Everyware: Always Crashing in the Same Car

Even where the application of ubiquitous technology would clearly be useful, I know enough about how informatic systems are built and brought to market to be very skeptical about its chances of bringing wholesale improvement to the quality of my life.

Greenfield, Adam. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Usability>Ubiquitous Computing

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

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

Evolution, Usability, and Web Design

The purpose of this article is to explain how evolution and natural selection relate to the web development process. It is suggested that it is wise to encourage designers to create many quick and dirty designs over many short intervals. This is in contrast to asking designers to create a lower number of better designs over fewer intervals. The ideas of failure, prototyping, usability testing, and iterative design are explored.

Rhodes, John S. WebWord (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability

Examining Tolerance for Online Delays

In this study, user tolerance for delays for three common WWW tasks, including information retrieval, purchasing, and downloading a text file was examined. These tasks were selected since the file sizes differ significantly among the three tasks, so it was expected that tolerance may be higher for those tasks with smaller file sizes. For example, tolerance for delays would be higher for downloading a text file than purchasing or information retrieval, since users may have an expectation that the task should take longer so they may be more willing to wait. End-users may be more tolerant of delays while purchasing online, since information must be exchanged to process the transaction, whereas information retrieval does not require information exchange.

Selvidge, Paula. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability

Examining Web Design Conventions Across Site Types

This study examined the viability of a Category-Based Usability Theory, which indicates that usability of websites should be accounted for on the basis of the category the website is in. While Web design experts have provided general design guidelines, it is believed that with different site types, design guidelines may differ.

Patel, M.R. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability

Examining World Wide Web Designs--Lessons from Pilot Studies

Since 1994, our faculty and graduate students have studied a variety of design issues critical to enhancing the effectiveness of World Wide Web (WWW) sites. Guided by earlier literature from such wide-ranging disciplines as information design, text legibility, hypertext, multimedia, interface design, human computer interaction, and communication science, we have completed five studies. Further, we developed a research protocol designed to enhance the effectiveness of WWW sites for education and information delivery. Our research protocol was guided by Berger and Chaffee's (1987) communication science orientation where communication science seeks to understand the production, processing, and effects of symbol and signal systems by developing testable theories, containing lawful generalizations, that explain phenomena associated with production, processing and effects.

Zimmerman, Donald E., Michel Muraski, Michael Palmquist, Emily Estes, Catherine McClintoch and Linda Bilsing. Microsoft (1996). Design>Web Design>Usability

Excuse-ability

Without innovative solutions that are imaginative and that promote the talents of the producer, the designer is left solving narrow, piecemeal issues that don't add up to much. Which is why Nielsen and Tahir reduce everything to the banal. They accept that the interface is the most critical aspect of the product, losing sight of the possibilities of the product itself.

Perks, Martyn. Spiked Online (2002). Articles>Usability>Web Design>CRM

Expert Usability Review vs. Usability Testing

Article outlining the difference between the two usability evaluation methods: The expert usability review and usability testing.

Halabi, Lisa. Webcredible (2007). Design>Web Design>Usability

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

Eye Tracking: Eye Candy vs. I Can Do

Eye tracking is definitely not a magic bullet or 'the closest thing to mind reading'. It does however serve as both a great piece of eye candy for senior executives with little time and is very powerful in helping come up with the most effective page design.

McElhaw, Mark. Webcredible (2007). Design>Usability>Methods>Eye Tracking

Eyetools, Enquiro, and Did-it uncover Search's Golden Triangle

The vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a 'golden triangle.'

Edwards, Greg. Eyetools (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>Eye Tracking

F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Eye Tracking

Face to Face With Your Users: Running a Nondirected Interview

An interview is a funny situation. It's like a friendly conversation between strangers, but unlike the kind you may have on the bus. When chatting on the bus, people try very hard to agree with each other and to quickly communicate interesting information. Each person wants to be liked and adjusts the way they speak and what they say so as not to offend. This type of exchange is perfectly fine for maintaining civil society -- deeper exchanges can always happen as an acquaintance deepens -- but shallow banter isn't appropriate for an interview. You need to find out what someone is experiencing, what they're thinking, or what their real opinions are.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2003). Articles>User Centered Design>Interviewing>Usability

