A Participatory Approach to Developing User-Centered Communications  

Participatory communication is most often applied to development communications--a field of practice rooted in the modernization efforts of the U.S. post World War II. Similar to participatory design, popular definitions and models of participatory communication provide a lens through which the efficacy of user-centered communications may be viewed. At Indiana University, we have had success in increasing the usability and usefulness of communication products by including end users, their advocates, and related stakeholders in cross-functional teams. The adoption of new systems used at Indiana University was fueled by communications strategies, plans, and products that resulted from a participatory approach.

Fitzpatrick, Christine Y. and Gregory A. Moore. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Participatory Design

Accentuate the Negative: Obtaining Effective Reviews Through Focused Questions    

How you ask a question strongly determines the type of answer that you will obtain. For effective documentation reviews, whether they are conducted internally or externally as part of usability testing, it's important to use precise questions that will provide concrete information on which to base revisions. This paper proposes an approach to obtaining useful feedback that emphasizes negative, 'what did we do wrong?' questions. This approach focuses limited resources on areas that need improvement rather than areas that already work well and that don't require immediate improvement.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Technical Communication Online (1997). Articles>Usability>Methods>Testing

Accessibility Audit vs. Accessibility Testing

Article outlining the difference between the two accessibility evaluation methods: The accessibility audit and accessibility testing.

Moss, Trenton. Webcredible (2007). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Methods

Activity Modeling: Toward a Pragmatic Integration of Activity Theory with Usage-Centered Design  

Activity modeling is a systematic approach to organizing and representing the contextual aspects of tool use that is both well-grounded in an accepted theoretical framework and embedded within a proven design method. Activity theory provides the vocabulary and conceptual framework for understanding the human use of tools and other artifacts. Usage-centered design provides the methodological scaffolding for applying activity theory in practice. In this Technical Paper, activity theory and usage-centered design are outlined and the connections between the two are highlighted. Simple extensions to the models of usage-centered design are introduced that together succinctly model the salient and most essential features of the activities within which tool use is embedded. Although not intended as a tutorial, examples of Activity Maps, Activity Profiles, and Participation Maps are provided.

Constantine, Larry L. Constantine and Lockwood (2006). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods

ADDIE Model

The ADDIE model is the generic process traditionally used by instructional designers and training developers. The five phases—Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation—represent a dynamic, flexible guideline for building effective training and performance support tools.

InstructionalDesign.org. Articles>Education>Instructional Design>Methods

Advanced Issues in Usability: Balancing User Preference and Performance Data Collection  

The purpose of this paper is to provide a little background on my position for the progression on usability issues. I’ll present what measures I typically collect, and the differences between performance and preference data. Having this as a starting place may help us to have a useful progression discussion.

Rauch, Thyra L. STC Proceedings (1996). Presentations>Usability>Methods

Agile Principles Are Changing Everything

There's an irony about agile development. There is no hard evidence that it produces better software, faster. And formal adoption rates, admittedly hard to measure, don't reach the 20 percent mark. Yet the ideas that underpin agile development--defining requirements incrementally, writing software in short stints, seeking customer feedback, testing code as it's written, frequent builds--have caught on like wildfire. They are widely accepted as sound development practices, even among teams that have not formally adopted them.

deJong, Jennifer. Software Development Times (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Agile>Methods

Agile: What is it Anyway?

Agile methodologies have had a lot of press in recent years. To listen to some people, agile methodologies are the answer to all the ailments that have ever plagued software development from the beginning of the computer age. But what are they, really? And do they really deliver on that promise? The answer is: (drumroll, please) it depends.

Little, Karen. BA Collective (2007). Articles>Project Management>Agile>Methods

Analyzing Card Sort Results with a Spreadsheet Template

This article explains how to quickly derive easily-read, quantitative results from a card-sort activity by entering data into a spreadsheet template that is adaptable to any set of cards and categories.

Lamantia, Joe. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting

Analyzing the Interaction Between Facilitator and Participants in Two Variants of the Think-Aloud Method    

This paper focuses on the interaction between test participants and test facilitator in two variants of the think-aloud method. In a first, explorative study, we analyzed think-aloud transcripts from two usability tests: a concurrent think-aloud test and a constructive interaction test. The results of our analysis show that while the participants in both studies never explicitly addressed the facilitator, the think-aloud participants showed more signs of awareness of the facilitator than the participants in the constructive interaction test. This finding may have practical implications for the validity of the two methods.

van den Haak, Maaike J. and Menno D.T. de Jong. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods

The Anatomy of a Help File: An Iterative Approach

This article presents an approach to Help file design that focuses on creating a task-centered user experience and accommodates an iterative development strategy. This methodology allows the introduction of user assistance into early test phases--not only getting earlier validation for its accuracy, but also supporting quality assurance testing by serving as the test scripts for interactions with the user interface. This approach can also be a self-contained strategy--that is, one that allows an iterative approach to user assistance development even if the rest of product development operates on a waterfall model.

Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Documentation>Methods>Help

Anthropologists Go Native in the Corporate Village

Anthropologist Elizabeth Briody earned her PhD studying communities of Mexican-American farm workers and Catholic nuns. For the past 11 years, though, she's been studying a different community -- the men and women of General Motors. As GM's 'industrial anthropologist,' Briody explores the intricacies of life at the company. It's not all that different from her previous work. 'Anthropologists help elicit the cultural patterns of an organization,' she says. 'What rules do people have about appropriate and inappropriate behavior? How do they learn those rules and pass them on to others?' Briody is a pioneer in a growing and influential field -- corporate anthropology. What began as an experiment in a handful of companies such as GM has become an explosion. In recent years, some of the biggest names in business have recruited highly trained anthropologists to understand their workers and customers better, and to help design products that better reflect emerging cultural trends. These companies are convinced that the tools of ethnographic research -- minute observation, subtle interviewing, systematic documentation -- can answer questions about organizations and markets that traditional research tools can't.

Kane, Kate A. Fast Company (1996). Articles>Usability>Methods>Contextual Inquiry

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires

The design community keeps making a lot of noise about designing for people/users/customers. However, while this notion is well-intentioned and even conceptually correct, I find much of it boils down to empty rhetoric. What exactly are we doing? More user research? More usability testing? Certainly these are valid approaches to finding out about people's needs, but they're only a small part of an optimal solution. Are we using hollow tasks and tools like personas and scenarios? Those approaches typically take design farther away from the people for whom we are designing products rather than closer. How about focusing on usability and the user experience? That gets at only part of the issue and tends to come from the perspective of the product--as opposed to the more universal needs and desires of actual people.

Knemeyer, Dirk. UXmatters (2006). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods

Approaches to Creating Personas  

You do research to better understand your users, but exactly what is it that you want to find out about them? That's the first question you need to ask, and its answer dictates which research methods you should use, since specific methods are tailored to finding specific types of information.

Mulder, Steve. InformationDesign (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Archiving Usability Reports

Most usability practitioners don't derive full value from their user tests because they don't systematically archive the reports. An intranet-based usability archive offers four substantial benefits.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Usability>Methods

The Art of Usability Benchmarking

One common concern raised by managers and engineers alike is this: how easy to use is enough? This question, and the absence of an easy answer, is often the first defense people offer against investing in usability and ease of use. The smart usability engineer or designer has at least one response: the usability benchmark. By capturing the current level of ease of use of the current product or website, a reference point is created that can be measured against in the future. It doesn't answer the question of how usable is enough, but if the benchmark is done properly, it does enable someone to set goals and expectations around ease of use for the future.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods

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.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Articles>Usability>Methods>Web Design

Balancing the 5Es: Usability  

Just what do we mean by usability? Before we can set out to achieve it, we need to understand what it is we are trying to achieve. It's not enough to declare that from here on, our software will be more user friendly or that we will now be customer focused.

Quesenbery, Whitney. Cutter IT Journal (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods

Basics of Conducting Focus Groups

Focus groups are a powerful means to evaluate services or test new ideas. Basically, focus groups are interviews, but of 6-10 people at the same time in the same group. One can get a great deal of information during a focus group session.

McNamara, Carter. Free Management Library. Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Focus Groups

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.

Quesenbery, Whitney. WQusability (2001). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Usability

The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes

In Eyetrack III, we observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. In this article we'll provide an overview of what we observed.

Outing, Steve and Laura Ruel. Eyetrack III. Articles>Usability>Methods>Eye Tracking

Beyond the Focus Group

Focus groups are popular amongst marketing professionals for good reason. They are relatively quick to organise and the feedback is instantaneous. A wide range of views can be assembled from people from a wide range of backgrounds. When focus groups go well, the data can be extremely useful in identifying profitable design routes. Plus any technique that gets companies closer to their customers can't be all bad.

System Concepts (2005). Articles>Usability>Methods>Focus Groups

Beyond Usability Testing

Usability testing is a powerful tool in identifying problems and issues that users may have with a website or software application. But for all its benefits, traditional testing does not necessarily give a complete picture at how effective a site or application is in terms of meeting business goals.

Farrell, Tom. Frontend Infocentre (2001). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods

Bite-Sized UX Research

Regardless of the cause for your company’s resource crunch, focus on getting small wins as often as possible throughout your involvement in a project. This is a fairly common piece of advice that crops up time and time again, but it’s very much worth repeating. And it applies just as readily to both situations where time is short and those when there’s just not enough of you to go around.

Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Research>Methods

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is an individual or group process for generating alternative ideas or solutions for a specific topic. Good brainstorming focuses on the quantity and creativity of ideas: the quality of ideas is much less important than the sheer quantity. After ideas are generated, they are often grouped into categories and prioritized for subsequent research or application.

Usability Body of Knowledge (2007). Articles>Usability>Methods>Collaboration