PurpleSlurple

My name is Matthew A. Schneider. I am a San Antonio, TX based Web developer/programmer and SharePoint system administrator.

I appreciate the balance that Web sites/applications must strike between form and function. My design decisions are informed by the necessity to provide viewers with the information they need, quickly and clearly. I seek to minimize distractions and embellishments and maximize the organization of business information to support meaning and usability. In this endeavor I count among my mentors: Edward Tufte and Jakob Nielsen. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Lynch and Horton and their “Web Style Guide“.

In building any Internet application one goes through the following steps:

1. Develop a data model.
2. Develop a collection of legal transactions on the model.
3. Design the page flow.
4. Implement the individual pages.

With so many Web application frameworks available today, there is a huge range of technology choices (and little challenge) at step 4, making this step mostly straight forward. An Internet application lives or dies by Steps 1 through 3. What can the service do for the user? Is the page flow comprehensible and usable?

Web projects rarely fail because an application does not function properly. Instead they fail because the intended audience hates to use it or doesn’t find its features useful. I deal with this by constant communication with my clients and by abiding by the release early release often method. I make sure the requirements elicited from the customer are mapping to the delivered functionality and I like to get the end users involved too.

Some work I’ve done as a free lance Web developer and programmer includes:

Health Consumer Alliance (healthconsumer.org), an organization in California which provides health consumer information in 14 languages to low income clients in thirteen counties. After evaluating numerous solution options, I implemented a content management and document repository solution (PHP/MySQL based) to facilitate the upload, management, search, and retrieval of nearly 800 organizational publications. Tasks included for example: developing the site architecture, document taxonomy, search and retrieval interface design, as well as guiding the development (authoring/linking) of site content.

Cimarron Women’s Clinic (womensclinic.org). This site supports internal users and external customers of the clinic and features self-designed browser-based editing of Web site content and one-click design template changes (original site developed circa 2001, CMS was hardly in the vernacular). Patients are able to register, make appointments, and submit questions via the site. All form data is captured in a MySQL database. Form submittal generates email notification to the appropriate clinic administrator. Administration of registrations, appointments and questions is via a browser-based dashboard. Site also utilizes Adobe Acrobat Web forms for patient registration.