Design>Usability>Methods

Switching Between Tools in Complex Applications

Usability practice needs a procedure to identify, record, count, and highlight tool switch events for study. This paper describes one that supports the trained observers on which User-Centered Design relies to detect problems and causes, and evaluate design changes.

Instructional Design

This site is designed to provide information about instructional design principles and how they relate to teaching and learning. Instructional design, also know as instructional systems design, is the is the analysis of learning needs and systematic development of instruction. Instructional designers often use instructional technology or educational technology as tools for developing instruction

Rapid Prototyping

The idea of rapid prototyping as it applies to instructional design, is to develop learning experiences in a continual design-evaluation cycle that continues throughout the life of the project. This cycle, known as the spiral cycle or layered approach, is considered to be iterative, meaning that products are continually improved as they cycle continues.

Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products

When we ask designers what stage they spend the bulk of their time in when launching a product, the majority of designers answer, the Implementation Stage. However, our research shows that the teams launching the most usable products on schedule and on budget spend the bulk of their time in the Measure and Learn stage.

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.

Usability Guidelines

These guidelines include most factors to consider during a usability evaluation of a web site. Not all factors apply to every site.

Usability Problems

Every page on the Web should ensure that users can understand its purpose. Even users not in the target audience should be able to figure out enough about the site to know whether it has content they are interested in or not.

The Complexity of Simplicity

Though many business strategies and publications continue to trumpet the power of simplicity in the design of digital products, for lots of companies and product teams, simplicity doesn't come easy.

Photo Study

Users take photos to highlight important aspects of their lives and context. The photos are assembled into collages and studied to highlight opportunities for new technologies and barriers to their acceptance.

Evaluation of an Informational Web Site: Three Variants of the Think-aloud Method Compared

To evaluate Web sites, usability experts often use methods that were originally employed for the evaluation of software applications. In doing so, they assume that these methods will work exactly the same for both types of test objects. However, there is a major difference between transactional software applications and informational Web sites, a difference that could have an effect on the workings of various usability methods. As such, we felt that it was valuable to repeat one of our previous studies in which we compared concurrent think-aloud protocols, retrospective think-aloud protocols, and constructive interaction to evaluate a Web application, this time using a Web site. The results of our study showed that in some respects, the methods did work differently depending on the test object they were applied to. However, we conclude that the three methods are largely interchangeable and that the decision to choose one variant of the think-aloud method over the other should be based on practical considerations.

Toward Integrating Our Research Scope: A Sociocultural Field Methodology

Technical communicators have recently become interested in user-centered design (UCD) for designing and evaluating technical genres. Yet, a critical examination of the field methods of UCD suggests that they suffer from unintegrated scope: an undesirably limiting focus on a particular level of scope (either the macroscopic level of human activity or the mesoscopic level of goal-directed action) in their theoretical underpinnings and data collection and analysis. This focus is often paired with the assumption that this particular level of scope causally affects what happens at the other levels. Both the focus and the assumption are at odds with sociocultural theories of human activity. This article lays out the problem of unintegrated scope and examines it through critical analyses of two field methods used in UCD research. It concludes by proposing an integrated-scope research methodology for UCD research, with roots in both sociocultural theory and the central issues of technical communication.

Ethnographic Methods: What Anthropology Teaches Us About Effective Usability Research

When it comes to usability testing, the field of anthropology is offering new insight into effective research methodologies. Ethnography is a form of research that anthropologists developed to observe how people behave in their own environments — and it's catching on in product development.

When Good Design => Bad Product

The prototypes looked great and tested well. The programmers did their usual competent job of implementation. The result was a disaster. What went wrong? Someone forgot the last, critical step.

Stalking the User: Practical Field Research

Describes how technical communicators can use field research--observing people in their workplaces, homes, and schools--to gain a better understanding of user behavior.

Avoiding Bias from the Survivor Effect

Only a few of the survey sites we analyzed in 2000 are still around. We can safely assume that the surviving sites are not a random sample of the original group, but rather that significant differences exist between the sites that made it and those that died. Survival might be due partly to luck, but it is mainly a result of good management and an understanding of Internet fundamentals. Thus, the surviving sites are likely to be disproportionately clued-in about what it takes to run an online business.

Being User-Centered When Implementing a UCD Process

For those who are interested in usability – whether long-time advocates or newly introduced – this is a good time to introduce a user-centered design process.

Severity Ratings for Usability Problems

Severity ratings can be used to allocate the most resources to fix the most serious problems and can also provide a rough estimate of the need for additional usability efforts. If the severity ratings indicate that several disastrous usability problems remain in an interface, it will probably be unadvisable to release it. But one might decide to go ahead with the release of a system with several usability problems if they are all judged as being cosmetic in nature.

Designing an Effective User Study

When it comes to learning about your users, a plethora of methods await you. But which one is best for your situation? The answer depends on many factors, including the kind of information you hope to discover, the time and budget you have available, and your access to users.

