#23514
It is advisable to be aware of the predominant conventions used on the Web. As Jakob Nielsen writes in the November 14, 1999 issue of his Alertbox, 'No website is seen in isolation: users come to your site expecting things to work the same way they are already used to.'
Atkisson, Heidi. University of Washington-Seattle (2003). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design
#29996
When IT professionals meet to talk about Internet and Intranets, the focus is invariably on technology. Active Server, Java applets, browsers, cookies, XML, scripting, secure sockets, JDBC, push, etc. It is rarely that any attention is given to what makes good content. What does the user want? And most users are actually 'readers'.
HyperWrite (2001). Design>Web Design>Writing>User Centered Design
#23982
What Causes Customers to Buy on Impulse? 
This paper studies the design elements within e-commerce sites that motivate impulse purchases online.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>E Commerce
#23288
What Do Manuals Say About Your Company?
According to the Consumer Electronics Association, product returns represent a $10 billion-dollar-a-year problem for the consumer electronics industry. Technical support costs are spiraling (even with the migration to off-shore providers) while consumer satisfaction with this support is plummeting. New technology and expanded offerings to a stabilized market are increasing competition. What can manufacturers do to help combat these problems? Better consumer manuals are a start.
Manual Labour (2003). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design
#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
#20627
User-centered design (UCD) is an approach to design that grounds the process in information about the people who will use the product. UCD processes focus on users through the planning, design and development of a product.
Usability Professionals Association. Design>User Centered Design
#31002
What Is Your Mental Model? An Interview With Indi Young
Rosenfeld Media has just released Indi Young's Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behavior. Boxes and Arrows sits down with Indi to talk about the origins and evolution of the mental model.
Baum, Chris. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Interviews>User Centered Design
#29191
What to Know About Your Audiences
If you provide your audience value in your publications equal to the effort or expense they put out, they will continue to come back. You will have created a stable system that continues to draw the audience and provide your organization with the value it deserves in return for its efforts.
Boiko, Bob. Content Management Professionals (2006). Articles>User Centered Design>Audience Analysis
#18193
What Users Want from Electronic Performance Support: Results from Three Waves of Qualitative Data
Quantitative data from user testing of three successive releases of a visual programming language demonstrated the limited value of several existing performance support systems. Qualitative data collected concurrently pointed to specific usability problems. Organization of help information was not clear to users, thereby hindering search. In addition, users could not act on help pages contained developer rather than user vocabulary and concepts.
Krull, Robert, Janet Friauf, Angela Eaton and Johel Brown-Grant. STC Proceedings (2002). Presentations>User Centered Design>EPSS
#23505
When users complain about sites, webmasters frequently respond with hostility, derision, condescension, or just plain silence. No wonder users rarely bother to complain. Bad attitudes stand between the site you created and the site your users want to use.
Seebach, Peter. IBM (2001). Design>Web Design>Correspondence>User Centered Design
#21465
What's Your Idea of a Mental Model?
We need a way to document and express mental models that is as simple and robust as personas for user profiles and scenarios for tasks. By laying out users' current mental models and a target mental model, we can clarify our thinking and communication about the user interface's objects, metaphors, and interaction.
McDaniel, Scott M. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Cognitive Psychology
#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
#27379
When Getting the Job Done Isn't Enough
Interface designers today are swirling within a blizzard of data. How many types of user data does your Web team collect?
Straub, Kathleen. Human Factors International (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Log Analysis
#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
#28912
When ROI Isn't Enough: Making Persuasive Cases for User-Centered Design
Making the case for user-centered design (UCD) is a topic of recurring discussion for UX professionals. Much of the discussion has centered on strictly objective approaches such as cost-benefit or return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. However, recent commentary suggests proving ROI is not always enough.
Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Project Management>Workplace
#24919
Who is the "Older Adult" in Your Audience?
Discusses a misunderstood demographic.
Chisnell, Dana E. and Janice C. 'Ginny' Redish. Intercom (2005). Design>Accessibility>User Centered Design>Elderly
#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
#30625
Who's Keeping Score? The Value of Usability Scorecards and Metrics
Explains how HFI's evolving set of user experience metrics can help you: quantify best practices in design at a site, sub-site or page level; prioritize your usability resources across a range of projects; get valuable feedback quickly, in 'design time'; track and benchmark user experience over time; learn how you score against your competitors; and synthesize your various user data streams into an integrated UX dashboard.
Goddard, Phil and Susan Weinschenk. Human Factors International (2007). Design>User Experience>User Centered Design>Podcasts
#18690
Why Are Good User Interfaces So Hard to Make? Three Insights into Good Design
Last year at Internet World a woman asked me why software and Web sites were so hard to use. Let's call her Pandora. I told Pandora that either we aren't smart enough yet, or the industry has not matured to the point at which well-designed products are required for companies to be profitable. She didn't buy it. She swore that sometimes we just did it on purpose. She laughed when she said it, but I think she meant it. It's my job to make simple-to-use products, and I took what she said to heart. I said that we really are trying, and that we're getting better at it all the time. She walked away unimpressed. I went back to the hotel bar that night and thought about why things are the way they are with the Internet and computers.
Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (1999). Design>User Interface>User Centered Design>Web Design
#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
#25076
Why Game Documentation is Essential to a Satisfying User Experience
Documentation and information organization are an integral part of video game construction. The video game industry may be one of the directions technical communicators will move toward in the near future.
Peterson, Martin. Usability Interface (2004). Articles>Documentation>User Experience>User Centered Design
#27023
I view a user experience as a conversation between people separated over the distance of time. At one end of that conversation are those who create the product; at the other, the people who use it. In between is the product itself--with a design that either helps or hinders; creates a barrier-free interaction or shouts in an unfamiliar language. Because this conversation does not happen in real time, we are not there to smooth over the rough spots and make sure that we have spoken clearly. Instead, we have to build our understanding of those users into every aspect of the design, by putting people--users--at the center of the design process.
Quesenbery, Whitney. UXmatters (2005). Articles>User Experience>Communication>User Centered Design
#30668
Wikipedia, Champion of User-Generated Content
Encourage user contribution to your Web site by learning from Wikipedia. Wikipedia builds on open source and respects the geographical variety and potential accessibility needs of its users. It provides tools to help users contribute, but also fosters an atmosphere where contributions are verified and discussed by the broader community.
Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>Community Building>User Centered Design
#18789
Winning With Rapid Development: Incorporating Customer Needs into Fast-Paced Web Design
This paper describes a case study of a challenging but successful rapid-development web project, which incorporated customer-centered design using multiple methodologies. Within ten weeks, we conducted field studies and focus groups, produced paper prototypes of three navigational concepts, conducted a usability test using paper prototypes, and performed heuristic evaluation on the resulting design. Keys to our success include: assembling a top-notch team, running many project phases concurrently, and good, ongoing team-client and intra-team communication.
Sova, Deborah Hinderer and Cory Knobel. STC Proceedings (2002). Design>User Centered Design>Methods>Web Design
#28237
Working with Others: Accessibility and User Research
After personally observing users with disabilities interacting with websites in unexpected ways, I have come to believe strongly in the value of user research--and to suspect that we really don't know quite as much about real-world accessibility as we think we do.
Boscarol, Maurizio. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>User Centered Design
