#29449
The Achilles Heel of Product Design Competitions and the Fair Judging Solution
I have judged a fair number of national and international product design competitions (five in the past three years alone) and each has made the same procedural mistake: products are assembled and categorized, judging criterion are devised, reputable judges are assembled, and yet we judges never see or touch the products in person. Instead, we receive a set of written documents describing each product, its intended function, and its design process. Imagine an art contest conducted by email and you get the gist of what's going on out there.
Buttiglieri, Rich. Usability Professionals Association (2007). Design>Usability>Assessment
#10407
This article is intended to make Web designers more aware of the qualities of heuristics by presenting a framework for analyzing the characteristics of heuristics. The framework is meant to support Web designers in choosing among alternative heuristics. We hope that better knowledge of the backgrounds, potentials, and limitations of heuristics will contribute to the professional expertise in the field. Our second goal is to make those who develop and present heuristics more aware of the information their users need. Thus, we try to increase the usability of heuristics.
de Jong, Menno D.T. and Thea van der Geest. Technical Communication Online (2000). Design>Web Design>Assessment>Usability
#13585
Helping Businesses Evaluate Their Internet Presence 
To ensure that their Web sites are conveying the intended image, a growing list of businesses, including Avis Rent A Car System, McDonald's, Staples and Holiday Inn, are turning to companies that test usability and brand opinion for help. These companies conduct surveys and focus groups and even use high-technology eye-tracking devices to uncover how customers use a Web site and how their experiences affect feelings about the parent company.
Bannan, Karen. New York Times, The (2002). Design>Usability>Assessment>Eye Tracking
#27406
How to Avoid Being Blinded By Your Own Design: Seeing the Forest for the Trees
If you design something for your company, organization or department, or help influence the direction of a design, it regularly can become very difficult for you to separate yourself from the design. And chances are, you are not even aware of it most of the time! This entry looks at why this seems to happen and what you can do about it (if anything at all).
Spillers, Frank. Demystifying Usability (2005). Design>Usability>Assessment
#19685
Improving Your Reader's Content Forms 
For most organizations, Reader’s Comment Forms serve primarily as Reader’s Complaint Forms. Most of these forms typically ask readers to identify errors in the text, citing location of the error, describing the error, and suggesting a change. What a waste!
Carliner, Saul. Intercom (2003). Design>Web Design>Assessment>Usability
#15158
Illustrates how technical writers can track customer complaints and use the information to improve the usability of products and documentation.
Bist, Gary. Intercom (2002). Design>Usability>Assessment
#24230
Not Getting Personal: Assessing Website Effectiveness
Websites are sometimes evaluated primarily on first impressions or personal preference. More difficult to ascertain is their success in terms of communication. Assessments of websites can benefit from research and developments from fields such as usability studies, linguistics, professional writing, and rhetoric.
Durham, Marsha. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Web Design>Assessment>Usability
#11838
Reader's Questions: Severity Scales
It is important for the Usability Engineer to attend meetings where development and product managers review bugs, decide if the severity is appropriate, and choose which bugs will be fixed. I've been able to convince development and product management to consider some usability bugs as critical bugs.
Wilson, Chauncey E. Usability Interface (1999). Design>Usability>Assessment
#19213
Usability and Gratifications -- Towards a Website Analysis Model 
This paper discusses website usability issues. Specifically, it assumes that the usability of a website depends more on the perception of the user than on the objectively assessable usability criteria of the website. Two pilot studies, based on theoretical notions of uses and gratifications theory and similar theories, are presented. In the first study, experts evaluated three websites on the national park Mesa Verde in a more formal approach based on criteria defined in the literature. In the second study, non-experts evaluated the same three websites in a more informal and personal approach, using concurrent, or “thinking aloud,” verbal protocol methods. Results show that overall assessment of the websites differs between experts and non-experts. Specifically, overall the website assessed as worst by the experts was liked most by the non-experts. Cognitive and emotional needs as defined by uses and gratifications seemed to make more of a difference with regard to website use, and less with regard to website evaluation. Results from these studies provide the basis for a user-centered website analysis model that may make use of but not depend on usability criteria defined by the literature.
Bunz, Ulla K. Rutgers University (2001). Articles>Web Design>Assessment>Usability
#31995
Using Calculators for User Engagement
Calculators can play important roles on websites. They are especially popular for financial sites, where they can help users calculate mortgage payments, retirement needs, interest earned, and so on. They also appear on other sites, where users can calculate things as varied as their BMI (body mass index), carbon footprint, life expectancy, or gas mileage.
Zhou, Yun and Cliff Anderson. Usability Professionals Association (2008). Articles>Usability>Assessment>User Centered Design
#13803
Using Usability Testing to Determine "Related Links" in An Online Brokerage Web Site
In content-rich web sites, success is defined by the user's ability to locate relevant content quickly and efficiently. To achieve such success, information architects and usability specialists direct their efforts towards developing intuitive and well-organized navigation structures to support user content search tasks. However, the rich content of the site may lend itself to more than a single navigation scheme that might satisfy the navigation demands of the site. In such cases, to decide on the best approach, usability tests are conducted. Observing users navigating through the site provides the critical information needed to finalize the information structure of the site. We used this technique to redesign the navigation of the www.harrisdirect.com web site, an online brokerage web site. This site is very rich in content. In addition to online trading, the site allows users access to a multitude of news, investment research, market research and educational content resources. The inherent inter-relationships of this content enabled us to further improve on the final navigation design by introducing related links in a manner that was derived from the usability test.
Vasmatzidis, Ioannis, Eliot Jablonka and Hsin Eu. Usability Professionals Association (2002). Design>Usability>Assessment
#32929
Toys 'R' Rushed: A Cautionary Tale
Website critic Lou Rosenfeld is shopping for a baby present, but the website he's using is making his task tougher than it should be. Lou takes on www.toysrus.com.
Rosenfeld, Louis. CIO Magazine (2000). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Assessment
#33091
Quantitatively Test the Effectiveness of Your Home Page
Staff should be able to confidently, quickly and accurately step from the home page of the intranet towards the information they require. If staff can’t achieve this without resorting to search, the home page needs to be redesigned. This article explains a quick and effective technique for assessing whether your home page is an effective gateway to site content.
Barker, Iain. Step Two (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Assessment
#34290
Information Architecture Task Failures Remain Costly
Task success is up substantially compared with usability statistics from 2004. Bad information architecture causes most of the remaining user failures.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Information Design>Usability>Assessment
#34904
タスク成功率は、2004 年のユーザビリティ統計と比べると大きく上昇した。しかしそれにもかかわらず、ユーザがタスクを完遂できないケースがあり、その原因の大半は情報アーキテクチャ(IA)の出来の悪さにある。
Nielsen, Jakob. Usability.gr.jp (2009). (Japanese) Articles>Information Design>Usability>Assessment
