User Interface Engineering

Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin

We use personas because they are powerful design, measurement, and communication tools. We use them in design to help us avoid the elastic user problem--where "the user" is a total novice one minute and a technophile the next--as well as self-referential design, because designers are seldom representative of a product's target audience. Personas also help cut through assumptions that certain tasks are necessary; if a task doesn't directly help accomplish a goal, we can try to eliminate it.

Moderating with Multiple Personalities: Three Roles for Facilitating Usability Tests

Usability tests are a core design tool and, when done well, they deliver tremendous insights to the team. However, when a usability test is done poorly, it can be a disaster for everyone involved. An important key to their success is the work of a great moderator.

Visual Design for the Non-Designer

What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals.

Information Architecture Essentials

What happens when, one day, you’re asked into the boss’s office and they drop “the web site” and “information architecture” into your lap? Regardless of your experience, where do you begin? Donna says your first question should be, “Why do we bother to have a web site in the first place?” “What’s its purpose?” She says if you don’t get this out of the way first, you’ll run up against it when you’re further along the trail and it won’t be easy to deal with.

Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web - Part 1

To present content on the web in the amount that most people want: think “topic,” not “book”; break large documents into topics and subtopics.

Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web - Part 2

One page or separate pages? When faced with that decision, ask yourself these questions: How much do people want in one visit? How connected is the information? Am I overloading my site visitors? How long is the web page? What’s the download time? Will people want to print? How much will they want to print?

The Web as a Conversation

Writing toward personas can help produce a successful form of content creation. Of course the next step after writing is to test the content with your customers to see if it indeed answers their questions. But there’s an important next step, especially if you’re a larger organization. You must work cross-silos to make sure different departments are not having contradictory conversations with the same customers. You also have to ensure that all the information on your site is current. If one department updates data, they all must still agree!

Components, Patterns, and Frameworks! Oh My!

In our research, we've found that teams that build out a re-use strategy see tangible benefits: They are more likely to get a completed design sooner, with all the little nuances and details that make for a great experience. Their designs are more likely to meet users expectations by behaving consistently across the entire functionality. Plus, the teams iterate faster (always a good thing), giving them a chance to play with the design while it's still malleable.

Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen

When things are going well in a design, we don't pay attention to them. We only pay attention to things that bother us. The same is true with online designs. We attend to things that aren't working far more than we attend to things that are. When the online experience frustrates us, we pay attention to its details, often because we're trying to figure out some way to outsmart it.

Designing for Faceted Search

Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related websites, from big box stores to product review sites. But e-commerce sites aren’t the only ones joining the facets club. Other content-heavy sites such as media publishers (e.g. Financial Times: ft.com), libraries (e.g. NCSU Libraries: lib.ncsu.edu/), and even non-profits (e.g. Urban Land Institute: uli.org) are tapping into faceted search to make their often broad-range of content more findable. Essentially, faceted search has become so ubiquitous that users are not only getting used to it, they are coming to expect it.

Hunkering: Putting Disorientation into the Design Process

After talking to several dozen craftspeople about why they hunker, we think we have a pretty good idea what's happening here. As they're building their design, they have a solid picture in their mind of what they are creating. However, when they put the physical pieces into the basic form, things aren't quite right. In essence, it's disorienting. Once the craftsperson has disoriented themself, they go through a process of reconciliation. Either the work-in-progress needs correction or the design in their head needs adjustment.

Harnessing the Power of Annotations -- An Interview with Dan Brown

Annotations come in all shapes and sizes depending on the artifact and the intent of the document. People are probably most familiar with wireframe annotations, where the author calls out areas of the screen to describe functionality not immediately discernible from the picture alone.

In Which a Concept Model Makes Me Giddy

Concept models aren't for everyone. When I show fellow designers these artifacts, I sometimes get "You show that to clients?" Like any deliverable, there's a time and a place for concept models. If you're anything like me, however, you think visually. Even if your models don't see the light of day, a good model can help you get a better grip on the problem, or lay some groundwork for your designs.

Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

If we simply look at what's already working well, and why, we can give ourselves two things we desperately need: a starting point for the design, and insight into to how to create better-stronger-faster interactions that are just as easy to use as the old classics.

AJAX Aids Accessibility?

Yes, if you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax is like most techniques and technologies on the web—they are what you make of them.

