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.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering. Design>Web Design

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.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>Interviews>Web Design

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.

User Interface Engineering (1997). Careers>Usability

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.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Design>User Experience

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.

Schroeder, Will. User Interface Engineering (2002). Articles>Usability>Collaboration

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.

Perfetti, Christine and Jared M. Spool. User Interface Engineering (2004). Design>Web Design>Multimedia>Flash

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.

User Interface Engineering. Articles>Usability>Documentation

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.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>Interviews>User Centered Design>Personas

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.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (1997). Design>User Centered Design>Usability

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.

Porter, Joshua. User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Standards>XHTML

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.

User Interface Engineering (1999). Articles>Usability

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.

User Interface Engineering (1998). Design>Usability>Prototyping

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.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search

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.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2001). Articles>Information Design>Usability

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?

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Articles>Web Design>Planning

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.

User Interface Engineering (1998). Articles>Usability>Methods>Testing

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'.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2002). Articles>Web Design>Usability

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.

User Interface Engineering (1998). Articles>Web Design

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.

User Interface Engineering (1998). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Testing

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.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design

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.

User Interface Engineering (1996). Articles>Usability>Web Design

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.

Schroeder, Will. User Interface Engineering (1998). Articles>Usability>Web Design>Eye Tracking

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.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>Web Design>Planning

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.

McGovern, Gerry. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>Content Management>Writing>Professionalism

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.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2004). Design>Web Design>Workflow