Design>Usability>User Centered Design

The Foundation of a Great User Experience

I’m part of the AEC User Experience Team at Autodesk. Our goal is to design a great user experience for our customers, but just what does that mean? Our definition of user experience focuses on all the touchpoints that current or new users have with our product. For example, the downloading of software trials is often the beginning of one’s user experience with a product. If you have to fill out forms that ask for too much information, (should “cell phone number” be a required field on a trial download form?) or present you with too many obstacles, the likelihood of a positive user experience will be low. Your interactions with technical support, documentation, the product, and even other products that you use, are all aspects of the user experience.

Teaching Users to Read

This may sound a little harsh, but you'll see, when you do usability tests, that there are quite a few users who simply do not read words that you put on the screen. If you pop up an error box of any sort, they simply will not read it.

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.

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.

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.

Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design

All of the members of the best teams could tell us, with relative ease, the top five business goals of their application, the top five user types the application was to serve, and the top five platform capabilities and limitations they had to work within. And, when questioned more deeply, each team member revealed an appreciation and understanding of the challenges and goals of their teammates almost as well as their own.

What is an End-User Software Engineer?

To address the challenge of developing a shared understanding of the users that participate in each scenario we have developed a set of personas that describe the work styles, characteristics and motivations that are common to particular groups of people using our products. The personas help us communicate these characteristics by humanizing them, increasing the empathy that team members have for these fictional users.

Jared Spool on User Research Methods

Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz recently talked to the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool about user research.

Persona Non Grata

Everyone is mad for personas. They’ve permeated the highest and deepest levels of organizations, and have become a standard interaction design tool. Whole projects are now built around creating them, and there’s a feeling that once you get a half dozen or so, your design problems will be solved. Presumably, your personas solve them for you. The problem is, most teams build personas from the wrong kind of user information, or worse, base them on assumptions. It’s no surprise that a Web search for personas brings up an amazing variety of persona sets, and most of them are terrible.

How Did You Get Here?

One of the most overlooked aspects of designing a Web site is how users get to it. Separate factions are often devoted to promoting, designing, and maintaining a Web site, and the lack of communication and involvement can lead to apathy or confusion. Too frequently is it assumed that visitors are knowledgeable about the company and Web site, and that they enter through the home page. False assumptions about visitor entry can plague even a well-planned, well-designed site.

Five Things to Know About Users

Over the years, we've studied the usability of hundreds of product and web site designs. We've seen designs that were incredibly effective for users and designs that fell tremendously short. One emerging pattern in our ongoing research is that design teams that know a lot about their users are more likely to produce user experiences that are usable, effective, and pleasing.

Client Centered Design

What is the difference between user centered design and usability? Until writing this column I didn't have the faintest idea.

Designing for the "Average User"

User advocacy is one of the central goals of usability. User advocacy can be defined as the process an IT professional (with an interest in user experience) goes through in re-sensitizing herself to the world of the "average user."

Making Decisions About User Research

We know that we should do user research for projects. All the user-centred design material says so, we talk about it at conferences, we put it in proposals. We just know that it is a good thing to do. But when I talk to people about their actual projects, I find that very few people actually do user research. There are many many reasons (no time, no money, already know what users need etc etc etc). I think that part of the reason it doesn’t happen is also that we don’t have good tools to tell us just how much research to do, and even when it isn’t necessary at all to do research.

Why Users Can be Hard to Design For

To know the mind of others is one of the fundamental problems of being human. Much of our energy is spent trying to do so. For web designers, knowing the mind of users is complicated by having very little interaction with them. It is possible, on some projects, to design and redesign web sites without ever talking to one user.

Usability Evaluation of a University Portal Website

This article provides a summary of a usability evaluation of a university portal website. University faculty, staff, and student users were asked to complete representative search tasks and provide feedback on the portal usability. Several user interface design issues were found to impact user performance in terms of task success and perceived task difficulty, in addition to overall satisfaction. From these results, recommendations are made for university portal design related to the default 'home' page, channel customization and configuration, and placement of user-specific functions.

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.

User-Guide-Driven Development

In my work with Bumblebee I use an approach I call 'User-Guide-Driven Development,' or UGDD for short. The mechanics of UGDD is similar to that of Test-Driven Development (TDD), but before I write the test for a feature, I write a snippet of the user guide describing the feature I am about to implement.

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.

Four Bad Designs

Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

How Little Do Users Read?

