#14191
Site visitors crave the sense that someone is there, within and behind your Web pages, your emails and newsletters. Dealing with the bare technology of online interactions is a cold experience for many, or even most of us. It makes us feel anxious. Technology isn't warm. It has no heart. It neither understands us, nor cares for us. For many Web sites, whether for businesses or organizations, we simply plug in and play the bare technology - the super-duper means of information delivery. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2002). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#20676
The CAA: A Wicked Good Design Technique
Discusses Category Agreement Analysis, a card-sorting technique to help create usable information architectures.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Articles>Information Design>Content Strategy>Card Sorting
#13740
Jared Spool goes out of his way to position himself as anything but a user-interface designer. Yet through his company, User Interface Engineering (UIE), he is a frequent keynote speaker on effective Web design, produces a monthly publication reviewing Web sites for effectiveness, and runs a series of workshops of effective Web design. Founded in 1988, UIE is an independent research, training, and consulting firm specializing in user-interface design and product usability issues. It has grown into one of the United States' leading usability research practices, conducting more than 400 usability tests each year on software and Web sites.
Spool, Jared M. Builder.com (2001). Articles>Usability>User Interface
#30297
Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas
If you're just going to guess on the personas, why bother? Just design for yourself, like the 37Signals team does. However, when you do the field studies, you create relationships with the people in your research. You can return to those people and ask them questions. You can learn about the things they do.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas
#19749
Design Patterns: An Evolutionary Step to Managing Complex Sites
When your organization's web site or intranet has hundreds of contributors, how do you ensure that every page is high quality and extremely usable? Especially, if these contributors have never designed a web page before? This is a problem that many of our clients are facing and they've tried a myriad of solutions, such as centralized approval processes, standardized templates, and style guides, all without success. However, the one solution that really excites us is now gaining a lot of attention -- design patterns.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering. Design>Web Design>Information Design
#30801
It's not that people resist change whole-scale. They just hate losing control and feeling stupid. When we make critical changes, we risk putting our users in that position. We must take care to ensure that we've considered the process of change as much as we've considered the technology changes themselves. Only then will we end up with changes that our users embrace.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2005). Design>User Interface>Redesign>Usability
#27969
During our recent Virtual Seminar on home page design, several people asked about whether it makes a difference if links are underlined or not. It's a good question and one we get frequently.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability>Interaction Design
#28095
Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines
'Use a Search Box instead of a link to a Search page.' This is one guideline from the plethora of recently created usability guidelines to help designers produce more usable web sites. It makes sense. After all, there are more than 42 million web sites on the Internet. It should be simple to study these sites and put together a list of 'do's' and 'don'ts' that, when followed, will produce easy-to-use sites. But...
Spool, Jared M. uiGarden (2006). Articles>Usability>Standards>Web Design
#14193
Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines
'Use a Search Box instead of a link to a Search page.' This is one guideline from the plethora of recently created usability guidelines to help designers produce more usable web sites. It makes sense. After all, there are more than 42 million web sites on the Internet. It should be simple to study these sites and put together a list of 'do's' and 'don'ts' that, when followed, will produce easy-to-use sites. Designing a web site, either usable or unusable, is hard work. There are many details that designers need to take into account, such as browser differences, content management, information architecture, and graphic design. Providing proven guidelines to developers can reduce their already overburdened workload, making one aspect of design that much simpler. However, we are assuming the guidelines actually result in more usable sites. This is where things start to get murky.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability
#13738
An Eye on User Data: An Interview with Jared Spool, Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering
Our most striking finding is how bad web sites are in general. We have yet to find a site where, if you choose questions at random based on information the developers have placed on the site, users can find the answers more than 50% of the time. (The best we've found is 42% of the time.)
