Investigating Behavioral Variability in Web Search  

Understanding the extent to which people’s search behaviors differ in terms of the interaction flow and information targeted is important in designing interfaces to help World Wide Web users search more effectively. In this paper we describe a longitudinal log-based study that investigated variability in people’s interaction behavior when engaged in search-related activities on the Web. We analyze the search interactions of more than two thousand volunteer users over a five-month period, with the aim of characterizing differences in their interaction styles. The findings of our study suggest that there are dramatic differences in variability in key aspects of the interaction within and between users, and within and between the search queries they submit. Our findings also suggest two classes of extreme user--navigators and explorers--whose search interaction is highly consistent or highly variable. Lessons learned from these users can inform the design of tools to support effective Web-search interactions for everyone.

White, Ryen W. and Steven M. Drucker. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Centered Design

Learning Information Intent via Observation  

Workers in organizations frequently request help from assistants by sending request messages that express information intent: an intention to update data in an information system. Human assistants spend a significant amount of time and effort processing these requests. For example, human-resource assistants process requests to update personnel records, and executive assistants process requests to schedule conference rooms or to make travel reservations. To process the intent of a request, an assistant reads the request and then locates, completes, and submits a form that corresponds to the expressed intent. Automatically or semi-automatically processing the intent expressed in a request on behalf of an assistant would ease the mundane and repetitive nature of this kind of work.

Tomasic, Anthony, Isaac Simmons and John Zimmerman. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design

Designing a Presentation

You will not draw any slides—in fact do not even launch PowerPoint—until step eight, 80% of the way through the process. Typically, when you want to create a presentation, you open PowerPoint and start creating slides. Slide one, slide two, … slide seventeen… what I am trying to say again? Am I making my point?

Abela, Andrew. Extreme Presentation Method (2008). Articles>Presentations>Planning>User Centered Design

Is Self-Centered Web Copy Hurting Your Websites?

Web developers frequently launch websites with self-absorbed web copy, which turns off visitors and kills conversions. Who’s to blame? Self-absorbed copywriters and business owners. To engage prospects and turn them into customers, web copy needs to appeal to the visitor’s self-interest.

Webdesigner Depot (2009). Articles>Web Design>Writing>User Centered Design

User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models

This is not going to be an article about personas or even what distinguishes a good persona from a bad one. Instead, this article is about the ingredients we can draw on when creating audience models and some alternative ways of communicating the results of an audience analysis. First, however, let me briefly discuss what we generally mean when we talk about personas and the role they play in the design and development process.

Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Audience Analysis>Personas

Analysis, Plus Synthesis: Turning Data into Insights

In this article, I will outline an approach to gleaning insights from primary qualitative research data. This article is not a how-to for creating the design tools that are often the outputs of primary qualitative user research—such as personas, mental models, or user scenarios. Instead, it identifies an approach to generating overarching insights, regardless of the design tool you want to create.

Ellerby, Lindsay. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Interviewing>Research

What if Readers Can't Read?

If we really do believe in the importance of the audience, the reader, the user, then how have we changed our practice to reflect the changing characteristics, competencies and even literacies of our readers? Have our readers changed over the past few years? The evidence points to the answer being a resounding yes!

Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2007). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>User Centered Design

Information Overload

Almost 2 million book titles were published in the US alone, compared to more than the 1.3 million books published in the preceding 100 years. This change in the amount of information available for consumption is starting to change the way people read. How do we address the problem of information overload? Through good writing, and good information architecture.

Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2001). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Publishing

The Engaged Reader

We live in an era of information overload, the just-google overload. And, because everyone can write (!), we also live with community-contributed growliths such as Wikipedia.

Basu, Anindita. Writing Technically (2009). Articles>Writing>User Centered Design

User Paradox with Not Reading User Manuals

Users would save time by reading the manual, but instead they try to figure the application out themselves and then get lost/frustrated as they end up spending even more time getting up to speed with the application.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2007). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Technical Writing

The Poverty of User-Centered Design

In the dim distant past, some of us used to distinguish our work from the masses by declaring proudly that we were ‘user-centered’. At one time this actually meant you did things differently and put a premium on the ability of real people to exploit a product or service. While the concern remains, and there are many examples of designs that really need to revisit their ideas about users, I find the term ‘user-centered’ to have little real meaning anymore.

