Bridging the Gap with Requirements Definition

Developing a new product or service is tricky. When everything goes well, the product can redefine a market or even create an entirely new one, to the benefit of its manufacturer and its consumers. When the product doesn't click with its audience, though, the costs—development, employee, manufacturing—can be staggering. How do you ensure that your new product doesn't flop? One effective method is to conduct a requirements definition phase before developing a new product.

Olshavsky, Ryan. Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Articles>Usability>Specifications

Bridging the Gap: From Raw Usability Testing Data to Design Implementation  

Learn practical ways to influence members of your company’s product engineering group with usability testing data. Putting the authors’ tips into practice will help you improve the design of your company’s products.

Leritz-Higgins, Sarah E. and Catherine J. Yaspo. Intercom (2006). Articles>Usability>Information Design

Bridging Usability and Aesthetic Design of Wheelchairs

A wheelchair provides transportation for the disabled, independence and self-sufficiency to someone who would otherwise be completely dependent on others. But is functionality the only aspect of a wheelchair worth contemplation? Should we not evaluate the design aesthetic of wheelchairs to the same extent that we analyze the design of other useful and purposeful objects?

Fields, Betsy. Usability Interface (2003). Design>Usability>Accessibility

Bring Your Personas to Life!

Method acting can take your personas from the page to the stage. Think beyond traditional practice to give emotional life to your personas.

Fugaz, Zef. Boxes and Arrows (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas

Bringing Usability to the Front Lines of Medicine

Will Emergency Medical Records (EMRs) make our delivery of medical care more usable?

Whitney, Hunter. Usability Interface (2008). Articles>Usability>Biomedical

Bringing Your Personas to Life in Real Life

The way you communicate the personas and present your deliverables is key to ensuring consistency of vision. Without that consistency, you'll spend far too much time arguing with your colleagues about who your users are rather than how to meet their needs.

Freydenson, Elan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas

Broadband Reality Check!

I just can't escape those shrieking ads and articles: 'Everyone has broadband – or at least, they're getting it next week!' Because of this overwhelming hype, many Web developers and content pros currently seem preoccupied with learning how to produce broadband content....I must admit that I've been lulled into the broadband fantasy to some extent, too. I live in a very 'wired' town (Boulder, CO), and we currently have both DSL and cable modem connections at our home. So I've been sucking down a lot of broadband content lately. I've gotten very spoiled! However the vast majority of Internet users (even in the US) cannot get broadband.

Gahran, Amy. Contentious (2000). Design>Web Design>Usability>Bandwidth

Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience

The most effective companies realize that they can't succeed on advertising alone; the customer matters.

Hurst, Mark. uiGarden (2007). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Experience

Build a Cross-Platform Web Design Testing Station in Mac OS

Everybody talks about cross–platform testing, but nobody’s shown how to do it on a nuts–and–bolts level. Until now. Sciortino’s comprehensive tutorial for Mac–based web designers will set you up with the testing platform of your dreams. (’Nix and Windows users, we hope to do the same for you in a future issue.)

Sciortino, Paul. List Apart, A (2002). Articles>Usability>Web Design

Building a Better Interface

If you build it, they may or may not come. But if they do come and you've built it badly, they almost certainly won't come back. While it's immensely difficult to figure out what makes a user bookmark a site, usability is a critical factor. Despite this, most Web builders spend far too little time thinking about this aspect of site design.

Shafer, Dan. Builder.com (1998). Articles>Usability>Web Design

Building a Better Style Guide  

Why are style guides so frequently created, but so rarely successful? All too often, businesses ask for a style guide as a means to create a common look and feel, in the belief that it will solve usability problems and establish consistency between applications – only to be disappointed in the results. Even if such a style guide is followed carefully, the resulting interfaces may not meet usability goals.. This paper explores strategies for creating a style guide that is more than a simplistic rules book. By making the style guide part of the process, it can be used to promote a shared vision, to help the product meet business and usability requirements for consistency and…it may actually be used.

Quesenbery, Whitney. Usability Professionals Association (2001). Articles>Style Guides>Rhetoric>Usability

Building Blocks to a Body of Knowledge for User-Centered Design: To Certify or Not to Certify

For the past nine months the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) participated in a project to investigate the feasibility of certifying usability (or user-centered design) professionals. The project was kicked off in Salt Lake City last November when a group of people from many organizations, countries and associations met for three days. That meeting ended with a sense of enthusiasm for creating a certification program based on the international standard for a human-centered design process, ISO 13407. The group planned activities to survey professionals to determine the level of support for certification, and to understand the benefits and drawbacks seen by stakeholders.

