User-centered design
In Extending a Technique: Group Personas, Mike presents a detailed walkthrough of the development of personas for group behavior (his example is a family at an amusement park). It’s a nice gloss on persona development, and worth reading whether you’re working with groups or individuals. In general, I’m a strong believer in persona/scenario development as a “way in” to designing an interface. I don’t put quite as much stock in personas as some people; I think they are extremely important for defining problems, but they just feel a bit unwieldy as an ongoing part of the design process - that whole “What would Glenda do?” thing. Anyhow, go read the article :)
Got a product promo for LIFT Text Transcoder, which auto-generates a text version of HTML pages. I have no idea how well it works, but I could see it being useful.
ReplayTV’s New Owners Drop Features That Riled Hollywood. This is not so surprising (if fairly lame). What caught my eye is the legal argument that it is the fact that Replay’s features are easy to use that make them potentially illegal:
The 30-second skip feature has long been available, if not widely used, on standard VCR’s as well. But program providers have not taken action against VCR manufacturers because those devices are generally more difficult to use.
“When things become too easy to do, that changes the legal argument,” said Mike Fricklas, executive vice president, general counsel and secretary of the board at Viacom, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Sonicblue.
So, while people often think of ease-of-use as an incrementally-changeable attribute, it is (in this view) a qualitative change with the potential to alter the fundamental nature (or at least the legal status) of the product.
I’ve always found heuristic evaluations one of the more useful usability methodologies. At first it seemed silly to me, but there’s something about forcing yourself to structure your evaluation of an interface that adds just the right amount of rigor to what is a fairly subjective process. Anyhow, Usability Heuristics for Rich Internet Applications is a nice discussion of how to apply Jakob’s standard heuristics to Flash interfaces.
I’ve always found heuristic evaluations one of the more useful usability methodologies. At first it seemed silly to me, but there’s something about forcing yourself to structure your evaluation of an interface that adds just the right amount of rigor to what is a fairly subjective process. Anyhow, Usability Heuristics for Rich Internet Applications is a nice discussion of how to apply Jakob’s standard heuristics to Flash interfaces.
Another gem from Scott at uiweb is his compilation of the Best of CHI-WEB and SIGIA-L, two lists that goodness knows need filtering.
Visiting Wendy’s grandmother in Wilmington, NC, I was reminded of how differently people interact with computers, when she said the following: “That little black arrow… I thought it was a bug crawling on your screen.”
The following quote from a usability test I recently conducted shows why it’s a bad idea to use greeked text in a test prototype: “I don’t know why you’d have multiple languages on this page.”
Nielsen-Norman has conducted usability tests on a bevy of Flash-based Web Applications and have put out a report based on the research. It’ll cost you $64, which ain’t much (although I do find it a bit hard to give those guys money).
Nielsen-Norman has conducted usability tests on a bevy of Flash-based Web Applications and have put out a report based on the research. It’ll cost you $64, which ain’t much (although I do find it a bit hard to give those guys money).
Dazed by a Technical Knockout: “If you’ve wondered what a car from Microsoft might be like, the 7 offers a clue.” oof! (thanks, mike)
Design Not Found, 37 Signals’ collection of “real-world examples of good and bad contingency design.” (via cam)
IBM has a great article on paper prototyping… really, really good.
Do not create text in pure red or blue. (If you’re going to issue hard rules like that you’d damn well better follow them yourself)… that said, there’s some decent basic human-factors type stuff on the site.
A wealth of articles up on IBM’s developerWorks site: Usability : Articles, columns & tips
I may or may not have posted these before…
Usability Evaluation Methods
Usability Methods Toolbox
Usability Logger.. I haven’t used this, but it’s good to see people thinking about specialized tools for things like usability testing. Now if someone would write a site-mapping and prototyping tool…
Excellent list of reasons it makes sense to hire an outside usability evaluator. (via carbonlog)
Christina churns out another good resource, this one the almost self-sufficient PowerPoint from her recent talk on User-Centered Design Strategies.
Sun’s HCI staff has released a GNOME Usability Study Report, nicely cross-referenced with Jakob’s familiar design heuristics. (via pointandgrunt, my favoritely-named weblog)
If you’re new to usability testing or intimidated by terms like “contextual inquiry,” there’s a nice overview of many usability engineering techniques in Info Design’s Usability Toolkit.
