SUCCESSFUL design
SUCCESSFUL design is a way to define the requirements for a successful project (both in the sense of the project itself and its outcome). SUCCESSFUL stands for:
Safe-Useful-Compatible-Configurable-Economical-Simple-Stable-Fast-User friendly-Localizable
and the idea is to simply organize requirements for ensuring all the above, in a tabular form. The list of requirements can be then referred to in all kind of decision points and dilemmas, to ensure that we are on the right path.
Contents |
[edit] SUCCESSFUL requirements table
[edit] Safety
| Requirement | Description | Reasoning | Action items / Relevant features | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheat prevention | The search engine should be able to prevent cheats by blocking cheaters and "punishing" them |
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| Traceability of ranking | An audit trail or at least a graph should give the user insight in recent changes to the ranking | |||
| Auditability of ranking | Rankings should be auditable by the user, that means the main reasons why a page has got a certain rank should be possible to visualize. | |||
| Singularity of ranking | From one address / user (IP-address) only one ranking should be possible within a certain period of time |
[edit] Usefulness
| Requirement | Description | Reasoning | Action items / Relevant features | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi search sessions | The search engine should be able to help users search for a group of interrelated items | The lack of this feature is one of the main drawbacks of existing search engines |
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| Promoting diversity | The search engine should encourage users to choose differently out of search results | Diversity of choice is a key factor for the success of any socially-driven process |
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| User Profiling | Users should be able to provide a profile of interests (e.g. maths, science, culture, media, business,...) that influences the search result or page ranking | |||
| "Information broker" | The internet consists basically of information providers and information consumers. Information consumers (=search engine users) should be able to ask information providers (websites) to provide, change or update information according to their request. | create some open source format (e.g. XML) for such transactions (->this could foster rapid growth of services) |