Quesenbery, Whitney. Usability Interface (2002). Careers>Certification>Usability>Body of Knowledge

Building Documentation into the Interface

As documentation is more and more built directly into the interface, and as technical communicators move into interface design and usability, it is important to have a theoretical framework within which to make decisions about what kind of information will be conveyed at any moment. We can build on basic principles of cognitive psychology to help us make these decisions. We start from a question: Why should users be aware of the difference between interface and documentation when all they want is to get something done?

Quesenbery, Whitney. STC Orange County (1998). Presentations>Documentation>Usability

Building Effective Customer Surveys

Well-designed customer surveys can yield valuable information for your business. Unfortunately, though, a poorly worded survey can set you marching off in exactly the wrong direction. Below are some tips on designing surveys to get reliable, useful data.

Bennaco (2005). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys

Building Usability in from the Beginning: Analyzing Users and Their Tasks  

In this interactive session, attendees will practice their skills in interviewing users, creating task scenarios from the users’ perspective, and turning the task scenarios into designs for information products.

Hackos, JoAnn T. and Janice C. 'Ginny' Redish. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Usability>Methods

Building Web Sites With Depth

Is the Web really the ultimate customer-empowering environment? The Web as a whole is empowering, because users have the option to click over to the competition at the slightest whim. So why do sites so often leave users feeling powerless? The Web increases accessibility and defies geographical barriers. But e-commerce sites often decrease accessibility and erect more barriers than you'd walk past in a store.

Nielsen, Jakob and Marie Tahir. WebTechniques (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability

A Business Case for Usability

This is a business case for usability in an organization. It is based on academic research, industrial research, case studies, consulting experience, and common knowledge found in the usability community. 

Rhodes, John S. WebWord (2001). Articles>Usability>Management>Business Case

Business-Centred Design

In traditional user-centred design, focus is on users’ needs and their use of the product, while marketing is left to the marketing department. On the web, usability and marketing go hand in hand. Whether commercial or not, a web site has to meet the need of its users and at the same time convince them to take action, for the objectives behind the site to be meet.

Olsen, Henrik. GUUUI (2003). Design>Web Design>Marketing>Usability

Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Knowledge Transfer Plan Benchmarking  

Describes the motivation behind a Knowledge Transfer Plan benchmarking study conducted by JoAnn Hackos and Comtech. Bradbury wanted to compare Cadence’s publications and training organizations to other organizations’. She has integrated the findings into plans for the new year. JoAnn Hackos describes the benefits of participating in benchmarking activities. They include: peer and professional contact, the exchange of best practices within the field, understanding how other groups deal with the similar issues, and so on. Dr. Hackos introduces her partnerbased model of benchmarking in which companies cosponsor the studies, bringing increased participation at less costs.

Bradbury, Julie and JoAnn T. Hackos. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Knowledge Management>Usability

Cadius

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

Cadius. (Spanish) Organizations>Information Design>User Centered Design>Usability

Calculating the Cost of a Large-Scale Web Site

A well-designed information architecture with intuitive organization, labeling, navigation, and indexing systems can significantly reduce the amount of time that users spend blundering through the hierarchies of Web sites and intranets. How much is this time-savings worth? The case is clearest for intranets where the users are your employees.

Morville, Peter. Semantic Studios (1997). Design>Web Design>Content Management>Usability

Calculating Usability Effects

Time to complete a task and number of errors per task are key metrics when evaluating usability effects.

Bohmann, Kristoffer. Bohmann Usability (2000). Articles>Usability

Can Collaboration Help Redefine Usability?    

A collaborative knowledge space would provide great value to the usability community. In particular it would: Help define the field and give it a presence that provides professionals and the public with a single source for theoretical, practical and speculative information about usability; encourage the integration of research and practice; invite colleagues in related fields to participate and share their perspectives; serve as a platform to advance our understanding of collaboration and knowledge management tools. Most of the tools needed to implement a collaborative knowledge space are already available and there are a number of related activities already underway that could feed into this project. It would be a great deal of work but I believe it would also yield a great deal of benefit.

Kreitzberg, Charles B. Journal of Usability Studies (2006). Articles>Usability>Collaboration

Can’t Someone Tell Me How to Measure Quality?  

Technical communication journals and conferences over the past decade have consistently covered the topic of quality, but much of this coverage has focused on defining quality in technical communication and describing models of quality for our field. Few have dared to declare a finite set of definitive metrics that could be used across our profession. This paper takes the bold (and yes, foolhardy) step of declaring a set of metrics that could be used universally to measure quality in technical documentation of commercial products. The author is fully aware that this will stir up controversy and dissent, but considers this her contribution to stimulating discussion of the area of specific quality metrics.

Fisher, Lori H. STC Proceedings (1998). Presentations>Usability>Assessment

The Canonical Intranet Homepage

In recent years, intranet homepages have become very similar in their basic layout. Intranets that look the same can nonetheless differ drastically in usability due to different features and content.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Design>Web Design>Intranets>Usability