Dillon, Andrew. Infomatters (2008). Articles>User Centered Design

User-Centered Design 101 (Why User-Friendly is Not Enough)

While system-centered places the system and programmer at the center of the design, and user-friendly considers the users, user-centered design put the user at the center of the design. What better way to design for the real needs, tasks, skills, knowledge, and behaviors of the users?

Bowie, Jennifer L. Screen Space (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Blogs>Podcasts

The Personable Manual

Why do product manuals sound formal and stiff-upper-lipped? Why don’t users read manuals? These questions have haunted the precincts of Technical Writing for quite some time now. From what I have seen in Indian writers, I am forced to conclude that English Composition, as we were taught in school, is the culprit.

Kumar, Suman. Indus (2009). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Rhetoric

Real or Imaginary: The Effectiveness of Using Personas in Product Design  

The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions.

Long, Frank. Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Five Ways to Reduce Costs With User Centred Design

User centred design can be a useful and speedy way of increasing efficiency and hence reducing costs. More often that not, design is seen as a way of increasing sales, attracting eyeballs or retaining customers. However at Frontend we've noticed that some of our most successful projects concentrate on cost-reduction and business efficiency. Here's a few ways we've used user centred design to help our clients save money.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Project Management

Out of Box Experience: Getting it Right First Time

The out of box experience (OOBE) describes the users first interaction with a product or service. In the technology sector this first experience invariably involves plugging stuff in, installing some software and crossing your fingers in the hope that the product will work. The problem is that, in far too many cases, it doesn’t.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design>Usability

Introduction to User Centred Design Process

The key principal of UCD is integrating users that represent the profiles of the target user group/s into the development process. Typically, friends, family and (most definitely) colleagues are not representative of the target user base! However, they’re nearly always free with advice. But the validity of this advice is often questionable. In order to integrate unbiased user feedback into the process the following are key steps in a UCD process.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods

The Users' Charter

Could a charter of rights for the user of web applications lead to the design of user-centred interfaces, better user experience and avoid causing frustration, irritation and consequently lost business? The following is an attempt to outline a charter of rights for the user of web applications.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design

Using Customer Tests to Drive Development

Test-driven development or TDD is a widely accepted practice used by agile software development teams of many flavors – not only Extreme Programming teams. For each small bit of functionality they code, programmers first write unit tests, then they write the code that makes those unit tests pass. TDD is seen as a design tool, since it forces the programmer to think about many aspects of each feature before coding.

Agile Journal (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Agile>Functional Specifications

Growing Happy Users -- One Customer at a Time

Technical writing is a profession in transition. The way companies think of, use, and manage the people who help users make sense of and use products is absolutely changing. A lot of companies have started to use the term “information developer” to describe their technical writing positions. I don’t really care what label the profession chooses for itself, but I do know this: if technical writers don’t transition more than their job title then they will be missing out on a huge opportunity to move from the “gotta do it” category into the “can’t live without it” one.

Stern, Paula. LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>User Experience>Technical Writing

A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance

Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country.

Schonfeld, Erick. TechCrunch (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Social Networking>International

How to Avoid Extinction as a Technical Communicator

Although there will always be a need for people to explain technical material non-technical people, Ellis Pratt said, others may be doing it instead, through the formats users prefer. To survive, technical writers may need to morph into content strategists, managing the information in a systematic way rather than merely creating it.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Documentation>Multimedia>User Centered Design

Usability Spotter #5: HP Laptop Touch Pads with Scroll Zones- Absence of Tactile Cue

Summary The issue with HP laptops that have a touch pad with a scroll zone contained it (as shown in image A) is that they do not provide a tactile cue for the user to help interpret what section of the touch pad the finger is positioned at. In the absence of a tactile cue, it is difficult for the user to determine whether the finger is on touch pad or the scroll zone without looking at it, resulting in the accidental scrolling on the screen when actually the user simply wants to move the cursor. The issue and multiple solutions are discussed ahead.

Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2009). Articles>Usability>Accessibility>User Centered Design

Documentation Usability: A Few Things I’ve Learned from Watching Users

Even though your customers may not read manuals, your tech support team probably does, which means someone is reading the manuals and using them to help others. But if your users find it easier to call someone, wait on hold for an agent, and then ask the agent a question rather than find the answer in the help, maybe your help materials aren’t very usable. Maybe increasing the usability of your company’s documentation could alleviate the need users feel to seek answers from another source.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Documentation>Usability>User Centered Design