Reading to Decide: Designing for Usability with a Needs, Users, and Learnings (NUL) Analysis

Information products that help users make decisions are a challenge to design, develop, and test for usability. We can begin to formulate a strategy for producing such documents effectively by doing a comprehensive preassessment of the specific project and by adapting testing methodologies from studies of creative thinking processes and expert system design.

Prototyping Your Process, Team and Tools Improving the Usability of Work

This paper explores prototyping the process, team, and tools comprising the work environment within which technical communicators operate when creating documentation. If you create a prototype of your documentation through a prototype of your work environment, you can uncover numerous flaws in your process, team, and tools. Iterative prototyping encourages adjusting the work environment to meet constantly changing requirements. If we consider how programmatic much of our work has become, especially with online help systems or the World Wide Web, prototyping our process, team, and tools can be invaluable toward improving the usability of our working lifestyle.

Designing Effective User/Training Documentation with the Learning Style Inventory (LSI), the User Empowerment Inventory (UEI), and Think-Aloud Protocols

While there are many instruments that measure the capacity for establishing peer-level communication skills, few exist that evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge transfer in the writer-reader relationship. The Learning Style Inventory (LSI), the User Empowerment Inventory (UEI), and thinkaloud protocols help assess how people acquire new knowledge and process information. The results of such measurements/ observations help determine user requirements. This paper presents a case history of how the LSI, the UEI, and think-aloud protocols helped improve both user and training documentation to a technology-averse audience in a reactive project environment.

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.

User-Testing Techniques - Site Reviews

Accurately measuring reader-friendliness is a complex task for any Website. Usability testing techniques have been applied with some success to Web pages. But formal usability tests are difficult to set up, and very expensive to conduct (often prohibitively so). And the diversity of the audience of Internet sites probably limits the utility of formal usability testing of many Web pages. Happily, inspection-based usability evaluation is generally as effective as formal, experimental testing, and it is much easier (and less costly) to conduct. This series focuses on inspection-based usability assessment. A site review is basically an unstructured inspection by a third party, typically focusing on the site's usability and aesthetics. It's a difficult but worthwhile effort for serious-minded authors to seek out reviewers who are willing to invest the time to undertake a serious review of your site, offering constructive suggestions for improvement.

Observing Users Who Listen to Web Sites

In this article we focus on the first of these goals and give you some of the fascinating findings about how vision-impaired users work with web sites.

The Role of Online Surveys in the Usability Assessment Process

I have attended several conferences at which I witnessed a growing debate over the role of survey work in the field of usability. Some practitioners are of the opinion that 'usability is usability' and 'surveys are surveys', and only rarely do the two meet in a harmonious exchange. The more I have considered this viewpoint, the more convinced I am that it is probably valid, unless the usability specialist takes the lead in assimilating survey output into the process of evaluating the overall effectiveness of Web sites and online applications.

Developing Heuristics for Web Communication

The quicklists presented here are derived from five sets of heuristics that were published in the August 2000 special issue of Technical Communication, 'Heuristics for Web Communication.' They are intended to help Web designers and developers consider crucial communicative aspects of Web site design.

Who Is "The User" Anyway?

As we have pointed out before, understanding the user is a pre-requisite of high quality interface design, whether online or offline. This means taking the time to find out what motivates typical user groups, what they expect from a given site or application, and how they prefer to work (or play). The alternative to proper user profiling is simply plucking an imaginary 'user' out of the air - usually to add weight to personal preferences or prejudices. The latter situation often consists of a so-called expert dismissing design features because 'the user wouldn't like it', when he or she is really saying 'I don't like it'. This common reference to a single undefined 'user' conjures up amusing images of a God-like entity casting judgment on interfaces from on high. In the real world, as we know, things are a little more complex. If 'the user' is frequently invoked but never defined, it may be time to rethink your usability strategy. Of course, after profiling has taken place, or when talking in generalities, there is nothing wrong with 'the user' being used as a convenient shorthand. But during specific projects it is essential to think in terms of real people rather than abstracts. This approach creates both better design and makes usability more understandable, in concrete terms, for others involved in the development process.

Dynamisk Hukommelse On-line

I denne artikel ses der på dynamisk hukommelse i relation til usability. Usability har I realiteten altid handlet om metoder (eller heuristikker jf. Nielsen) som skal sikre, at brugeren kan forstå det indhold, som bliver tilbudt på et givent site. Dette er naturligvis vigtigt og relevant, men det er alt sammen underlagt brugerens kontekst, og denne kontekst er igen underlagt brugssituationen.

The Power of the Usability Lab

You cannot build a useful product or Web site without usability testing. If you have never watched someone use your designs in a usability lab, you are taking shots in the dark. You can't possibly know whether your hard work is making things better or worse. The features you are focusing on may be things that no one really needs, or could never figure out. Without regular sessions in the usability lab during the development cycle, projects are guaranteed to head in directions that do not benefit the users of the product. As a developer, you should have deep interest as to whether your hard work is making the product better. It's in your interest to make sure your work gets examined in the labs, so that you can make adjustments and ensure that you are making the best possible product for your users.