Guiding Users with Persuasive Design: An Interview with Andrew Chak

An easy way to define persuasive web design is to contrast it with usable design. Usability focuses on giving users the ability to complete a transaction if they so desire. A usable site makes it easy for users to complete transactions, from buying products to convincing users to read featured articles. Unfortunately, having a usable web site is not always enough to convince users to transact. Even if a user can complete a transaction on your site, doesn't mean that they will transact. To be successful, sites must go beyond Usability by focusing on Persuasive Design.

Documenting Design with Dan Brown

If you ask designers what the most frustrating parts about designing a project are, one of the top answers would be undoubtedly be “communicating and documenting the design process.” And with good reason… it’s not easy. That’s why I interviewed Dan Brown for this week’s SpoolCast. I don’t know of anyone who knows more about solid design communications than Dan.

Using Ajax for Creating Web Applications

In the past few years, developers could choose between two approaches when building a web application. The first approach was to create a screen-based system with very rich interactions using a sophisticated, powerful technology such as Java or Flash. The alternative approach was to create a page-based system using easier-to-learn core web standards like XHTML and CSS whose more basic capabilities force less-rich interactions. A new technological approach, dubbed Ajax, might just be the right mix between the two.

As the Page Scrolls

Users say they don’t like to scroll. As a result, many designers try to keep their web pages short. But one of the most significant findings of our research on web-site usability is that users are perfectly willing to scroll. However, they’ll only do it if the page gives them strong clues that scrolling will help them find what they’re looking for.

Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages

Contrast the Dove home page to the Dove site map. Using 5 times as many links, this page gives a real picture of the content of the site. Even with 148 links, it is well designed and organized nicely. It's easy for users to find what is available quickly.

Image Links vs. Text Links

Years back, we compared successful clickstreams (clickstreams that resulted in users accomplishing their goals, as observed in tons of usability tests) with unsuccessful clickstreams (clickstreams where users abandoned their goals before completing), looking for any clues that would help us predict behaviors in one that we didn’t see in the other. One factor we looked for was whether the clickstreams contained image links versus text links — does one type of link show up more often in successful clickstreams than the other. Our finding was when users clicked in image links they were just as likely to succeed or fail as when the clicked on text links. There was no statistically-meaningful difference.

Five Things to Know About Users

Over the years, we've studied the usability of hundreds of product and web site designs. We've seen designs that were incredibly effective for users and designs that fell tremendously short. One emerging pattern in our ongoing research is that design teams that know a lot about their users are more likely to produce user experiences that are usable, effective, and pleasing.

Intranet Portals and Scent are Made for Each Other

How does the intranet designer ensure that employees can productively find the important content and functions, with minimum frustration, with a network growing that quickly? Many designers are turning to Portals -- a set of pages that act as a launch point for every dive into the intranet's ocean of content. We've found that some designers confused portals with a site's home page, but they actually function differently. Home pages guide users to content within a specific site, but because the intranet is actually a collection of sites, (such as human resources, sales, or individual project information,) they each have their own home pages.

Snap Decisions on the Web

We’ve seen in testing that users make important judgments very quickly when they arrive at a web page. That’s one of the reasons we use 5-second tests as our primary technique for evaluating users’ first impressions.

The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities

In design, our resources are limited. Priorities become a necessity. We need to ensure we are working on the most important parts of the problem. How do we assess what is most important?

Designing Embraceable Change

It's not that people resist change whole-scale. They just hate losing control and feeling stupid. When we make critical changes, we risk putting our users in that position. We must take care to ensure that we've considered the process of change as much as we've considered the technology changes themselves. Only then will we end up with changes that our users embrace.

Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas

If you're just going to guess on the personas, why bother? Just design for yourself, like the 37Signals team does. However, when you do the field studies, you create relationships with the people in your research. You can return to those people and ask them questions. You can learn about the things they do.

Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products

When we ask designers what stage they spend the bulk of their time in when launching a product, the majority of designers answer, the Implementation Stage. However, our research shows that the teams launching the most usable products on schedule and on budget spend the bulk of their time in the Measure and Learn stage.

Five-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages

On your site, the content page is the user's most frequent final destination. This page contains the information the user came to the site to find. Sites often have hundreds, if not thousands (and in some cases, millions) of these critical pages. How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they've designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively?

