I received a message on AFF a few weeks ago from PandaDiaries, a college student taking an Art and Design class, asking me if I could answer a few questions for her project. She was assigned an assessment worth 40% of her overall grade in which she had to carry out a case study on different professions within Art and Design that included web design and development. She just let me know that she got an A for her assessment so I decided to share my responses to her questions here in case anyone was ever interested.

1. How did you clarify and negotiate a brief?

To prepare a brief for any given new project, a set of requirements must first be gathered from the users then apply certain restrictions to prevent possible ways that a particular feature can be abused.

For example, users have been wanting a more user-directed way of featuring stories weekly on the front page instead of having a computer algorithm choose for them. Writing a brief for an alternative featured story system required talking to users for suggestions and led to the idea of a voting system for people to vote directly on stories they’d like featured.

However, I also put in place the restriction that a user must also have a certain number of “karma points” (points received for participating in various site activities which typically takes a long time to earn) to vote. Although no one had asked for this, it was important to place that particular restriction to prevent a user from registering multiple accounts simply to vote for their story. Completely analyzing a problem and its edge cases for a complete brief helps reduce unintended consequences and side effects in the long run.

2. How would you describe your attitude and approach to your specialism?

My specialty is creating applications on the web. This is one of the few industries where you can be extremely successful with a relatively small organization. My attitude is that if something needs to be built and I know for a fact that it’s possible, then there’s nothing stopping me from doing so. Anything that’s not within my specialty can be outsourced (ex. legal, accounting).

3. How do you modify and develop initial ideas to produce a final outcome?

Initial ideas usually come from the need to solve a specific problem and are modified depending on changing user needs, a misunderstanding of the problem, or technical difficulty.

For example, I had always wanted to include threaded commenting in my web applications. Threaded commenting is the ability to reply to each and every comment and the resulting replies end up looking like the steps to a ladder. This is a technically difficult challenge which is a major reason that I had put off doing it for so long. Then I realized that it’s not really threaded commenting that is absolutely needed by the users but simply a way to be alerted whenever someone had replied to their comment. With the new modification to the requirement, it made it much easier to develop that sort of solution on the backend which resulted in a reply-to-one-comment-only system with alerts instead of full-fledged threads.

From an information architecture and design standpoint, every new feature and section must be organized in such a way to be easily accessible to users in that they should find what they need within a click or two in a related section. I prefer users to be able to do a “wide search” (within a click or two in a section) instead of a “deep search” (requires multiple clicks through several sections) through links to get to where they want. To accomplish this, a lot of thought must go into organizing an efficient site navigation with many links while utilizing empty space to prevent user distraction from page clutter. In general, users’ eyes tend to focus on the top left, top, and left sides of the page since people are generally used to reading from left-to-right and top-to-bottom in cultures with those types of writing systems so it follows that important navigational elements and other information should be located in those sections. Nevertheless, important elements may still get lost so the effective use of contrasting colors can help draw the eye to those particular details but must be used sparingly to avoid desensitization.

4. How do you liaise with the users?

I provide many avenues of communication including a ticketing system using the site’s contact link, my personal profile page, and my email contacts for both legal and advertising correspondence.

5. How do you respond to constraints that affect your work e.g. costs, scale, resources, time, etc.?

There are always compromises when it comes to any of these things. For the most part, time for me is not an issue since I put forth new releases into production only when it’s good and ready and not by anyone else’s timetable. Nevertheless, there is also no need to reinvent the wheel so if someone else out there has solved similar work and placed it into open source for anyone to use, then I will avail myself of those resources to save time. Also, for skill sets that I don’t have such as design, I prefer to pay for a professional and outsource the work.

6. What process do you use to produce the work?

The initial step is the discovery process of determining what needs to be built and there is only one way to do this: talking to the users. The next step is researching if the new product or feature is feasible in terms of technical capabilities and cost. The execution step is the part where the product is actually built. I do it in short iteration steps and initially release a minimum viable product that contains all of the features which I think are essential for the product to be successful. Then I continuously gather feedback from users to either polish the product or pivot into a new direction if it turns out that my initial assumptions were flawed. The iteration steps continue until the problem is solved.

7. How is the commercial viability of the work considered?

Generally, in any web venture, a product will either have to have a wide enough market appeal to create any meaningful amount of advertising revenue or a very niche market will have to have paying customers. Instead of taking on larger established players up front, I prefer to look for underserved niches and growing the service from an initial minimum viable product. But in my case, as long as the revenue offsets the costs of maintaining the site in regards to servers, backups, and professional services, it's good enough for me.

8. How difficult is it to get in to the profession?

Although the industry almost always requires a university degree for a career, web development is open to anyone with a computer and a drive to learn. The open nature of the field in terms of the amount of information that can be learned for free allows entrepreneurs a low barrier to entry to the web industry. However, there is a great deal of information that needs to be learned and then put together before a full-fledged product can be released.

9. How do you think you could improve by adopting professional working practices?

Let me preface this answer by remarking that as someone with experience working for a large Fortune Top 20 company, I am no stranger to professional working best practices. However, the elimination of many of what some in corporate may consider to be professional best practices from smaller ventures provides a certain degree of agility that large companies are generally not able to cope with. The processes I do have in place for product and feature development are already suitably optimized albeit, also different from large corporate practices.

One area that does require constant improvement is in the field of security. With recent incidents of corporate hackings and espionage on the rise, one can never be too diligent in protecting sensitive user information and constantly improving security. As such, I only require and store three pieces of sensitive user data: email, IP address, and password.

The email is currently collected only for the purpose of resetting a user’s password if they had forgotten it while the IP address is stored for legal purposes in the event that the information is requested by the law.

Although some may consider the passwords stored on a social site to be inconsequential, many users use the same password on different sites so it is imperative that the passwords are protected. Currently, passwords are one-way hashed using one of the most secure hashing algorithms available which means that when a user registers a password, their password is not stored as it is but rather, in a different representation that is unintelligible to a human reading it. In the event that the database is compromised by a third party, there would be no way to decrypt those passwords to their original form for an attacker to try on different sites. Proper password encryption is actually fairly straightforward but many companies including large organizations still fail to do so out of convenience. Sony’s recent hacking of its network that yielded millions of unprotected passwords is a testament to the need for diligent security processes. Password security also evolves as faster decryption hardware is manufactured so it is important to stay informed of best practices.