From Cooper, Perfecting Your Personas, an excellent set of suggestions for creating personas. (via gleanings)
Nice article on Interface Usability in Flash. (via gleanings)
Stalk your user, a nice chatty introduction to applying ethnographic methods to the development process by Jeff.
From 1997, a nice intro to heuristic evaluation as applied to the web: Web Site Usability Evaluation by Keith Instone. (via christina)
Good critique of arguments against opt-in for spam. (via RRE)
A couple egroups I’m not joining now, but want to remember:
usability for interactive TV
usability for mobile apps
<disclaimer>No idea if they’re active or useful.</disclaimer>
I like the waiter metaphor in this chi-web post about “friendly” software. (via eleganthack)
Lotsa good resources up at Usability First. Check out the usability glossary. (via gleanings)
I know I linked to Usor a long long time ago, but I can’t find it in my archives, so here it is again: Usor: a collection of user oriented methods.
A nice, thoughtful installment in the continuing design v. ue saga.
Evolt has a new Usability/IA area. Seems like a good candidate for spyonit (although Spyonit seems to be having trouble with that URL. Feh.)
From uxblog, a link to the slightly-sinister-sounding “Usor”, a collection of user-oriented design methods.
This feed interview with the 4 horsemen of the usapocalypse (+ jeff) is a really fun, quick read (and gets extra points for mentioning the Atari 400, although of course I had the Atari 800, which was way cooler because it had 48k instead of like 16 or something and a real keyboard, so there).
But the thing I wanted to point out, which I absolutely agree with, is this line from Don Norman:
… usability people are not designers — that until we become designers, nobody cares about us. What we are good at is pointing out flaws after somebody else has designed it, which makes us not very interesting and not very relevant.Hence my (no longer) secret tagline: “Design is Interaction.”
Now, in the midst of the Florida ballot brouhaha, taylor says usability isn’t dead. Sheesh, make up your mind! (hee hee).
Taylor welcomes the “usability backlash” and I tend to agree. On the other hand, it’s gonna take something a bit more articulate than this interview with Val Casey (which uses the naive-sounding argument that “users are smarter than you think” to dismiss “usability”). I guess I’m just a moderate on the design-usability spectrum, but that’s because I don’t see it as a continuum. In fact, I have a secret little motto: “design is interaction”. In general, I absolutely believe in usability testing, but I also think the always-make-your-links-blue usability strawman masks the fact that we haven’t figured out how to do this stuff right yet, shielding us from the ugly truth that our excruciatingly thought-out interfaces are still hard to use. But I also think that’s OK. Figuring out how to use a medium is damn difficult and it’s gonna take some time. And I feel patient right now.
We have to learn how to speak in order to learn to sing, but there’s no reason we can’t be doing both at the same time.
Tangentially, I love her photographs and she has some excellent basic web design notes with lotsa annotated links.
Red sent me a link to this page where Amazon explains its navigation. Guys, I really think user feedback needs to come a little earlier in the process. (translation: what are you thinking? If you had been testing your design all along, you’d come up with something that doesn’t need a whole page devoted to explaining how it works.)
I’m all for basing design decisions on user feedback, but this example from Yahoo travel is just plain silly:
So, I’m at Web Design World in Seattle, where I’ve been studiously avoiding being the “roving reporter from the show floor.” But then I just heard Tog speak and they announced that he’d joined the Nielsen-Norman group (I guess they’ll need a new domain name). And it made me laugh because I realized these guys have become like the Usability Mafia or something.—you know, the three families that control the entire illicit industry and they have this sort of detente where they split up the pie. And I keep picturing Jakob Nielsen walking around a conference room table at Yahoo brandishing a baseball bat and ranting about default link colors.
