#21155
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.
Rhodes, John S. WebWord (1999). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#14346
Gathering Input for the Best Possible Prototype 
Prototyping has long been a part of the sofiware development process, but is still an underutilized aspect of documentation design, particularly for online design. Developing a detailed approach to prototyping lets writers design and confirm document usability early in the development cycle. Implementing detailed prototyping in an iterative design cycle ultimately leads to the best possible document for the audience.
Mobley, Karen L. STC Proceedings (1997). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability
#23977
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.
Goodwin, Kim. Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas
#21271
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?
Thornton, Chad. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design
#27942
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.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#27107
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.
Usborne, Nick. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#27476
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.
Farrell, Tom. Frontend Infocentre (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design
#27387
Discusses how Anthem attained the training, standards, and resources they needed to create a sustained usability effort.
Weinschenk, Susan and Kyle Tolar. Human Factors International (2006). Presentations>Usability>User Centered Design
#19428
How Good are Designers at Predicting User Performance?
Having designers guess the best way of achieving optimal user performance is very difficult. Their design decisions can be improved by ensuring that designers are familiar with the research literature, and by effectively using performance-based usability testing.
Bailey, Robert. Web Usability (2001). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#31909
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design
#30219
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.
Ismail, Ismail. Webcredible (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design
#21048
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.
Baker, Adam. Merges.net (2001). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#25074
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.
Dix, Alan. uiGarden (2005). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Usability>User Centered Design
#28533
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.
Armano, David. uiGarden (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas
#18687
Web sites and software often compete with each other based on the features they provide. The popular assumption is that the more features a product has, the better it will be. The truth is that features improve a product only if they are actually used by the customer. In most cases the proliferation of features in products creates more complexity than value. Each feature gets an icon or a link on a Web site or toolbar, and is yet another item that the user needs to wade through before they can find the one that they need. Web sites are still young, but many Mac and Microsoft® Windows applications show the carnage of years of feature wars with competing products. Over the years I've learned a few things about how to keep interfaces simple, and simultaneously keep the power intact for more sophisticated users.
Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (1999). Design>Usability>User Centered Design
#13939
Information Design Considerations for Improving Situation Awareness in Complex Problem-Solving 
The conventional techniques for task analysis derive the basic tasks that make up user actions. However, in the complex-problem solving environment, attempts to describe step-by-step actions break down because no single route to a solution exists. Although individual tasks can be defined, task-analysis normally results in the tasks being divorced from context. However, to support complex problem-solving, the design must place the information within the situation context and allow users to develop and maintain situation awareness.
Albers, Michael J. ACM SIGDOC (1999). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability
#20543
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.
Bowie, John S. Intercom (2003). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Usability
#26244
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.
Calabria, Tina. uiGarden (2005). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas
#24375
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.
Hammar, Molly. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>User Centered Design>Usability
#14519
Involving Users Throughout The Information Development Process
Testing documents for usability is critical, but we don’t always get to do it. Even when we do, too often, it’s too little, too late. What we really want are documents that we are fine-tuning in usability testing because they already meet users’ needs, match our users’ mental models, and fit with the way that our users work.
Redish, Janice C. 'Ginny'. STC Proceedings (1994). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability
#28645
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.
Usability Body of Knowledge (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Project Management
#31738
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.
Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2008). Articles>Documentation>Usability>User Centered Design
#13945
Learnability in Information Design
Design of information used for technical communication of complex products should consider how learnable that information is, and strive to deliver materials that are inherently learnable.The speed of information interchange and the demands of the workplace and school curricula require increasingly minimalist approaches to the material that is made available. People are frustrated by long learning times, and new users of software tools demand rapid absorption of tool capabilities. In addition, many readers of technical information are people for whom English is not their native language.Methods and practices that worked in the period when people were willing to commit to hours of study to understand a topic, or days of practice to master a tool, no longer work in a world based on ?internet time.? To assist our understanding of these trends in learning, this paper addresses three key areas related to learnability: proposing a definition of learnability, showing where learnability and usability intersect, and providing a basis for learnability based on some attributes of human beings.
Haramundanis, Kathy. ACM SIGDOC (2001). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability>Cognitive Psychology
#18914
Listening to the Learners: A Case Study in Health Information Website Design
An important mantra of user-centered design is to 'know thy user.' Accomplishing this requires one to decide what should be known about the user and how to gather the information. In this paper, we focus on the specific instance where the user is a learner. Specifically, we describe our efforts to listen to the learners of an information website, the Arthritis Source, and to act on this information.
Turns, Jennifer and Tracey S. Wagner. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Scientific Communication>Usability
#20364
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.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Journal of Computer Documentation (2001). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Usability
