Explore the Articles

Streamlining Usability Testing by Avoiding the Lab

The usability lab, with its fancy cameras, one-way mirrors, and comfortable observation suites, is often considered a can't-do-without necessity for conducting serious usability tests. Even those who feel it's not required will jump at the chance to use a lab when available. However, while studying successful projects over the years, we've found that usability testing can often be more effective when the team eliminates the lab from the process.

The most successful teams conduct usability tests to help them make informed design decisions. You can tell a testing project has succeeded when the designers have the necessary information to resolve the pending choices they face. Anything slowing down or obfuscating this information gets in the way of the design process.

Read More

Practical (and Cheap) Usability Testing

When building interactive Web sites or applications, the success of our work is not based solely on marketing strategy and design. The real challenge is providing Web customers with clarity, control and satisfaction.

The only real way to ensure understanding and ease of use is to watch representative customers use your site—otherwise known as usability testing, a one-on-one test during which you give participants open-ended tasks to perform on your site. As they use the site, you gain understanding from their confusion.

Read More

The Canonical Intranet Homepage

In recent years, intranet homepages have become very similar in their basic layout. Intranets that look the same can nonetheless differ drastically in usability due to different features and content.

Over the past five years, I've reviewed several hundred intranets and have seen a clear trend: homepage layouts are becoming more and more similar over time. We've now reached the point where one specific intranet homepage layout is so common that it makes sense to anoint it as the canonical design.

Read More

Functional Usability of Web Content Management Systems

Econtentmag.com has a great article on Content Management Systems, here is an extract;

In Part I of this series, [I] looked at CMS interfaces and found that in general, users come to CMS projects with diverse expectations, leaving vendors struggling to match a product out of the box to a prospective customer's particular scenarios. As Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, puts it, "A CMS product is designed for an ideal, generic world, but none of us work in that world—it's like trying to sell everyone an average-sized shoe."

So here in Part II, [I'll] examine usability through the lens of system functionality. What does it mean to have a usable workflow? Can a "Help" subsystem make up for the inevitable gaps in user training and understanding? How can authors find what they need? To the extent that you can answer questions like these for your CMS project, you are well on your way to developing a more usable—and therefore, by definition, a more effective—content management system.

Read More

Applying Usability Principles to your CMS

Usability has moved to the forefront in the past few years, especially for corporate Web sites, as marketing managers seek to understand and measure whether their investments in Web communications are really paying off. Now that Web-based applications have proliferated, enterprises are beginning to look more closely at application usability in general and the usability of content management systems in particular.

Read More

Why Consistency is Critical

Users Need Consistency - There is little doubt that consistency is important for users. Consistency makes sites easier to use, because visitors don't have to learn new tricks as they move around.

Read More

Shannon's 10 Winning Interface "Do's"

Be consistent with your inteface elements, and interface positioning. A good read for tips that every web designer!

Read More

Minimize me - badly chosen or poorly cropped product images

At times though, looking at e-commerce sites can make me a little sad because of the quality of the images chosen to illustrate products. It sometimes feels like the effects of good planning and usability design are diminished by badly chosen or poorly cropped product images. This issue comes into focus particularly when looking at small, thumbnail images.

Read More

Create a Retro style look

A cool tutorial from the macromedia website. This tutorial demonstrates how to create a retro look to images. For example by changing the background to black and white.

This technique can be usefull when you have an eyecatcher on your website.

Read More

Web Accessibility - Policy & Tools overview

Breeze online overview of Web Accessibility. Flash player required. Read More