“Flat design and improperly rescaled design are the main threats to tablet usability, followed by poor gestures and workflow.”
Tablet usability
Usability in a new form factor has its own idiosyncrasies.
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Usability
When the UI is too fast
Speed and attention, two challenges for UX.
“Users might overlook things that change too fast – and even when they do notice, changeable screen elements are harder to understand in a limited timeframe.”
Website reading: It (sometimes) does happen
Thin versus deep reading and understanding: online versus offline.
“When web content helps users focus on sections of interest, users switch from scanning to actually reading the copy.”
Interesting facts make web pages compelling
Facts, not ‘factoids’. Find ‘Facts’, replace ‘Content’.
“Users hunt for facts online, so factually rich content will attract readers and keep their attention.”
Seniors as web users
Many things can be stopped or changed, except age. So change the web.
“Users aged 65 and older are 43% slower at using websites than users aged 21-55. This is an improvement over previous studies, but designs must change to better accommodate aging users.”
Users’ pagination preferences and ‘view all’
Pages as dividers are old school from the atom world.
“Long listings might need pagination by default, but if users customize the display to ‘View All’ list items, respect that preference.”
Bridging the CEO credibility gap
So, grow-up you UX community.
“Unfortunately, boardroom UX literacy does not develop by itself. It is the role of UX leaders to create an environment in which it can develop within their companies’ leadership teams and to provide meaningful data to which it can be applied. (…) I would suggest that the root cause leading to CEOs remaining underserved by the typical usability data available to them is a continued lack of business leadership focus and practice understanding among the UX community.”
Windows 8: Design over usability
Win8 as talk of the town. We’ll get used to it.
“Windows 8 gets a lot right, but Microsoft’s determination to offer computer and mobile users the same interface makes the operating system somewhat weird.”
The past 100 years of the future: Human-computer interaction in science-fiction movies and television (.pdf)
HCI in films, TV shows and SciFi is really getting a genre.
“During the past hundred years, science-fiction (sci-fi) films and, later, videos, have, of necessity, had to depict detailed views of human-computer interaction (HCI) of the future, or alternate pasts/presents, in order to convey a compelling scene and, sometimes, in order move forward the plot. This publication explores some of the themes that emerge from examining this body of work. The basic premise is simple: HCI professionals can learn something from sci-fi media, and sci-fi media-producers can learn more from HCI professionals in order to show smarter views of the future.”
(Aaron Marcus a.k.a. @amandaberkeley ~ Amanda)
Auto-forwarding carousels and accordions annoy users and reduce visibility
Carousels and accordions are for fairs, children parties and other festivities, not for web design.
“The user’s target was at the top of the page in 98-point font. But she failed to find it because the panel auto-forwarded instead of staying still.”
Intranet Users Stuck at Low Productivity
A voice from the distant past: the intranet.
“Although intranet design is improving, it hasn’t kept pace with increased complexity in enterprise requirements, so measured usability is down slightly.”
The Design for Usability book
A Dutch delight.
“The Design for Usability project published a book that provides the product development community with a comprehensive and coherent overview of the results of the project, in such a way that they can be applied in practice. The book outlines the studies conducted in the project, and indicates how the individual research projects are related and which of them can be applied in a coherent mode.”
(Edited by @jaspervankuijk ~ Design for Usability)
Revealing unawareness in usability related decision-making
Usability, (still) a vibrant concept.
“Nowadays, many users experience usability issues with their electronic products. It does not work as they expect or otherwise irritates the user, so he becomes dissatisfied about the product and may even complain about it. These numbers of complaints to companies and usability issues are high and rising. Reasons for these increasing numbers are the highly complex electronic products that are being developed, the global economy in which they are created and produced, and the wide variety of users that uses the product.”
(Christelle Harkema and Ilse Luyk-de Visser ~ Design for Usability) ~ courtesy of annekevandelangkruis
Hardware Specs vs. User Experience
A kind of atoms versus bits, again.
“Product quality has to be judged in the context of human tasks, and reviews should emphasize real use—not raw numbers.”
Mobile Email Newsletters
Mobile newsletters, why not?
“Mobile use strengthens email marketing’s benefits by offering ubiquitous newsletter access, but it also introduces new usability limitations for template design.”
Tips on Prototyping for Usability Testing
Make it as real as possible.
“(…) there are some differences between testing a prototype and testing a fully functional Web site or application. In this column, I’ll provide some tips that can make your usability studies more successful and help you to avoid problems when testing prototypes.”
(Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters)
User Satisfaction vs. Performance Metrics
All you can measure…
“Users generally prefer designs that are fast and easy to use, but satisfaction isn’t 100% correlated with objective usability metrics.”
Homepage Design Changes
The more things change, the less things change.
“Web design is stabilizing; the average homepage is only about 40% different than it was a year before. (Corresponding to 2.5 years between complete redesigns.)”
Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention
The more you know, the more you see.
“Users don’t see stuff that’s right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest.”
SEO and Usability
Designing for humans, not machines.
“What makes a website good will also give it a high SERP rank, but overly tricky search engine optimization can undermine the user experience.”