Spool, Jared M. WebWord (1999). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#19748
Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs
The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle. While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the 'field study'. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering. Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Usability
#29814
Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site
Galleries -- the list of links to content -- are your site's hardest working pages. They are the final page that separates those users who find the content they are seeking from the users who won't. A well-designed gallery page will drive users to success every time. A poorly-designed site will only serve to drive users away.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability
#19751
Getting Confidence from Lincoln
A few years back, we conducted one of the most painful usability studies in the history of our research. We learned some really important things, but I'm not sure the users in that study will ever forgive us. Before that particular study, we'd noticed, when searching large web sites for information, there were some sites where users always seemed to know where to find the content. No matter what content they were seeking, every user somehow knew to make a bee-line for it. Not every site worked this way and we wanted to know what made these particular sites work so well.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering. Design>Web Design
#26450
Global Site Navigation: Not Worthwhile?
Having global navigation isn't a bad thing. It's just not something that should garner a lot of resources, as it's unlikely to be important in the user experience. You're probably better off putting your resources elsewhere (such as increasing scent for the most important content on your site).
Spool, Jared M. GUUUI (2004). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design
#29815
Apple and Netflix gained insight by investing in understanding the current experience of their potential customers. Those insights led to industry-changing innovations that have made an indelible impression on businesses everywhere. As innovation is now the new black, experience design is the fabric of new insight. The work designers do is now the hot spot to be.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Design>User Experience
#29811
Making Personas Work for Your Web Site: An Interview with Steve Mulder
It's important for the people responsible for creating the personas to have active listening skills, empathy, and clear communication skills. Ultimately, what design teams need to do is aggregate all of the qualitative or quantitative data into a clearly communicated story. This means that writing and communication skills are also critical. From the point of view of a more tactical skillset, the design team will get better results if they have experience conducting interviews and writing surveys.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>Interviews>User Centered Design>Personas
#23297
Users' expectations of a product depend on the maturity of its market. Markets for software products go through some predictable stages, each with a different emphasis. By identifying what stage your product is in now, you can anticipate some of the pitfalls that lie ahead.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (1997). Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#29817
The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch
Companies would often hire new outside firms to create and execute these new designs, abandoning the firm that made the previous design. The new firms would try to top the existing design with something dramatically different and attention-grabbing. After all, if you can't notice any change, why did it cost so much?
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Articles>Web Design>Planning
#14192
The Search For Seducible Moments
If you offer something that is unique to your organization, (and chances are that you do - that's why you're in business) then how do you make the users aware of these benefits? Jared Spool discusses how to identify these 'seducible moments'.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2002). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#29451
Surviving Our Success: Three Radical Recommendations 
The world of usability practitioners is undergoing massive changes. I know because I read it in the New York Times.
Spool, Jared M. Journal of Usability Studies (2007). Articles>Usability>Professionalism
#29812
Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign
Teams who focus on the long term are far more likely to create designs that really pay off for the organization. Short-term thinking gets the design done, but the team ends up doing it all over again months down the road. Long-term thinking deals with the inevitability of changes and turns the site into a living, breathing entity that grows with the organization's needs.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>Web Design>Planning
#10568
The Top 3 Priorities of the Talking Horse
Anytime somebody does something new with technology, something nobody else has ever done before, that technology goes through a talking horse stage. It's extremely common and, more importantly, it's critical for the design team to recognize that they are in this stage.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2004). Design>Web Design>Workflow
#13739
For example, it is often stated as if it was almost a law of nature that the faster pages download, the more usable the site was. But when we actually compared the usability of sites to their download times, we didn't see any correlations. None, zero, zip. If this 'fact' was true, we should've seen something. To go farther, we found that when we asked users to rate the speed of a site, that didn't correlate to the actual download time either. Instead, the perceived speed of the site correlated strongly to whether they completed their tasks! This tells us that, when users are complaining about download time, they probably aren't actually talking about the download time, but about their ability to complete tasks.
Spool, Jared M. WebWord (2001). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#23982
What Causes Customers to Buy on Impulse?
This paper studies the design elements within e-commerce sites that motivate impulse purchases online.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>E Commerce
#32923
The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities
In design, our resources are limited. Priorities become a necessity. We need to ensure we are working on the most important parts of the problem. How do we assess what is most important?
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2004). Articles>Information Design>Project Management>Charts and Graphs
