expertise you're missing, and make sure they're prpared to transfer their knowledge to others in your team as well as work on the problem at hand. Be prepared to pay serious money; but if the problem really is complex, chances are you'd take much longer, get a much worse result, and pay more overall if you try to figure out out without any help.
First, +1 to Borgwardt, Oded, Bushkin. Great answers here. Now my two cents...
Your path forward should consider whether this is a skill/technology i.e. "capability" that your company needs to have internally. Depending on this, take the advice of either #Oded (Outsource) or #Michael Borgwardt (hire a contractor to do some knowledge transfer), or spend a lot of time (if you have it) and develop the capability on your own. For example, suppose you're going to interface with some purchased package that spits out magic numbers in some binary format. Hire a contractor to write the interface. Suppose your VP of fulfillment wants you to interface with a FedEx web service, and nobody at your company knows SOAP. And you know that more SOAP is coming, for all suppliers and partners. You'll need SOAP skills in-house, so get some training, do a prototype, and maybe bring in some outside help.
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Most people have been here at some point or another - in your project, you get really small requests along the way that you're happy to take care of, but at some point the little things add up. Sometimes it takes less time to implement something than it does to re-negotiate the project plan.
Providing the spec/requirements plan is decent and it isn't a doomed project to start with, at what point do you actually blow the whistle and start re-negotiating? At any request? When that request requires additional pages / forms? Or just feel it out? Would love to hear how you make the call.
Budget N hours of ad-hoc requests in your project plan. (You know it's going to happen, so why isn't it in there?) Then track your ad-hoc requests and renegotiate when the budget's blown.
At any request?
The real goal is to make the customer happy while not getting ripped off, right? Agile methods address these issues to a large extent. New requirements always come up, and if you don't address them as they come you end up building things that are obsolete or dysfunctional out of the box. So what you need is customer buy-in to the process, a working prototype as soon as possible, and lots of iterating. There's a ton more, of course, but that should be enough to be getting on with.
Edited to add: Customer buy-in means they are aware of you working on a new feature instead of whatever you would be doing, and that they are in agreement. When you've gone through your schedule and budget and still aren't done they they've been there with you the whole way and know why. No big surprise "What? You're not DONE?!"
I'd say when it's going to impact the schedule/release date. If that happens, it's definitely time to blow the whistle. If either the scope creep is of sufficient magnitude, or if there are enough cumulative changes that it's impacting your ability to ship on time, then you should push back.
The moment your budget gets blown. You can't keep doing all these "freebie" add-ons - unless you are doing it for charity.
Once you've put your foot down once, you'll find the requests drying up!
I have only been in this situation with internal tools where our stated goal was to best serve any whim of our "customers" in a situation where there was no way to predict needs in advance. So take my answer with a grain of salt.
My view is that the decision is often political, and unless you're the head of the company it might not even be up to you. The cost of unsatisfied customers going over your head to your boss can be more damaging.
I'm a big believer in agile and continuous requirement gathering that does involve seeing how users work with the product, and trying to match their needs. However, every user has his individual "nice to haves" and there's no way to satisfy everyone. If you have multiple target users, democracy is a good system - only implement things that the majority of the users can benefit from.
If your clients are a cohesive group (e.g., you're making it for users in a specific department in a specific organization), run a Wiki site or something like SO or other engines where they can list and then collaboratively vote on possible features. Make it clear that you will give priority (but no guarantees) about higher rated features, and that you're probably not going to give priority to things that don't get votes from others.
In doing so, you may be able to get the clients to apply some collaborative filtering (or peer pressure) on ideas. You will also get some visibility, so people can see why their wishes were not respected. An important side benefit is that whoever requested a feature now has an interest in formulating the request and its rationale well, so that they can get others to vote for them. This will eliminate some asinine half-baked ideas.
Of course, an underlying assumption of all this is that you budgeted some time to "misc features" with whoever is paying for the projec.
The estimated completion date is more of a probability curve than a single date.
Any extra feature reduces the likelihood of meeting some particular date.
You should 'blow the whistle' if and when the decrease in likelihood becomes 'significant' or worth mentioning.
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What are the main reasons personal projects (software apps etc) never get to the level of competing with your salary?
To me one big problem is "on-the-fly" feature expansion, with this problem, the end only gets further and further away!
For me, it's simple: I work 8 hours a day already. I spend a few more hours a day keeping current. I have a girlfriend, some local family and a decent circle of friends. I have (gasp) non-computer-related interests and hobbies. In other words, I have a life.
So ... Time. Time is not on my side. Would that it was ... My blog might be a bit more current if there were just two more hours in every day. :)
(Originally posted by John Rudy.)
If you want your hobby to become your job you have to acquire all the other skills you need to be in business. At the end of the day your pet project has to stand on its own two feet in the real world. At the same time you are enjoying the coding you need to get yourself a concrete plan to commercialise your activity.
Most hobby projects fail to make the big time for one of two reasons:
The idea is not commercially viable
The discipline necessary to commercialise the idea is missing
Just because you are a great technologist does not mean you'll be a great businessman. You may be, but the two are not necessarily linked. It is no weakness to consider partnering with someone who has no technical skills but a good network and some proven business acumen. Quite often people like that are looking for techies too so you might find a great partnership. That person can provide the structure and commercial discipline that you probably lack if feature creep is pushing your completion backwards.
I think the primary reason is the simple work overload that most developers experience. Most personal projects take place in the evening and weekends, and as excited as most of us get about our ideas for personal projects, after 40 hours (or more) of salaried programming, it's hard for "more work" to compete with watching a game while sipping a beer or spending quality time with the family.
Different skill sets are required to start and maintain a business than to develop software. Entrepreneurship skills can be learned, but not every has the skills to make it happen. A lot of times the skills it takes to get something started and off the ground are different than the skills it takes to finish it and polish it. For me, I know that I have the creativity to make software and find ways to solve problems, but I have little interest in finding funding for a business and marketing a product or service.
Assuming that you're a developer, it's most likely due to the fact that you do not know when, or are incapable of, stopping development and focusing on other things, like marketing and sales.
Time and Losing Interest, there is always a new tool or technology that can take your attention away from completing projects.
I'm not sure if I understand your question, but here are a few answers:
Adding "on-the-fly" features isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's the expected model of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 projects. The key is to keep them very simple, only roll them out once they've been tested, and listen to your users. If you try to dump the kitchen sink in on the first release, it will most likely be ugly, confusing, and buggy.
Being a great programmer is only a part of it. You need business skills, marketing, knowledge of the user's needs and how to meet them, artistic/design skills, and a hell of a lot of luck.
Lot's of people have great ideas. Often different people have the same ideas. Most never get implemented. Of those that do, very few of them succeed. In some cases, revolutionary products took years to convince the buyers and users that they even wanted the product. Often the people or companies behind the first few iterations failed miserably and then a third or fourth person or company finally hit the market at the right time with a right product. Apple is great at both ends of this by the way - they not only innovate (first Mac, the Newton, etc.), but they also wait until the market need grows and they sense a place to pounce in and take advantage of it (the iPod, the Mac vs. Windows issues, etc.)
Most of these bullets apply as much to software as they do to widgets and services. The big advantage that software has is lower startup costs. Just like the saying "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" - "When looking at a web app, the user doesn't know if you are a multi-billion dollar company or a single guy sitting in your underwear in your parent's basement." If your software is good, that is...
I'd say one of the big reasons is that by nature, personal projects don't get as much attention as your job will.
I have a slew of personal/side projects I'm working on, but they get far less of my attention that my 'real' work does because, right now, that's what's paying the bills.
If I were to take a month off and work only on my personal stuff, it'd probably be pretty cool / worth money.
developers often design for themselves instead of for their customers
developers tend to put off releasing products until things are 'perfect' - and they never will be
Weakness of mind and spirit. Build a team around your product early.
Scope creep. Concentrate on selling what you have already got: "The customer can have any color he wants so long as it's black". Henry Ford
Small feature set. Leverage features of your product by what is already available on the market.
Not enough hours spent daily. Often achieving something might depend just on simple routine, putting your time in.
Deep down I think its a lack of belief in the project. If I believed in what I was doing I would not stop in completing the project.