The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site

The designers of Netflix.com have a smashing success on their hands, but we didn't find them resting on their laurels. They want to get even better, and for them that means iterate, iterate, iterate. Netflix isn't the only company using a fast iterative design approach. Google has also gained attention for their unorthodox design methods, with many people complaining that they have a huge stable of products, but only a few they've designed well.

Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site

Galleries -- the list of links to content -- are your site's hardest working pages. They are the final page that separates those users who find the content they are seeking from the users who won't. A well-designed gallery page will drive users to success every time. A poorly-designed site will only serve to drive users away.

Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin

Kim Goodwin is the General Manager and Vice President of Design at Cooper. The great folks at Cooper created an interaction design methodology known as Goal-Directed Design. Their methodology identifies the goals and behaviors of users and directly translates them into the design. UIE's Christine Perfetti recently had the chance to talk with Kim about her work and we've included an excerpt of their conversation below.

Innovation is the New Black

Apple and Netflix gained insight by investing in understanding the current experience of their potential customers. Those insights led to industry-changing innovations that have made an indelible impression on businesses everywhere. As innovation is now the new black, experience design is the fabric of new insight. The work designers do is now the hot spot to be.

Making Personas Work for Your Web Site: An Interview with Steve Mulder

It's important for the people responsible for creating the personas to have active listening skills, empathy, and clear communication skills. Ultimately, what design teams need to do is aggregate all of the qualitative or quantitative data into a clearly communicated story. This means that writing and communication skills are also critical. From the point of view of a more tactical skillset, the design team will get better results if they have experience conducting interviews and writing surveys.

The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch

Companies would often hire new outside firms to create and execute these new designs, abandoning the firm that made the previous design. The new firms would try to top the existing design with something dramatically different and attention-grabbing. After all, if you can't notice any change, why did it cost so much?

Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign

Teams who focus on the long term are far more likely to create designs that really pay off for the organization. Short-term thinking gets the design done, but the team ends up doing it all over again months down the road. Long-term thinking deals with the inevitability of changes and turns the site into a living, breathing entity that grows with the organization's needs.

Time for Content to Become More Scientific

I'm all for formulaic writing. I love hierarchies and classification. I'm all for measuring content. There is a 'right' way to write content. Sure, it may not be the 'perfect' way, it may not be the way Shakespeare or Joyce would have written it, but it'll do. It'll get results and deliver value. A production line can be set up where this content can be mass produced, tested, and measured.

Do Links Need Underlines?

During our recent Virtual Seminar on home page design, several people asked about whether it makes a difference if links are underlined or not. It's a good question and one we get frequently.

What Causes Customers to Buy on Impulse?

This paper studies the design elements within e-commerce sites that motivate impulse purchases online.

Market Maturity

Users' expectations of a product depend on the maturity of its market. Markets for software products go through some predictable stages, each with a different emphasis. By identifying what stage your product is in now, you can anticipate some of the pitfalls that lie ahead.

Are the Product Lists on Your Site Reducing Sales?

You can increase sales on your site as much as 225% by offering sufficient product information to your customers at the time they need it. One way to do this is to develop product lists that don't require shoppers to bounce back-and-forth between the list and individual product pages.

Macromedia Flash: A New Hope for Web Applications

Some new, cutting-edge applications have demonstrated Flash's potential to surpass the power of traditional software applications. These web applications leverage the strengths of Flash to help users make better sense of large amounts of data, presenting information in an easily accessible, graphical visual representation. In this white paper, we will explore how Flash can help developers easily build the next generation of web applications. We will also look at several new applications that have recently appeared on the scene and talk about how they leverage the benefits of Flash.

The CAA: A Wicked Good Design Technique

Discusses Category Agreement Analysis, a card-sorting technique to help create usable information architectures.

Transitional Layouts in (X)HTML and CSS: An Interview with Eric A. Meyer

In a pivotal user test a couple years ago we found out one of the secrets of great web sites: they inspire confidence in users. This article explores how to measure it and use it to your advantage.

Design Patterns: An Evolutionary Step to Managing Complex Sites

When your organization's web site or intranet has hundreds of contributors, how do you ensure that every page is high quality and extremely usable? Especially, if these contributors have never designed a web page before? This is a problem that many of our clients are facing and they've tried a myriad of solutions, such as centralized approval processes, standardized templates, and style guides, all without success. However, the one solution that really excites us is now gaining a lot of attention -- design patterns.

Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle. While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the 'field study'. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

Getting Confidence from Lincoln

A few years back, we conducted one of the most painful usability studies in the history of our research. We learned some really important things, but I'm not sure the users in that study will ever forgive us. Before that particular study, we'd noticed, when searching large web sites for information, there were some sites where users always seemed to know where to find the content. No matter what content they were seeking, every user somehow knew to make a bee-line for it. Not every site worked this way and we wanted to know what made these particular sites work so well.

Usability Testing Best Practices: An Interview with Rolf Molich

If you’ve done any usability testing, design evaluations, or heuristic inspections, then you’ve been affected by Rolf Molich's pioneering work.

Usability Myths Need Reality Checks

Not so very long ago, it was agreed that five to eight users was enough for a good usability test. Somehow, this idea achieved mythic status. We believed it. We preached it to everyone who would listen. It survived in areas where it had been disproved, and was introduced into new situations where it didn't even apply. What gives some ideas such staying power? What did the five-user myth accomplish? It reconciled test plans with testing budgets! If five to eight users are enough, then it's safe to act on the results of a test series with only five to eight users.

Are There Users Who Always Search?

Web designers often tell us that they spend a great deal of their limited time and resources working to improve their on-site search engines because, they believe, there are some people who always rely on the search engine to reach their target content. They find further support for this assumption from Jakob Nielsen who, in his book, 'Designing Web Usability,' asserts that more than half of all users demonstrate 'search-dominant' tendencies by going right to the search engine when they first visit a web site looking for content.

The Art of Being Human

Site visitors crave the sense that someone is there, within and behind your Web pages, your emails and newsletters. Dealing with the bare technology of online interactions is a cold experience for many, or even most of us. It makes us feel anxious. Technology isn't warm. It has no heart. It neither understands us, nor cares for us. For many Web sites, whether for businesses or organizations, we simply plug in and play the bare technology - the super-duper means of information delivery. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.

The Customer Sieve

We've learned that using a web site is a progressive process. Each user transitions from one stage to the next, as they work to accomplish their goal. The most pronounced transitions we've seen are on e-commerce sites. When we watch shoppers focusing on buying a product, we can clearly see each stage and when the transitions fail or succeed. By understanding the stages and how they work, we can learn a lot about building better sites.

Design for Community: An Interview with Derek M. Powazek

Derek M. Powazek has worked on community features for Netscape, Nike, and Sony, along with creating the community sites, {fray}, Kvetch!, and SF Stories. Christine Perfetti, a consultant at User Interface Engineering, recently talked with Derek about his experience. Here is what he had to say about creating effective online communities.

Designing A New Information Architecture: An interview with Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path

Last year, Adaptive Path, working with interactive media agency Lot21, took on a challenging project -- the redesign of three PeopleSoft sites. The redesign involved over 40,000 pages as well as 40 divergent opinions from stakeholders! After four and a half months, the site's information architecture and navigation were transformed to the accolades of both PeopleSoft and their users. We recently interviewed Peter about this project.

Determining How Design Affects Branding

Designers often tell us part of their responsibilities is to enhance the branding of a site, product, or organization. In recent years, we've focused our research on understanding how design can have a positive effect on a brand. In our research, we've learned that brands are an investment instrument. With a savings account, money is deposited so that interest accrues -- the investment grows over time.

Driving Innovation and Creativity through Customer Data

This article explores the foundations of designing for innovation. Karen Holtzblatt has created contextual inquiry, a practical, customer-centered approach that helps designers develop creative solutions that dominate the competition.

Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines

'Use a Search Box instead of a link to a Search page.' This is one guideline from the plethora of recently created usability guidelines to help designers produce more usable web sites. It makes sense. After all, there are more than 42 million web sites on the Internet. It should be simple to study these sites and put together a list of 'do's' and 'don'ts' that, when followed, will produce easy-to-use sites. Designing a web site, either usable or unusable, is hard work. There are many details that designers need to take into account, such as browser differences, content management, information architecture, and graphic design. Providing proven guidelines to developers can reduce their already overburdened workload, making one aspect of design that much simpler. However, we are assuming the guidelines actually result in more usable sites. This is where things start to get murky.

Flash + Information Visualization = Great User Experiences

By combining tools like Flash and information visualization, designers can dramatically improve how users work with large, multidimensional data sets.

