Utilize Available Screen Space
“Websites and mobile apps both frequently cram options into too-small parts of the screen, making items harder to understand.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
All posts about
Usability
Workflow Expectations: Presenting Steps at the Right Time
“Actions at one step of an application impact subsequent steps. When users don’t understand this relationship, usability suffers.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users’ Problem Solving
“Users increasingly rely on individual pages listed by search engines instead of finding better ways to tackle problems.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
There Should Be Limits to Usability
“People generally regard improving the usability of products or systems as a major part of our role as UX designers. While there are tradeoffs in all aspects of design, our assumption has generally been that products and systems that are easier to use are preferable to those that are harder to use. However, despite what seemed to be a common understanding, a number of articles have recently reported on research that suggests increased ease of use can be detrimental.” (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)
Six controversial topics in usability
“Every field has its set of hot-button issues and usability is no exception. Here are six topics that tend to generate some passionate discussions.” (Jeff Sauro ~ Measuring Usability)
Optimizing a Screen for Mobile Use
“A single mobile screen with almost no features still required 10 design changes to meet usability guidelines for mobile websites.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
DIY usability testing: Steve Krug explains it all for you
“Many discussions about user interfaces see the same type of arguments. Developers like complicated things, with many things on the screen. Designers like pleasant esthetic experience. This problem can be addressed with usability testing. Many sites have usability problems, including Steve Krug’s own site. Steve hasn’t fixed the problem, because it’s cheaper to send an email in support of a struggling user than to fix the actual problem. You don’t have the resources. Easy to find, but hard to fix. Steve makes the argument you should do the usability testing yourself. Most sites aren’t tested, because it costs money, time, and it’s hard to find professionals to do it. So Steve will show how to do it yourself.” (Michiel Berger – SXSW NL Report)
Can Hated Design Elements Be Made to Work?
“Once users reject a design technique due to repeated bad experiences it’s almost impossible to use it for good because people will avoid it every time.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult
“When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex Web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
Non-Profit Organization Websites: Increasing Donations and Volunteering
“Giving money on charity websites is 7% harder than spending money on e-commerce sites. Donating physical items is even harder. For non-profit websites, social media is secondary; the top priority is to write clearer content.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
User expectations are important
“A key principle within usability is that people carry around a ‘mental model’ of how we expect the world to behave. These models are based on past experiences and can be a very powerful factor in influencing how people behave in certain situations. In our experience of usability testing, usability suffers when a site does not match users’ expectations. Indeed, our usability testing sessions have repeatedly shown that breaking expectations makes users unhappy.” (Tim Fidgeon ~ Spotless Interactive) courtesy of usabilitynews
Why Don’t Usability Problems Get Fixed?
“How many times has this happened to you? You’ve finished presenting the results of your usability testing, heuristic evaluation, or other user research activity, feeling great about the positive impact your recommendations will have on a product’s user experience. The audience smiled and nodded along during your presentation. Most of them agree with your findings and seem genuinely impressed by the work you’ve done. But, later on, you face the reality that few of your recommendations have gotten implemented fully—and many, not at all.” (Jim Ross ~ UXmatters)
Changing terms for changing times: Usability, HCI, UCD & more
“I am also somewhat sceptical about the value of including information architecture in this analysis. For sure, it is a term currently used within the digital community to describe the application of the principles of user centred design to the development of information-rich websites and applications. But the term was in use long before the web was invented (notably by the software industry)…” (Tony Russell-Rose) ~ courtesy of usabilitynews
Test-Taking Enhances Learning
“People remember much more after reading if they retrieve information about the text from memory. Quizzes are one way websites can help users remember more.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
A model for UX design reviews
“Design reviews are so important for our work as user experience designers, but they too often fail us. Here is a model for design reviews that overcomes the problems of ego, emotion, and communication that so often get in the way of helpful feedback.” (Davin Granroth)
UX, Design, and Food on the Table
“In this case study, Laura Klein takes us inside the design process in a real live startup. (…) Interactive prototypes and iterative testing let you improve the design quickly before you ever get to the coding stage. Targeting only the confusing parts of the interface for redesign reduces the number of things you need to rebuild and helps make both design and development faster. Lean design is about improving the user experience iteratively! Fixing the biggest user problems first means getting an improved experience to users quickly and optimizing later based on feedback and metrics.” (Eric Ries ~ Startup Lessons Learned)
Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability
“Three methods for increasing UX quality by exploring and testing diverse design ideas work even better when you use them together.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
The Dark Side of Usability
“By crafting simple and user-friendly interfaces we relieve our users of the need to think – or more accurately, to think about the more trivial and mechanical parts of the task, things which can be outsourced to the machine. But by doing so we are at risk of indadvertedly surrendering more than we planned for, as we are lured into thinking that interface will do our work for us—and so we spend less time thinking about the problem, less time planning.” (Dmitry Fadeyev ~ Usability Post)
10 Best Intranets of 2011: A summary
“Knowledge management progressed from cliché to reality, based on simpler and thus more-used features. Mobile intranets doubled.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
Kinect Gestural UI: First Impressions
“Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog conformations. But fun to play.” (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)