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

Of Mice and iPods, or The Death of the Designer

Computing technologies are becoming so familiar it can feel as if they have always been here. It is strange to think that the mouse, for instance, was invented by Doug Englebart in the seventies. He must encounter a degree of incredulity when he mentions this to people. “You invented the mouse? Really? How nice. Did you also invent the pen?”

Preparing for User Research Interviews: Seven Things to Remember

Interviewing is an artful skill that is at the core of a wide variety of research methods in user-centered design, including stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and focus groups. Consequently, a researcher’s skill in conducting interviews has a direct impact on the quality and accuracy of research findings and subsequent decisions about design. Skilled interviewers can conduct interviews that uncover the most important elements of a participant’s perspective on a task or a product in a manner that does not introduce interviewer bias. Companies hire user researchers and user-centered designers because they possess this very ability.

The Kind of Documentation Users Really Want

Have you ever asked your users what kind of training materials they want, or how they prefer to learn software? This kind of information is critical to figuring out what help deliverables to produce. But really when it comes down to it, there are only so many options — printed manuals, short guides, interactive flash guides, videos, online help, live training, reference cards, context-sensitive help, workbooks and exercises, or, usually the favorite, someone to stand by their computer and answer questions whenever they need help.

Extreme User Research

What is the biggest problem I face almost every time a client hires me to do something about a web project going awry? They don't know a thing about their users. They don't have a clue, whatsoever. Unbelievable but true!

When Geolocation Gets Too Clever

Geo-redirecting -- redirecting users to different parts of your website depending on their own geographical location -- is a neat trick. It is handy when your website has different messages or product offers for users from different countries or regions. But many website owners mistakenly assume that their geolocation software works every time. It doesn't!

User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly

Users now do basic operations with confidence and perform with skill on sites they use often. But when users try new sites, well-known usability problems still cause failures.

This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Create UI

If you let your developers create your UI, hilarity ensues.

User Experience Inside and Out: The Strategy of Persuasive Design

Presents a strategic roadmap for user experience design. Combining usability with the science of persuasion, learn how you can: impact online decision-making and user motivation; create a dashboard-based framework to measure and track user experience; integrate your customer channels and internal-facing systems; and help executives appreciate and understand the value of user-centered thinking and design.

When Products Become Easy to Use, What's Next for Writers?

People who follow the right trends will someday lead them. Such an opportunity now lies in the hands of technical writers, as the computer field moves toward standardized, graphical, easy-to-use interfaces.

How to Embed Usability and UCD Internally

Integrating usability into any organisation can be a difficult and isolating experience. Get the lowdown on how to achieve this within your organisation.

New Technical Writer: Use the Persona to Create the Most Useful Section of Your User Document

A good User Document includes sections on how to set up, use, and care for the product. However, to create a great User Document, the technical writer should use the Persona, generated in the analysis of the User/Reader, to create the topics for the most useful section of the User Document. This article describes this procedure.

Five-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages

On your site, the content page is the user's most frequent final destination. This page contains the information the user came to the site to find. Sites often have hundreds, if not thousands (and in some cases, millions) of these critical pages. How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they've designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively?

Conducting Usability Studies at User Group Meetings

In this day and age, getting closer to your user base is imperative for creating user-centric documentation. This paper discusses how the Technical Publications group at Mentor Graphics tapped into their annual User Group meeting (MUG) to conduct usability studies. We cover: Convincing management of the ROI of participating in the User Group meeting; establishing relationships with meeting organizers; defining proper "protocol" for interacting with users and other meeting attendees; planning for and dealing with equipment setup; recruiting users to the usability lab; considering and acquiring incentives for usability lab participants.

Practicing Persona Development: an In-House Case Study

As Technical Communicators, many of us were initiated into this industry with the oft-cited cliche, 'know thy audience.' But what does this really mean? To what extent must we 'know' our audience in order to deliver effective information products? The critical questions are, 'what tools and means can I use to sufficiently understand the needs of my audience? Rather than relying on the directives of Engineering and Marketing, how can I discover the true needs of my audience and develop a user-centered design? And how do I hone my skills at gathering and applying this crucial data?' One of the emerging trends in Technical Communications is to develop user 'personas' as a design tool. This paper presents 'real-world' advice and 'best practices' on using the persona methodology to design information products.

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.

Conducting a (User-Centered) Expert Review

How do you review a product for usability, but make that review user-centered?

The Myth of "The User"

Instead of becoming computer users, like the cheery protagonists of Star Trek, we've become the computer used, like the gloomy inhabitants of Dilbert.

Behavioral Concepts: Effectiveness and User Response

What are hazards and why do we need them? Best practices for key elements of hazards.

Understanding Principles of Usability, Part 1

In this podcast, Karen Bachmann, manager of the Usability and User Experience SIG, provides an overview of the user-centered design process. This is part one of a two part series.

Design for Life Cycle

I was struck by the similarities in the challenges of getting software engineers to consider usability during design, and getting mechanical product designers to consider life cycle issues during design. It occurred to me designers may resist adopting these two design processes for very similar reasons, and that possible solutions may be almost identical.

Issues in Sizing UCD Projects

Sizing UCD projects presents special challenges to usability practitioners and consultants. Each project and UCD methodology comes with its own set of variables that makes it difficult to accurately estimate resource requirements and completion times.

A "Way Last Resort"?

I recently made a career transition from technical writing to usability engineering. In my new position, I have been conducting site visits with customers in the area. During a recent visit, I found an opportunity to query a user, 'Mike,' about using online Help. Join Molly on her first experience watching a user try to work with documentation, an experience both illuminating and alarming.

IDEO's "Ten Faces"

Tom Kelly's latest book 'The 10 Faces of Innovation' internal personas are used to help illustrate traits critical in building an innovation culture.The Experience Archtect is included.

So You Want to Be an Interaction Designer 2006

Five years ago, Robert Reimann wrote a seminal article for the Cooper Newsletter called 'So You Want To Be an Interaction Designer.' Like many people, I read the article and said, yep, that's what I want to be. I took Reimann's (good) advice and found both work and training as an interaction designer.

Progressive Disclosure

Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.

About Personas and Scenarios

Personas are an extremely powerful design tool, which help you to visualise an end-product that you can be confident will suit your users' needs by helping them achieve their goals, and help you test your success.

Users' Goals

Once you've got a statement of purpose you're halfway to being ready to design. The next step is to understand who'll be looking at the page, and why.

Usability News: The F-Pattern

Since I've started developing websites I've been looking for the ideal layout. Today I got another hint on the direction to take. Jacob Nielsen calls it the 'F-Pattern.'

Empirical Evaluation of a Popular Cellular Phone's Menu System: Theory Meets Practice

A usability assessment entailing a paper prototype was conducted to examine menu selection theories on a small screen device by determining the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of a popular cellular phone's menu system. Outcomes of this study suggest that users prefer a less extensive menu structure on a small screen device. The investigation also covered factors of category classification and item labeling influencing user performance in menu selection. Research findings suggest that proper modifications in these areas could significantly enhance the system's usability and demonstrate the validity of paper-prototyping which is capable of detecting significant differences in usability measures among various model designs.

Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First

Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

Users Interleave Sites and Genres

When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own.

Highlighting Functionality

Research indicates that most users never find the majority of the functionality in any given application. Learning tends to reach a plateau early on, and is rarely expanded upon. And what that means is that most customers consistently undervalue the software products they purchase and use.

How Can You 'Insure' Usability? – Achieving Routine User-Centered Design for Anthem's 12 Million Members Worldwide

Discusses how Anthem attained the training, standards, and resources they needed to create a sustained usability effort.

Dimensions of Usability: Defining the Conversation, Driving the Process

Have you ever wondered if your colleagues or clients really understand usability? Too often, standards or guidelines substitute for really engaging our business, technical and design colleagues in a discussion of what usability means. By looking at usability from five dimensions, we can create a consensus around usability goals and use that definition to provide the basis for planning user centered design activities.

可用性的维度：定义会话，推动进程

你有没有怀疑过你的同事或者客户是否真的理解“可用性”？在我们和同事的在商务、技术和设计讨论中谈论‘可用性’是什么时，经常充斥着一些标准和指导方针替代品。在本文中，我们通过了解可用性的五个维度，我们便能够围绕可用性目标达成一致的看法，并开始以这个可用性的定义为基础，来计划用户中心设计的工作。

Navigation: Left is Best

Web sites and Web applications require users to select from navigational options to access subsequent content pages. An important question relates to where the first navigational choices should be located on the page. Is the navigation better placed at the top of the page, on the left or right panels? If three clicks (i.e., three navigational level selections) are required to get to the desired content, should they be grouped together at the top, left, right, or split between different locations (e.g., select from the top, with the next selection[s] from the left, top or right)?

Helping Your Visitors: A State of Mind

Remember your site visitors won't find your website as easy to use as you do. Change your state of mind and you'll improve the user experience for all visitors.

角色设计的方法

在我们着手开始内部网（译者注：本文中提到的内部网一词，指的是企事业单位中内部网中的在线应用，不是指硬件构架）或网站设计项目时，最重要的一点是了解用户需求。只有如此才有可能确定出产品功能和特色，最后保证项目的成功；也只有如此，才有可能保证设计出来的东西可以服务于不同级别和具有不同目标的用户。

默认想法：消费品失败的原因

短信服务（SMS）是一个典型的迷人应用。不仅流行而且有利可图，给网络运行商带来了丰厚的收入。甚至还有强大的铃声下载，信息提醒以及交互式游戏的销售后市场。有意思的是，这样一个成功的产品在技术上是如此的被轻视。就所有的关于SMS市场的狂热的讨论来说，产品在最近几年中基本就没有变化。根据它的成功表现，业界应该投入更多的努力来理解SMS带给消费者的价值，并且推出能够延伸这种价值的新服务。

人性的界面

我们常常看到这样的新闻报道：飞机坠毁夺走了好几百人的生命，某次工业事故导致几百万英镑的损失，某新发现的系统医疗错误致使数千病患重返医院。几个月后，公布的调查结果如下：操作机器设备时的人为错误导致了这些事故。人们使用‘人为错误’一词来表达‘操作上的错误’，而经常的情况是，这些‘人为错误’ 根本就是机器设备的人机界面设计或安装上本身固有的问题。低劣的人机界面会导致使用效率降低或者容易发生错误，严重的则会造成财产和生命损失。

Beyond Usability Testing: User-Centred Design and Organisational Maturity

What lies beyond usability testing? User-centred design, based on ISO standards. We discuss this approach and the organisational maturity needed to put it into action.

User-Centred Design (UCD): 6 Methods

Learn all about user-centered design, the methods available to you, and how and when they should be employed.

Usability for All

With a small budget to create a website, many small businesses bypass usability testing. While it is not always possible to do a full-blown usability test on a small website, there are steps that website developers can take to help make sure users are not ignored during the process.

The User Advocate: Interactive Prototyping, Part 1: Easy PDF Prototyping

I've often observed that once wireframing begins, it's off to the races! In the rush to launch, we sometimes forget end-users. Is there a way to ensure that they get a voice during this always-hectic phase?

The User Advocate: Interactive Prototyping, Part 2: Building a PDF Prototype

This tutorial shows a very high-fidelity prototype—based upon the current gotomedia site—that might be created very late in the design process.

An Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them

There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution.

Collaboration Sessions: How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes

I have participated in, led, and suffered major website redesign efforts. Whether at process-heavy consultancies, notable product companies, or design studios, all teams experience the same points of pain: late feedback, lack of common design vision, and complaints that individuals or teams didnt have enough input.

All About Users

A blog from Bangalore based on everything related to the user experience and interaction.

Default Thinking: Why Consumer Products Fail

Short Message Service (SMS), or texting, is a typical killer application. It is not only popular but profitable, bringing in significant revenue to network operators. There is even a strong after market selling RingTones, info alerts and crude interactive games. A great technological irony is that such a successful product is so under appreciated. For all of the frenzied SMS marketing discussion, the product has hardly changed over the last few years. Given its success, you would think the industry would put more effort into understanding the value SMS offers to consumers and then produce new services that extend this value.

The Human Interface

The phrase 'human error' is taken to mean 'operator error', but more often than not the disaster is inherent in the design or installation of the human interface. Bad interfaces are slow or error prone to use. Bad interfaces cost money and cost lives.

Usability and User Experience Design: The Next Decade

Predicts that usability practitioners will need new skills to cope with changes in this field.

User-Centered Deliverables: Communicating the Right Things to the Right People

As usability professionals working on the Web, it is our responsibility to make sure our clients' sites communicate effectively to their intended audience. We make recommendations about what information the audience needs, how they expect it to be presented and how they’ll need to work with it once they’ve got it. But how often do we consider our own audience, the people we need to make our recommendations happen? Does one set of documentation meet the needs of all members of an interdisciplinary team? Probably not.

Personas, Participatory Design and Product Development: An Infrastructure for Engagement

The design of commercial products that are intended to serve millions of people has been a challenge for collaborative approaches. The creation and use of fictional users, concrete representations commonly referred to as 'personas', is a relatively new interaction design technique. It is not without problems and can be used inappropriately, but based on experience and analysis it has extraordinary potential. Not only can it be a powerful tool for true participation in design, it also forces designers to consider social and political aspects of design that otherwise often go unexamined.

Afraid So: Horrible Web Monstrosities

Here they come. Nightmare web sites that, from a usability perspective, are horrid monsters. When you're tired and in a hurry, you want a web site to quickly and easily provide relevant content to you, so you can solve a problem or perform some task. Discover common hideous impediments to web usability. WARNING: Not for the faint hearted!

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.

Altruistic vs. Narcissistic Web Sites

Users are repulsed by web sites that are narcissistic, egotistic, corporate-speak, hard to understand, and difficult to use. Users are attracted to and enjoy web sites that are altruistic, user-prioritized, user-focused, easy to understand, easy to use, and full of fresh, relevant content.

Involving Customers in Developing Usability Metrics

Usability metrics are standards to measure a product against and are critical to finding out whether the product is successful in the areas that are important to its users. You can miss critical observations during a usability test if you do not use metrics to test the product. This is especially true if you are testing a product for the first time and do not know what the test will uncover. This paper describes how to find out what users want out of your product and develop usability metrics through focus group and contextual inquiry research.

Three Ways To Find Out What Your Customers Want

The Web is interactive, whether you like it or not. And your customers are live participants in the marketing process, whether you like it or not. And as participants, they want something that most companies find hard to deliver. Your customers want you to listen. They want you to tune in and hear what is on their minds.

A Blog on Usability in India

This Indian usability blog attempts to bridge the gap between user requirements research and UI design.

Tell Site Visitors What To Do

Being sensitive to the fact that the user is in control, many sites simply present as many options as possible on their home pages. The thinking apparently being that the more choices you show on page one, the more likely you are to present something that connects with as many visitors as possible.

Critic to Creator: Recognizing Good Design

All too often, people in our field focus so much on pointing out the egregious interaction design mistakes that make it to market, we forget to pay attention to the good design that exists. Not only does it make our profession look bad if we are always complaining, but it also makes us less effective.

Design Research: Why You Need It

Just as important as market research, design research is a necessary ingredient for creating, developing, and delivering a successful product. Marketers need solid market research to guide their decisions about product positioning, revenue potential, and target markets. Likewise, designers need solid design research to guide their decisions about the product's interaction framework, feature set, and overall appropriateness for its users.

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data

The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points.

Making Use of User Research

By focusing on how a product performs in the lab without broader knowledge of the user's environment and goals, measurement alone may be misleading. To get the most value and meaning out of user feedback it is important to choose the appropriate method for conducting and analyzing user research.

The Origin of Personas

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness. Had personas been developed in the laboratory, the full story of how they came to be would have been published long ago, but since their use developed over many years in both my practice as a software inventor and architectural consultant and the consulting work of Cooper designers, that is not the case. Since Inmates was published, many people have asked for the history of Cooper personas, and here it is.

Perfecting Your Personas

It's easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective design and communication tools. If you have begun to create your own personas, here are some tips to help you perfect them.

Usability in Practice: Company Profile of Hylotek

Which companies are actually practicing usability, and what does usability mean to them? Who's investing time and money into usability, and what kind of return are they receiving on their investment in the real world?

Accessibility Redefined

Accessibility has come a long way. Not only most public places but even many private areas now claim to be 'accessible'. However, this term usually implies that a person in a wheelchair is able to get to the inside of a venue. This is not enough. If I am using a wheelchair, I would like to be completely autonomous and move around freely. I don’t want to have to go along a long dark corridor to use a service lift in order to get to another floor. Although I always appreciate it, I don’t want to have to count on the generosity of passersby to help me open a door or push my wheelchair up a slope. My only wish is to blend in with other people, and enjoy life as much as anyone else.

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.

Market Maturity

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.

Web-User Satisfaction on the Upswing

Site visitors are more likely to finish Web tasks successfully, but site searches are still troublesome, according to a recent survey.

Effects of Link Arrangement on Search Efficiency

The subjects that used the 155-link Web pages had a significantly faster search time using a three-column link arrangement, while the two-column link arrangement had the slowest search time. Results for the 30-link Web pages did not show a significant difference in search times for any specific link arrangement.

OOBE Project: A Case Study in User-Friendly Hardware

Many people can't even program their VCR, let alone set up a new PC. As part of an industry-wide response to this problem, Epson America came up with the Users Digest. We hoped it would grab users' attention and hold it long enough to get them up and running without calling tech support. This paper relates the history of the User k Digest andprovides a guided tour of this innovative document.

Customer Partnering: Another Way to Gather User Data

Information developers have been using user-centered design principles for some time now. Many of the techniques available, however, do not provide the depth of knowledge needed to design more complex information products. Customer partnering sessions take place ofer a period of three or four months, allowing information developers to learn more about customer needs and how information products are used. Customer partnering relationships benefit both the company that funds the sessions and the customers who attend them.

Cadius

Cadius es una iniciativa al servicio de la comunidad de profesionales de la Arquitectura de Información y la Usabilidad.

Usability Gesucht

Unregelmäßig erscheinende Artikel über die aktuellen Problemen in Bereich Ergonomie/Usability und die mögliche Lösungen.

Why Consumer Products Have Inferior User Experience

Physical products, from consumer electronics to cars, are needlessly complex because they're developed by insular companies that continue to ignore the growing usability trend.

Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution

Better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time.

Got Usability? Talking with Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen has brought usability to the attention of the general public, but within the user experience community he's been criticized by those who say he emphasizes a view that excludes other dimensions of user experience. So is he the defender of ease-of-use or the enemy of creativity?

The Making of a Discipline: The Making of a Title

Many people who work within the design field have had a hard time assimilating the full scope of Experience Design—and a harder time accepting their niches within it. The reasons for this resistance uncover much about the state of design as well as the state of identity.

Designing Customer-Centered Organizations

Even with the present downturn in the economy, more companies, from new media to established banks, have larger usability and design teams than ever before. Should we be content that we have come so far?

Focus on User Responses

What do you really want your users to do once you get them to your site? What information do you want to get to them? How do you want to them to use your site? What responses do you want from your users?

Free Stuff and Web Usability

Everyone loves free stuff. Capitalize on this and you can make your site more user-centered. It can also drive up sales, profits, and user satisfaction.

Más Allá de la Usabilidad: Interfaces 'Afectivas'

La creciente popularización de las nuevas tecnologías de la información obliga a que cualquier producto interactivo sea diseñado para una audiencia cada vez más heterogénea y menos tolerante con experiencias de uso frustrantes. Las técnicas, metodologías y prácticas propias de la Usabilidad y Accesibilidad, intentan hacer frente a este hecho, estudiando las necesidades, objetivos y comportamiento del usuario, y enfocando cualquier decisión sobre el diseño, así como la evaluación, en base a estos factores.

Preference Does Not Equal Performance

People will swear up and down that they love a particular product. They will tell you that the colors are right, the size is perfect, and the information is exactly what they needed. However, until you watch and test users you will not see how well the product works. You will not find out if they really would continue using the product, in the right amount, at the right time, under the conditions you expected. People have a funny way of deciding when, where and how they will using something.

Understanding Design Misfits

The purpose of this paper is to briefly discuss design misfits. A cursory overview of misfits is provided, along with a working definition. Eight types of design misfits are revealed. Three examples of each type of misfit are provided for clarification.

How to Make URLs User-Friendly

One of the worst elements of the web from a user interface standpoint is the URL. However, if they're short, logical, and self-correcting, URLs can be acceptably usable.

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.

Rethinking User-Centered Information Development

Often in the computer industry there is a tendency to provide information about the features of a system. However, customers usually purchase the system based on knowledge of its features, when they receive the product they need information on how to accomplish tasks. Developing task-oriented information requires a shift in perspective from what the computer technology can do, to what your customers want to do with the technology. The resulting information must be usercentered rather than feature-driven. These types of customer requirements demand afresh development approach.

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.

Dimensions of Usability: Defining the Conversation, Driving the Process

The Rise of the Subsite

Web users need structure to make sense of the many and varied information spaces they navigate. The fundamental nature of the Web does not support any structure beyond the individual page which is the only recognized unit of information. For information spaces that cannot easily be hierarchically structured, the subsite can be used as a helpful additional structuring mechanism. Subsites can also be used in hierarchical information spaces to give particular prominence to a certain level of the hierarchy which is used as the subsite designator.