This Testing User Interfaces tutorial actually has some really good heuristics for designing UI. (also via xplane)
Any time you get three or more HCI-folk together, someone ruefully jokes about how people think you can “just slap on a little usability” at the end of a project, and everybody nods knowingly. Well, I’m here to say that you absolutely can slap on a little usability at the end of a project. Maybe I’m just being contrarian, and I absolutely recognize the value of (and argue for) an integrated user-centered design process, but, shoot, the difference between a site with no thought to usability and one that was evaluated and “tweaked” after the fact is still very significant, so quit yer whining and give me some usability by tomorrow afternoon, dammit!. </curmudgeonliness>
I wish I read Spanish better (or babelfish worked better): Usablog: “Una bitácora en castellano sobre Usabilidad, Diseño, y algunas otras cosas más…”
Via someone on chi-web: Lauren Scharff’s display readability research.
Marc Rettig: Architecture for use: ethnography & information architecture, which addresses both the emerging field of experience design/information architecture/whatever and gives a really nice overview of ethnography/contextual inquiry.
Now I’m back, lots of catching up to do (or whatever)… young ideas—what is task analysis? (via multiple)
Fitts’ Law Applied to the Web. I generally don’t find it that useful to focus too much on time-to-completion measurements (especially at the expense of larger structural issues), but this is still good stuff to keep in mind. (via multiple)
Alertbox: Eyetracking Study of Web Readers reports on research that shows that people “interlace” multiple web sites; that is, they have multiple browser windows open and switch back and forth, reading several sites at once. This is one of those things that I do all the time, but it never occurred to me to take it into consideration at design time. I certainly will from now on. ps—I really wish Jakob would stop trying to get people to use the default link colors; that horse is dead and rotting.
Taylor pointed out this chi-web post from jakob nielsen and I have absolutely no comment.
Vincent is back: I had seen human factors international before and ignored it, but there’s some good stuff there, like 10 Web usability tips. He also pointed to Enabling Extremely Rapid Navigation…, which appears to be useful, although I’m not sure I agree that “Every Web Site Needs a Detailed Table of Contents” (obviously I wasn’t able to navigate this rapidly enough to figure out if it was worth reading ;)
Here’s a useful-looking overview of methods for involving users in the design process. (via tremendo)
I’m surprised I’ve never noticed these useful thoughts on user-centered design from peterme. Particularly easy to forget: You are not your user and There is no monolithic “user”.
Like cam, I found Joel on Software User Interface Design for Programmers full of both useful info and infuriating oversimplifications like “[UI programming is] straightforward because when you make a mistake, you immediately see it and can correct it.”
Heh, I like the Windows International Word List. Now I know how to lament Amazon’s Scheda problem in Italian.
Also from xblog, which rules, btw, The Usability Methods Toolbox. I haven’t read through it, but it looks like a nice overview of usability evaluation methodology (it seems not to include methods specific to usability design, such as use case modeling).
Just to prove I don’t have a one-track mind, here’s a description of user testing with a paper prototype. The one thing it doesn’t mention, which I think is one of the key benefits of paper prototypes, is that users evaluate them differently than they do HTML mockups. No one expects a paper prototype to resemble a finished design. With HTML, even if it’s all shades of grey and you explain that it’s not a finished design and it’s ugly and so on, people still focus a fair amount on the visual design.
I recently suggested the idea of a standard user test reporting language, but I wasn’t the first person to think of it, believe it or not: Common Industry Format is a software-industry effort run out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Unfortunately it’s more of a format (thus the name) than a computer-readable syntax, but shoot that’s gotta be a solvable problem, doesn’t it?
It’s funny, if you actually read Usability Is Not Graphic Design, and can get past the first few paragraphs where the author sets up this really bizzarre straw man of graphic design as “wowing the user,” then you see that the whole article is about how design is usability. Which is absolutely true.
Essential Use Cases (Constantine and Lockwood) are a geeky HCI way of formally defining the types of people who will use a system and how they’ll do so. The key is keeping things abstract to distance yourself from specific technologies or implementations. I find these sorts of formal exercises really, really frustrating while I’m doing them, but they can be a very powerful way to break free from the implementation-lock that sets in so quickly on a project.
When thinking about usability, I believe there’s an important distinction between empirical usability (whatever that is) and perceived usability. Here’s an interesting CHI-Web post from Jared Spool on what determines perceived speed of a Web site (hint: it’s not load time).
MikeK on why open-source doesn’t work for UI design. Maybe someone’ll come up with a distributed user-testing model, perhaps an XML-based user-test description language so test results can be shared.