Best Practice

Designing navigation that will support the needs of website users is one of the more important aspects of site usability. At Caktus we practice iterative, user-centered navigation design, which includes user feedback.

In the day-to-day work of building new software and maintaining old software, we can easily lose sight of the bigger picture. I think we can find perspective when we step back and walk through the evolution of a single piece of software.

Part 6 in the 2017 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.

Here at Caktus, we’ve been fortunate to work on some incredible projects with our clients. For example, we built the world’s first SMS voter registration app for Libya, developed a digital archiving system for the world’s largest on-demand video provider, and created a survey tool with auto-scaling architecture to help the University of Chicago track school reform.

I attended the TriAgile conference in Raleigh, NC on March 30th, 2017 and wanted to share some takeaways from a couple of the talks I saw. Overall, the conference was a nice opportunity to network with some local Agilists and hear about their work and experiences. It was well organized, and I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the Agile community in the Triangle!

Subtests are the best

Testing our code is important. Because developers write bugs, it’s valuable to catch and correct them before the code gets to production so our apps work as they should. Specifically, we want tests that are DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), thorough, and readable. Though there are many ways to try to accomplish these goals, subtests make each of them easier. If you’re not using subtests in your test classes, you probably should be.

When considering a website upgrade, many business stakeholders probably think about the frontend, i.e., how the website looks or the features users interact with. Perhaps less often considered is the importance of upgrading the backend; that is, the databases, applications, and servers powering all the behind-the-scenes activity. Infrastructure support and upgrades are necessary but often performed as a separate project from any improvements to design or user experience, rather than as part of a holistic update project.

In the first installment of this two-part series, I introduced product discovery as the process of building a shared understanding about the product between stakeholders and the product team, which helps you make better decisions about what to build. I also suggested that we look at product discovery as a four-step process:

When setting out to build a new website or web application, it is a good idea to build a shared understanding of the product between stakeholders and the product team. Through research and collaborative activities that aim to answer questions about the product, its goals, and its users’ needs, the stakeholders and product team discover the full breadth and depth of the application to be built, as well as contexts and implications that need to be considered for the product to be successful. We call this process product discovery.

Here are some brief thoughts on writing good bug reports in general.

Main elements

There are four crucial elements when writing a bug report: