Usability Tidbits for Wednesday 20-September-2006
Website Usability - You Can’t Get There From Here — “Usability can encompass many different facets. How easy is it to navigate through the website? Are search engine crawlers able to successfully find and index site pages? What paths do you want customers to take through the site? How up-to-date is content?”
Before search, Government agencies should look at usability – “So, before any organization, including a government agency, can help users via a web site, there must be a strong understanding of how users will interact with that site, and that seems to be the area in which many government agencies are lacking the most.”
Redesign of the Google Base homepage – “In our usability studies, we noticed that providers new to bulk uploading would often see the link “Post an item” and click it immediately. They often wouldn’t notice the smaller link that said “Post multiple items with a bulk upload file”. Our testers would end up in the one-at-a-time posting process, and they definitely did not like the idea of trying to add hundreds or thousands of items to Google Base by hand! With the new design, all of our testers were able to choose an upload technology that is right for their items.”
What term do you use for ‘user experience’? — “There’s a range of vocabulary that can be used to refer to user experience: ‘usability’, ‘interface’, ‘human centered design’, etc. What term we use seems to depend on what sells — within an organization, you use the terms that connect with the values and the understanding of the people you’re working with.”
Improving portal usability — “Remember that less is better and simple is good (think iPod or Legos). So focus less on technology and features, and more on simply “getting the work done.” In particular, portal developers should strive to remove features that may be nice to have, but end up cluttering the interface.”
Real Wireframes Get Real Results — “Usability tests are done to get early feedback on content and functionality decisions from people outside the project team. These participants, unfortunately, are not sure how to respond to a wireframe.” (Hmm…)
On the Meta-Usability of User Interface Standards — “Concrete product design examples were more influential than the abstract requirements statements. Queried about the usability of the standard, more than half of the participants said that the rules in the standard were difficult to remember. An equal number suggested that providing good programming tools would enhance the value of the standard.”
Upping The Ante: Understanding business & design through casino poker – “When I started to make the connections between the two, it was incredible how much playing poker began to inform my thinking and understanding of both design and business. The people, behaviors, and situations happening at the poker table directly correlate to the processes in business and design, and through this series of articles, I hope to share some of those insights.” (Fun!)
Who Is Jonathan Ive? — “An in-depth look at the man behind Apple’s design magic”
Favorite Summer Hack — “Answer: a bottle opener in the bottom of the Reef Fanning beach sandal” (Related: Helicopters opening beer bottles.)
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change — “A lot of the information that newspaper organizations collect is relentlessly structured. It just takes somebody to realize the structure (the easy part), and it just takes somebody to start storing it in a structured format (the hard part).”
User experience podcast – “Tired of reading about user experience? Then you might enjoy listing to Gerry Gaffney’s user experience podcast UXpod.”