Desire to build an ideal product
For example: There are various ways (algorithms) to get a particular task done. But, people wait to discover that one ideal solution. Even if there are multiple solutions for the same problem already available. That ideal solution is never found.
Procrastination
Your personal software projects don't compete with your salary for one reason.
What do you do for your salary? Whatever that is -- however much you may like or dislike it -- it more valuable than your software product.
"But my day job involves a lot of stupid time-wasting meetings." So? Clearly, someone will pay you more for wasting your time in meetings than for your software products.
"But my day job forces me to waste months in useless analysis and design documents and test plans that never even get used." So? Clearly, someone thinks this activity is more important than writing software.
"How can meetings or useless documents be more valuable than software?" I don't know, but look at your experience. Companies love to pay programmers relatively large amounts of money to hang around and waste time.
Companies don't love to pay for software.
Your personal projects don't compete with your salary because your time is more valuable than your products.
The biggest reason? Because if you can write it yourself and people like it, someone else can make an open source version with much better support than you can provide alone. Why not skip the middle man and release it as open source yourself? Sure, you miss out on the direct profit, but that looks very good come hiring time.
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From time to time, there will be student attached to our projects, i would certainly like to assign him/her many things to do so can learn more. But alot of times we are resigned to assigning stuff like documentaiton, updating of ui mockup screens etc. As problem is that is it bit hard to trust the quality of work provided by students and another thing is that they are still young and their enthusiam may not be there.
How do we better utilize them such that they really cut down our workload and also in turns mean learning more stuff which will aid them in their future job opportunies?
I am afraid it might sound disappointing but it is not the best idea to utilise students to cut your organisational unit workload down. Probably, if your goal is cutting workload the best thing is not to take students. Read on to understand why.
Though you haven't specified the level of work-related expertise the students possess, nor did you mention the duration of their attachment, I assume from the tone of your question that their expertise is not sufficient to hit the ground running. It is also reasonable to assume that they are not staying for longer than 2-3 months.
The essential benefits your organisation can extract even given the limited timeframe are:
Notice and grab talented workers before they even get to the job market. Later in their working life they are likely not to be that easily available.
Turn every student into your organisation salesman. Let them tell everyone how good your product is, bring you in contracts in the future or make their peers envy their work experience increasing the pool of good candidates for your company.
Outsiders can help cast a fresh eye on your processes, procedures, product, expose inefficiencies etc.
Learn from them the latest stuff taught at universities.
Boost your time morale: Maslow theory, "esteem needs". Even the most junior member of your team becomes somewhat more senior, since these students have yet to achieve that position.
Cutting down workload means that you'd need to find a set of tasks which is fairly independent, does not require knowledge or skills that the students do not have and needs much of your team's time to transfer. The tasks cannot be strategically important in case they cock it up, not can it be operationally important. Hence you left with some dusty requests for management reports or research and development projects.
Chances are that R&D considered to be more desired work within your organisation and if you give exclusively to students some people feelings are going to get hurt.
How long are the students around for? When we have had students on-site for up to two weeks there was not much other then testing type work we could give them.
If the student has enthusiasm you code do some pair programming through a bug and let them write the unit tests for verifying the fix.
Even if you don't normally do pair programming, I find that with a junior dev it is sometimes productive to have him/her do pair programming with a more experienced developer, for the following reasons:
I wouldn't assign coding tasks to the junior developer alone, because his code would have to be closely reviewed by someone else anyway and quite probably rewritten or changed substantially.
On the other side, how can a junior developer learn if not by programming? So, you want him participating in some way in programming tasks.
You get some of the advantages of pair programming: the most experienced dev is less prone to make silly mistakes (even a very junior programmer can point things like 'hey, you made a typo there') and less likely to goof off checking stackoverflow.com every 10 minutes during the pair programming session.
Of course I also would rotate the junior with several seniors during the day, so they don't feel 'slowed down' or annoyed by the young guy for extended periods of time.
Why not assign one or more engineers as "sheperds" to the student and let them oversee their work or even better pair with them. The student will gain a good understanding of your project and real work and have a known fallback when in trouble and someone who can give provide direction.
The sheperd/mentor gains a fresh perspective, and the joy of teaching.