“Contingency design is design for when things go wrong. It’s the error messaging, graphic design, instructive text, information architecture, backend system, and customer service that helps visitors get back on track after a problem occurs.” (37signals) – courtesy of guuui

“More and more money is being spent online as consumers switch to shopping on the web. Yet so many websites don’t seem to have considered the usability of their ecommerce site and of their ordering process, resulting in users prematurely giving up and abandoning their shopping basket. Here are ten ways to improve the usability of your ecommerce site, so that you can maximise your conversion rate and help convert the contents of users’ shopping baskets into orders.” (Webcredible) – courtesy of guuui

“A field study identified twenty-two ways that automated hospital systems can result in the wrong medication being dispensed to patients. Most of these flaws are classic usability problems that have been understood for decades.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Today we know that consumers evaluate and select both products and services based on the user-friendliness of an interface.” (Kath Straub – Human Factors International Newsletter) – courtesy of usabilityviews

“The evangelism strategies that help a usability group get established in a company are different from the ones needed to create a full-fledged usability culture.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Change isn’t bad. It can’t be. If it were, we’d never have any technology advancement and wouldn’t be pleased with our iPods and TiVos. Yet people obviously resist some change. Understanding why change is sometimes embraced and sometimes resisted is critical to successfully introducing new designs.” (Jared Spool – User Interface Engineering)

“Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“More and more intranet teams are buying into the need for usability. However, usability is not a strategy, and without a clear strategy, usability can become a pointless, wasteful and counter-productive exercise.” (Gerry McGovern)

“On average, this year’s winning intranets increased site use by 149% with designs that supported bigger screens, multinational users, collaboration, easily updated content, and factory-floor workers.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Usability testing is a serious investment of time and resources for any team. Having a clear understanding of what you want to get from it is critical to its success. The most successful teams constantly monitor the decisions that come out of the testing process. They look at subsequent usability problems that appear and ask, ‘How did our process miss this? What should we change for next time?’ Only with the constant process of honing our skills and improving our processes can we ensure that we’re getting the best value from this priceless technique.” (Jared Spool – UIE Roadshow: Know Your Users)

“The community includes people working on mobile telephony, web design and in many other industries as usability engineers, user researchers and interaction designers. Take a look at your phone. There’s a good chance that people from UPA China worked on the user interface. (…) There are all these bright, young, clever, motivated people here who are interested in usability.” (Whitney Quesenbery – The UPA Voice) – courtesy of usabilityviews

“Despite being an artificial situation, user testing generates realistic findings because people engage strongly with the tasks and suspend their disbelief.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“While a large number of organizations have adopted e-learning programs, far fewer have addressed the usability of their learning applications. More attention should be devoted to assuring the usability of e-learning applications if organizations are to fully benefit from their investments.” (Michael J. Miller – Learning Circuits) – courtesy of webword

“When someone has trouble applying knowledge, it’s usually because they really never had knowledge. They had information, and that’s not the same thing. You can get information just through listening or reading, but knowledge requires thinking… thinking about the RIGHT things.” (Kathy Sierra – Creating Passionate Users)

“When using websites, teenagers have a lower success rate than adults and they’re also easily bored. To work for teens, websites must be simple — but not childish — and supply plenty of interactive features.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“(…) usability professionals use their budgets to run usability studies. That is, when given money, they immediately start setting up usability programs to solve particular problems. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because many usability professionals think the value of usability is derived entirely from the results produced through usability tests. Most people think usability is synonymous with usability testing. It isn’t, and this misconception frustrates me.” (John S. Rhodes – Boxes and Arrows)

“About 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid, though several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Design happens at the intersection of the user, the interface, and their context. It’s essential for interface designers to understand the gamut of contexts that can occur, thereby ensuring they create designs that are usable no matter what’s happening around the user.” (Jared M. Spool – User Interface Engineering)

“Make new or follow-up information easily accessible from the location of the original information or transaction.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Studies of how people react to online advertisements have identified several design techniques that impact the user experience very negatively.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)