Flash Strikes Back: Creating Powerful Web Applications

Flash is a powerful tool that offers developers huge capabilities. Until recently, developers mostly utilized Flash's strengths to create complex animations or fast-loading movies. However, the most recent versions of Flash offer developers power that's far beyond the tool's original scope. With the advent of Flash MX, we've seen that developers have the power to create web applications with more sophisticated client- and server-side interactivity. When integrated with sophisticated server-side software like ColdFusion Server and JRun, Flash delivers the power and flexibility to become a serious contender in the web application space.

Learning from the Work of Others

Rolf Molich has conducted two experiments comparing the work of different usability teams, examining their practices, and looking for patterns and differences. His experiments provide extremely valuable material for sharpening individual usability practices.

No Standard for Migrating to Web Standards

Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about migrating to web standards, like XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). What's the big deal about these standards? Why should web teams invest the effort to learn new coding techniques and convert all their legacy sites over to standards-compliant sites? Time and Money, that's why.

People Search Once, Maybe Twice

Lately, we've been focused on the effectiveness of Search. When looking for content, users often end up using the search engine. In a recent study, we observed that users only found their target content 34% of the time with Search (less than with categories). We wanted to know why.

Personas: Matching a Design to the Users' Goals

We hear all the time from designers that they're faced with the huge challenge of designing products and web sites for a large number of different users. Many designers tackle this problem by making the functionality of the web site or product as extensive as possible. To do this, they outline all of the goals of each user, identify any commonalities between these goals, and add all of the functionality needed to satisfy these common goals.

The Search For Seducible Moments

If you offer something that is unique to your organization, (and chances are that you do - that's why you're in business) then how do you make the users aware of these benefits? Jared Spool discusses how to identify these 'seducible moments'.

Strategies for Categorizing Categories

How does a site containing thousands of pages of content get users to the content they seek quickly? There are many different strategies for organizing content on sites and we recently took a hard look at five of them. We've been examining several e-commerce sites to see how they handled the problem of categorizing large numbers of products. We were interested in seeing if the different designers came up with different methods and which methods were most effective.

The Truth About Download Time

We hear all the time from web designers that they spend countless hours and resources trying to speed up their web pages' download time because they believe that people are turned off by slow-loading pages. What we discovered may surprise you.

User Interface Design Bibliography

Chauncey Wilson of BMC Software, Inc. has compiled this excellent list of resources. We are grateful to him for allowing us to post it here. To contact Chauncey directly, send e-mail to chaunsee@aol.com. This bibliography was last updated in December 1998.

Users Continue After Category Links

Over the last year, we've been looking at how to get users to find valuable content that they aren't aware of when they first come to the site.

Users Decide First, Move Second

Designers use interactive design elements, such as fly outs, rollovers, and dropdowns, to conserve space, make the screen less cluttered, and enhance the users' experience. We were surprised when users succeeded more often when they didn't encounter these design elements than when they did.

Users Don't Learn to Search Better

When we watched 30 users trying to search various sites for content they were interested in, we noticed a peculiar phenomenon: The more times the users searched, the less likely they were to find what they wanted.

Why Amazon Succeeds -- And Why It Won't Help You

Amazon is one of the best on-site search capabilities we've ever seen. But surprisingly, the reason why it works so well is likely to be the same reason why Search won't work well on your site.

Words Drive Action: An Interview with Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern is a world-renowned content-management expert and author of the books, 'Content Critical' and 'The Web Content Style Guide'. User Interface Engineering's Christine Perfetti and Josh Porter recently talked with Gerry about the importance of an editorial perspective in a web development process. Here is what Gerry had to say about his experiences.

Branding and Usability

Many web sites exist primarily to create or strengthen the brand for a product or service. We’re finding that a site’s usability can dramatically affect branding. And the graphical aspects of the site — such as logos or evocative pictures — have much less effect on branding than we expected.

Bridging Conceptual Gaps

Many usability problems are instances of what we call 'conceptual gaps.' A conceptual gap arises because of some difference between the user’s mental model of the application and how the application actually works.If the gap is large enough, it can stop the user’s work. For example, a user who wants to search the web for free local concerts may not know how to formulate a query that will yield this information. The gap between the search engine’s syntax and the user’s understanding of that syntax may prevent the user from accomplishing their goal.

Docs in the Real World

In two recent consulting projects, we worked with online documentation developers who wanted to understand the problems users encountered and how their documentation helped solve those problems. To find out, we went and observed users in their own work environments. Although the clients and their software differ significantly, we found similar issues.

Five Paper Prototyping Tips

Prototyping is a quick way to incorporate direct feedback from real users into a design. Paper-based prototyping bypasses the time and effort required to create a working, coded user interface. Instead, it relies on very simple tools like paper, scissors, and stickies. Even in applications where new technologies are deployed, paper provides maximum speed and flexibility.

How Usability-Focused Companies Think

In our consulting work, we’ve noticed that some companies build usable products through the heroic efforts of one or two individuals. Although the end result is desirable, the products suffer when those individuals leave the company. Other clients have established strict processes that are supposed to promote usability. However, because the company has imposed these processes on developers, individuals follow them in letter but not in spirit — they just don’t buy into them.

Making Online Information Usable

So you follow all the standards and guidelines, but suffer nagging questions about whether anyone can and will use the help you’ve just written. Or management wants you to move your printed documentation online, but you wonder whether that’s really best for your users. In the course of our consulting work, we’ve done dozens of usability studies that focus on how people use a variety of printed and online documentation, including manuals, help, cue-cards, and wizards. We’d like to share some of our results and observations, in hopes that this will help you make more informed design decisions.

Observing What Didn't Happen

During usability tests, everyone notices when a user fails because a feature breaks down. We don’t need Holmes to solve these! But when expected things don’t happen, or illogical things do happen, it can mean that developers didn’t understand what the users needed, or how they would use the product.

Paper Prototypes: Still Our Favorite

We’ve been creating paper prototypes and teaching others to use them for the past eight years. In that time, we’ve learned a lot about what paper prototyping is all about and we’re still pleased by what an effective and easy-to-use tool it is.

Scheduling Hard-to-Find Users

Developers may hesitate to start usability testing because they worry that their product poses special problems in finding, scheduling, or compensating the right users. This shouldn’t stop them. We successfully find and test hundreds of users a year and about 10% of these require special tactics for scheduling.

Seductive Design for Web Sites

Education has a concept called 'the teachable moment,' the point when a learner is ready to learn, willing to change, and can act. For web sites, the parallel is something we call 'the seducible moment.' This is the point at which designers can entice users off the path to their original goal with the lure of something else.

Six Slick Tests for Docs and Help

Usability testing isn’t just for software and web sites. Testing documentation can ensure that it includes — and accurately conveys — all the information users expect and need. Testing gives you accurate information on how well your documentation and Help work. It can even uncover problems that are better solved by changing the interface.

Surprises on the Web: Results from Usability Testing

We were surprised by how hard it was to compare simple facts on the web. We asked users to compare facts (Which vehicle has the better rebate: the Geo Tracker or the Isuzu Rodeo?) on sites that had all the necessary information. Users found these tasks frustrating; our randomly- chosen test sites were not designed to facilitate comparisons.

Testing Web Sites with Eye-Tracking

Thanks to some recent usability studies we conducted using an eye-tracking system, we now have real evidence of where users actually look when they view a web page. It’s clear that users quickly learn to look where they expect to find content. They also quickly learn to avoid areas where they don’t see—or expect—what they’re looking for, including banner ads and parts of the page outside the central area.

The Top 3 Priorities of the Talking Horse

Anytime somebody does something new with technology, something nobody else has ever done before, that technology goes through a talking horse stage. It's extremely common and, more importantly, it's critical for the design team to recognize that they are in this stage.

Using Paper Prototypes to Manage Risk

History is littered with the carcasses of failed products and the companies that built them — product development is indeed a risky business. Learn how we help companies create paper mock-ups of their product interface so that they can find out early on how to make it successful in the market.

When to Develop a Wizard

Development teams sometimes ask us about adding a wizard to their application. Should they use a wizard or a cue card? Isn’t a wizard just a patch for a bad interface? We conducted a usability study of several wizards in popular software and have some ideas about which situations can best be solved with a wizard.

Why On-Site Searching Stinks

In our most recent web-site studies, we watched users look for information within web sites. Our goal was to gather data about what makes a good link, but we did not tell users whether or not they should use the site’s search facilities. Users went to these search engines in almost half the tasks. Maybe they shouldn’t have.