paper & pencil

politics-free design

An article from Adaptive Path - Keep Office Politics Out of Your Design - provides some tips for handling design discussions by using user research.

The team that has rational support for its conclusion can trump power and opinion. User research can give you concrete proof that one direction is better than another.

1. earn trust by gathering data objectively
2. let the data speak for itself, don't mold into what you want it to be
3. derive recommendations and be flexible
4. review and validate with team members

creatures of habit

read on donna m's blog her revelation while watching users navigate a new intranet.

While watching people work on the production system today, I noticed that, even when they found something very easily the first time, they tucked it away in their memory. The next time they had to find the same or related information, they tried to remember where they found it - even though they had found it intuitively the first time.

Now I know how quickly humans develop habit, and how strong habit becomes, but I hadn't realised the extent to which we do it.

user experience roi

b&a article criticizing the $122 NN/g report - Usability ROI. They recommend the free report - Return on Investment for
Usable User-Interface Design: Examples and Statistics (pdf).

the report provides lots of useful info & recommendations including the need for cross-functional teams. an interesting response from Paula Thornton was posted to the experiencedesign yahoo group:

The reference to creating 'cross-functional' is an anthem to my reference of 'horizontal'. Companies are just not yet comfortable with 'horizontal'. To further the discussion above, even where 'horizontal' is tolerated, there then becomes the meeting with the great flaw: influence and accountability. Since no budgetary (the real 'power' metric in an organization) responsibilities align horizontally, the output of a 'cross-functional' effort is 'advisory' at best.

she expanded on it on her own site:

Is there any doubt why companies are struggling with moving from a product to a customer focus?

button maker

nifty little online button maker from Kalsey Consulting. I used it to create my tpbeta button.

@TypePad

i'm joining the TypePad beta group on yahoo.

communities vs. audiences

Communities, Audiences, and Scale.

You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with technology, because they assume very different relationships between the sender and receiver of messages.

As group size grows, the number of connections required between people in the group exceeds human capacity to make or keep track of them all.

The growth of two-way media, however, shows that the audience pattern re-establishes itself in one way or another -- large mailing lists become read-only, online communities (eg. LambdaMOO, WELL, ECHO) eventually see their members agitate to stem the tide of newcomers, users of sites like slashdot see fewer of their posts accepted.

The community model is good for spreading messages through a relatively small and tight knit group, but bad for reaching a large and dispersed group, because the tradeoff between size and connectedness dampens message spread well below the numbers that can be addressed as an audience.

see my other post on a shirky article - "groups are their own worst enemy"

magic icons

from simplebits
magic icons

create 2-color images with one of the colors to be transparent. "fill" in the missing color with the background in CSS.

sample code for the headers on fast company

h3 img {
background: #369;
vertical-align: middle;
}


interview w/rolf mulich

from uie:
Usability Testing Best Practices: An Interview with Rolf Molich

rolf discusses the art (more) & science (less) of usability testing.

It depends. The number of users needed for web-testing depends on the goal of the test. If you have no goal, then anything (including nothing) will do.

goal: selling usability in your org = 3-4 users
goal: find "catastrophic probelms to drive an terative process" = 5-6 users
goal: "find all usability problems in an interface" = as many as you can get
Rolf has conducted tests with 50 users and not come up with an exhaustive list of problems and has also had 9 usability teams test Hotmail and of the 310 problems found, only 6 were identified by more than half the teams and 232 (75%) were reported only once. basically, usability testing is an art.

regarding heuristic evaluations:

Heuristic inspections are cheap, simple to explain, and deceptively simple to execute. However, I don’t use this method very often and I don’t recommend it to my clients. In my opinion, the idea that anyone can conduct a useful heuristic inspection after a crash course is rubbish. The results from my studies showed that inexperienced inspectors working on their own often produce disastrous amounts of “false alarms”.

Another problem is that heuristic inspection is based solely on opinions. No one has given me a good answer to the question that I’ve heard several times from disbelieving designers: “Why are your opinions better than mine?” I think that’s an excellent question, particularly knowing that users often prove me wrong whenever my heuristic predictions are put to a real usability test.

tips for creating usable usability reports:

Above all, a good usability report must be usable. The main recommendations I give clients for creating a usable usability report are:

• Keep it short.
  No more than approximately 50 comments and 30 pages. It’s the job of the good usability professional to limit the comments to the ones that are really important.


• Provide a one-page executive summary on page 2.
  Include the top three positive comments and the top three problems. Four of the nine CUE-2 teams did not include an executive summary in their reports.


• Include positive findings.
  The ideal ratio between positive findings and problems is 1:1, but I have to admit that I rarely do better than 1:3. The CUE-2 teams ranged from no positive comments at all to an excellent ratio of 7:10.


• Classify the comments.
  Distinguish between disasters, serious problems, minor problems, positive findings, bugs, and suggestions for improving the interface. Three of the nine CUE-2 teams did not classify their comments at all. The remaining six each invented their own classification scheme.

Reports are of course useful, but even a perfect report is useless if it doesn’t cause beneficial changes to the user interface. For example, good communication with the development team through effective consensus building is far more important than a good test report.

sample usability report

rolf's CUE (Comparative Usability Evaluation) reports are available online.

opensource CMS

opensourceCMS

admin access to test over 40 open source php/mysql cms's. they refresh every hour.

css for online forms

Style Web Forms Using CSS

example form styled with css: