#26260
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.
Rogers, David J. GotoMedia (2005). Design>User Centered Design>Usability>Testing
#19475
User Experience Design for Working Web Sites and Applications 
As Technical Communicators, we’re often added as members of software and web site development teams merely as an afterthought. Executives, managers, programmers, and other team members frequently view the results of our work—manuals, online help systems, tutorials, and other documents—as 'nice-to-have' additions to products. This pervasive attitude is certainly not healthy for the profession of technical communication... but it’s not good for the applications our organizations and clients produce either. When Technical Communicators working in an e-business unit as user advocates are given more responsibility and more authority over the 'user experience' of a web-based application, for instance, they affect the bottom-line. They increase hits, product buzz, and completed transactions. By moving beyond manuals, beyond help, and into the new role of User Experience Designer, we increase the value we add to services and products and increase our professional status within organizations.
Sisler, Paul and Catherine M. Titta. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#30626
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.
Nadel, Jerome and Jay More. Human Factors International (2007). Design>User Centered Design>User Experience>Usability
#30827
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.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design
#24735
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.
Beecher, Frederick. Usability Professionals Association (2004). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design
#18567
User-Centered Design is a well established process that has been widely adopted by many organizations to deliver products that meet users' expectations. IBM has regularly enhanced this process, which has now been consolidated within the broader framework of User Engineering.
#26516
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.
Fidgeon, Tim. Webcredible (2005). Design>User Centered Design>Accessibility>Usability
#20727
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.
Butler, Scott A., Jennifer L. Giordano and Myron M. Shawala III. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Usability
#27940
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.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#28429
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.
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2005). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>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
#28583
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.
Malsam, Molly. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design
#23299
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.
O'Reilly, Dennis. PC World (2004). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#19497
What Does Usability Mean: Looking Beyond ‘Ease of Use’
The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to 'easy to use,' but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer. A more precise definition can be used to understand user requirements, formulate usability goals and decide on the best techniques for usability evaluations. An understanding of the five characteristics of usability – effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn – helps guide the user-centered design tasks to the goal of usable products.
Quesenbery, Whitney. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design
#31019
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!
Heraghty, Michael. Mediajunk (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#30315
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.
Oram, Andrew. Boston Broadside (1991). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Documentation
#10035
Who, What, When, Where, How: Design Issues of Capture and Access Applications
One of the general themes in ubiquitous computing is the construction of devices and applications to support the automated capture of live experiences and the future access of those records. Over the past five years, our research group has developed over half a dozen different capture and access applications. In this paper, we present an overview of eight of these applications. We discuss the different design issues encountered while creating each of these applications.
Georgia Institute of Technology (2001). Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#22309
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.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Usability>User Experience>User Centered Design
#20867
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.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1997). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#26959
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。
Dix, Alan. uiGarden (2005). (Chinese) Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Usability>User Centered Design
#27176
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。
Quesenbery, Whitney. uiGarden (2006). (Chinese) Articles>Usability>User Centered Design
#32144
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.
Brolund, Daniel. Thoughts of a Goldfish (2008). Articles>Documentation>Usability>User Centered Design
#32356
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.
Schroeder, Will. Journal of Usability Studies (2008). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Methods
#32807
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.
Chaparro, Barbara S. Usability News (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design
#32940
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.
Spencer, Donna. DonnaM (2008). Articles>Research>Usability>User Centered Design