Facilitating Data Exploration with Query Previews: A Study of User Performance and Preference

Current networked and local data exploration systems that use command languages (e.g. SQL), menus, or form fillin interfaces do not give users an indication of the distribution of data in their databases. This often leads users to waste time, posing queries that have zero-hit or mega-hit results. Query previews are a novel visual approach for browsing and querying networked or local databases. Query previews supply users with data distribution information for selected attributes of a database, and give continuous feedback about the size of the result set as the query is being formed. Subsequent refinements might be necessary to narrow the search sufficiently. Because there is a risk that query previews are an additional step, leading to a more complex and slow search process, we ran a within subjects empirical study with 12 subjects who used interfaces with and without query previews and with no network delays. Even with this small number of subjects and minimized network delays we found statistically significant differences showing that query previews could speed up performance 1.6 to 2.1 times and lead to higher subjective satisfaction.

Tanin, Egemen, Amnon Lotem, Ihab Haddadin, Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant and Laura Slaughter. SHORE (1999). Design>User Interface>Usability>Search

Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement

Fahrner Image Replacement and its analogues aim to combine the benefits of high design with the requirements of accessibility. But how well do these methods really work? Accessibility expert Joe Clark digs up much-needed empirical data on how FIR works (and doesn’t) in leading screen readers.

Clark, Joe. List Apart, A (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Usability

Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored

One site did most things right, but still had a miserable 14% success rate for its most important task. The reason? Users ignored a key area because it resembled a promotion.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability

Feature Richness and User Engagement

The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment--especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Design>Web Design>Usability

Featuritis (or Creeping Featurism)

Featuritis or creeping featurism is the tendency for the number of features in a product (usually software product) to rise with each release of the product. What may have been a cohesive and consistent design in the early versions may end up as a patchwork of added features. And with extra features comes extra complexity.

Soegaard, Mads. Interaction-Design.org. Articles>Usability>Interaction Design>Project Management

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

Filter and Sort: Improving Ecommerce Product Findability

Filtering and sorting are essential for helping users find the products they're looking for. Find out how to make best use of this essential functionality.

Webb, Jonathan. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce

Findability

Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval. This website is a selective, seriously incomplete, and perpetually evolving collection of links to people, software, organizations, and content related to findability.

Findability. Resources>Information Design>Usability>Search

Finding Information on the Web: Does the Amount of Whitespace Really Matter?

It has been a long-held notion that the use of open space or 'whitespace' adds not only to the attractiveness of the design of a written publication, but adds to the functionality as well. For example, it has been stated that whitespace plays the crucial role of 'directing the viewers attention to the regions where important information is provided and allowing the global structure of the composition to assume a meaningful configuration' (Mullet & Sano, 1995, p. 126). It is contended that Whitespace 'gives the eye a place to restIt can help to organize the material on the page. It can tie successive pages together by repetition of identifiable areas' (White, 1974, p. 48). However, it has been asserted by Web usability researcher Jared Spool that these assumptions should not apply to Web design.

Bernard, Michael, Barbara S. Chaparro and R. Thomasson. Usability News (2000). Articles>Usability>Web Design

Finding the Right Users

If you’re using the eenie meenie method to select users for your research, perhaps it’s time you tried something a little more scientific. There is no such thing as sound user research without an airtight user-selection process behind it. No matter how good the observation and analysis, it’s all for naught if you’ve studied the wrong people. Too much “user research” is conducted, analyzed, and applied without anyone ever having spoken to users. Researchers then offer guidelines based on the needs and preferences of people who would never use the product in question. Relevant user research results depend on two factors: First, obviously, you’ll need to find people who are likely to use the product. Second, you’ll need to interview enough of them so that trends emerge from their collective behavior. These trends will indicate your primary design targets.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2003). Articles>User Centered Design>Usability

Five Paper Prototyping Tips

Prototyping is a quick way to incorporate direct feedback from real users into a design. Paper-based prototyping bypasses the time and effort required to create a working, coded user interface. Instead, it relies on very simple tools like paper, scissors, and stickies. Even in applications where new technologies are deployed, paper provides maximum speed and flexibility.

Klee, Matthew. User Interface Engineering (2000). Design>Usability>Prototyping