Simplicity Costs Less and Works Better

If ordinary people have to use it, make it simple. You'll be doing your users a favour, and saving money too.

Tech-Support Tales: Internet Hard to Use for Novice Users

The Internet is still much too difficult to use for novice users. Specialized information appliances like WebTV reduce complexity but still involve considerable risk of user error.

Zipf Curves and Website Popularity

Much available data suggests that Web use follows a Zipf distribution. The figure shows the distribution of incoming page requests to www.sun.com during a one-month period last year. Each datapoint represents one page, with the x-axis showing pages sorted according to popularity: the first page is the most popular one (the home page), the second page is the one that received second-most requests that month, and so on until we reach page number 10,000 which was only requested a single time that month.

Designing for Real People: Additional Lessons for Web Design from Mall and Retail Design

Suggests lessons from bricks-and-mortar retailers that can be applied to web design.

Formal Definition of User-Centered Design

UCD is a highly structured, comprehensive product development methodology driven by: (1) clearly specified, task-oriented business objectives, and (2) recognition of user needs, limitations and preferences. Information collected using UCD analysis isscientifically applied in the design, testing, and implementation of products and services. When rigorously applied, a UCD approach meets both user needs and the business objectives of the sponsoring organization.

User-Driven Documentation: From Usability Testing to User Guide

Rockwell Software is a $90-million company specializing in plant automation software. Offices in West Allis, Wisconsin, and Mayfield Village, Ohio allow technical communicators to work closely with development teams to design, test, and release usable, consistent software and information products. While Rockwell Software’s information development process is a multi-faceted endeavor, this paper focuses on the following three steps we implement to create our information products: interviewing customers to establish information guidelines, conducting usability tests, and writing Getting Results guides.

TaskZ

This site is dedicated to increasing awareness of the benefits derived from the use of 'user-centered' development methods in the creation of advanced technological solutions to complex social and business problems. The primary focus of our editorial content is on screen-based products and services. In the strong belief that knowledge is power and collaboration expands knowledge we have created this site with the hope of building an executive resource for user-centered design information.

The UCD Decision Matrix: How, When, and Where to Sell User-Centered Design into the Development Cycle

Welcome to the UCD Decision Matrix Website. This is a tool that provides information about how user-centered design practitioners around the world have had success and failure integrating their processes into the product development lifecycle.

Information Engineering for the 21st Century

Bowie urges technical communicators to spend less time creating documentation and more time designing products that people can use intuitively.

Little Machines: Understanding Users Understanding Interfaces

This paper questions the ubiquitous practice of supplying minimalist information to users, of making that information functional only, of assuming that the Shannon-Weaver communication model should govern online systems, and of ignoring the social implications of such a stance. Help systems that provide fast, temporary solutions without providing any background information lead to the danger of users completing tasks that they do not understand at all. (Word will help us write a legal pleading, even if we have no idea what one is.) As a result, we have help systems that attempt to be invisible and to provide tool instruction but not conceptual instruction. Such a system presents itself as a neutral tool, but it is actually an incomplete environment, denying both the complexity and alternative (and possibly improved) modes of thinking about the subject at hand.

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.

Designing the User-Centered Process Model: A Case Study

The case study involved the redesigning of NCR’s performance improvement model for developing information products, documentation, and training interventions for our customers. This process model, the Quality Information Products Process (QIPP) seeks to move information product developers away from an adversarial, compliance type model towards a quality improvement system that is grounded in the everyday practices of the users. The redesign effort was initiated during a review of the existing process as it related to a new corporate-wide product creation process which was recently implemented.

Low-Fidelity Prototyping for Technical Communicators

Technical communicators are responsible for a great deal of what the user sees and touches. This means that more technical communicators are becoming integrated members of product design teams, bringing their expertise into the group and taking the lead in designing and evaluating their information systems, Creating low-fidelity paper prototypes of software for customer feedback sessions is an effective methodfor gathering valuable user input early in development.

Advanced Toolkit for Experienced Technical Communicators: Using a User-Centered Design Process to Overcome Challenges in Implementing a User-Centered Design Process

Technical writers have known for years that a good explanation for a bad software interface may be better than nothing, but that it’s not as good as a usable software interface. With ‘usability' gaining greater visibility, this is a good time to implement a usercentered design process. This article looks at ways that the approach and techniques of such a process can be applied to the task of introducing a new process.