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James Hom has created The Usability Methods Toolbox with explanations for inquiry, inspection, and testing methods including related techniques such as prototyping and affinity diagrams.
most of these methods and techniques apply to interation design as well. i guess it all depends on how wide or narrow your definition of usability.
there is quite an extensive bibliography on the site as well.
from sigia:
"This summer the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) under Tommy Thompson, released the
first major comprehensive Web design guidelines issued
by a federal agency. This work began at the National
Cancer Institute, and is now being distributed
throughout HHS departments, companies doing business
with HHS, and their agencies."
I was skimming through some of the sections and most of the guidelines apply to all web sites not just health-related ones. However, I did find this interesting finding in the Content Organization section:
"When segmenting content for two or more distinct groups of users, allow
users from each audience to easily access information intended for other
audiences. One study showed that users want to see information that is
intended for a health professional audience, as well as for a patient or
consumer audience. Users want access to all versions of the information
without first having to declare themselves as a health professional, a patient,
a caregiver, etc. To accommodate these users, audiences were not
segmented until they reached a page where links to multiple versions of a
document (i.e., technical, non-technical) were provided."
The screenshot example is from the National Institute of Mental Health. While the main navigation segments by audience ("For the Public", "For Practitioners", etc.) in the National Cancer Institute site the information documents index has information links labelled "patients" and "health professionals". If you select one there is a navigation tab to switch to the other type.
(via AIGAExperienceDesign)
nick ragouzis offers his thoughts on a web design curriculum from waaay back in 1997.
Ten Design-less Rules for Successful Web Design
These are all still very, very relevant and true. basically, interaction design requires a professional so educate everyone on this and the value that you deliver.
If it's valuable to them, it must be valuable to the producers and the enterprises they represent. Understand the full economics - time, people, resources, funds. Account for everything. Account for the future. Account for change, constant change.
A Web Design Curriculum
Written in 1997 and updated in 1998 it is aimed at the "webmaster" role, but there is a lot in here pertaining to each of the different roles (id, ia, etc.) that have split out.
some highlights:
Multi-Disciplinary Studies
- The social role of speech acts (convince, order, appeal, express)
- Human-Computer Interaction/Computer-Human Interaction
- Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - The computer as mediator of social interaction
- Hypertext
- Institutional and personal efforts for tracking, understanding, experimenting with, reporting, and applying research and developments
Revisiting Design Principles--from the perspective of the Web
- Line and space
- Light (black, white, color)
- Typography
- Movement; Sound
- Tension; Balance
Basics - User Interface Design
- Models
- Human factors
- Analysis
- Design Process
Web Implementation Economics
- Looking for and understanding value - discovering your client's multi-constituency value system
- Communicating and demonstrating value to your client
- Economics and standards for return in Web investments - from speculative investment and opportunity costs to cost-replacement and resource re-deployment.
- Proforma development, launch and maintenance budgets
- Specifying and allocating infrastructure system costs
- Capturing soft benefits as project value: from goodwill to organizational development
- Establishing systems for evaluating changes in costs using a marginal utility ROI model
- Measuring and communicating return - proposing, getting buy-in, doing it.
- Recognizing client-relevant new technologies. Techniques for effective, fast, and low-risk evaluations.
Productive Critique of Web Designs
- ACM/interactions Quality of Experience criteria on detail judging
- Understanding of users
- Effective design process
- Needed
- Learnable and Usable
- Appropriate - right problem at right level?
- Aesthetic experience
- Mutable
- Manageable in context of use
- User goals and expectations
- Economics
- Competing and comparative sites
- Participation in judging panels (and criteria creation)
- Submission of designs
Stepping through a Project
- Exploration
- Problems and needs
- User analysis (tasks, profiles, models)
- Identifying and validating applicable metaphors
- Identifying and validating navigation requirements
- Information organization and mapping
- Schematics
- Thumbnails
- System, tools, and middleware specifications
- Service levels: capacity, availability, response
- World-wide user compatibility and accessibility requirements
- Artifact design, repurposing, acquisition
- Phased, iterative implementations
- Prototypes in user-driven, participatory cycles
- Fast-track implementations
- Investigating the quality of the experience - from testing to listening
- Training, documentation
- Rollout - from the first hot page to user value, to client value
Client Communications
- Modern communications and team performance models -- Understanding, implementing, and convincing your client.
- Direct to all player communications - benefits, and techniques for coping
- High-frequency communications
- Full availability - employing technology to inform everybody, at their convenience and level of interest
- The multiple-threat opportunity for internal, external, and team communications
- Personal communications - Avoiding the single-point-of-contact model and making n-way-n-way communications work
- Telephone
- Voice mail, and pager integration
- Web-passive
- Electronic news groups and mailing lists
- Collaborative, threaded bulletin boards
- WWW-push to client desktops, with project-involvement customization
- Techniques for bringing your customer into your model - including: understanding the returns in giving technology to your clients
Getting the Client
- Getting in first, or elbowing your team to the top of the heap
- Getting the whole project
- Identifying, claiming, and selling value: from sales to organizational transformation
- Proving the value of real, professional, web design
- Avoiding the red-herring of costs
- Getting the client technologists and communicators on your side
- Effective methods to present your portfolio. Including, demonstration of your knowledge of the "Productive Critique of Web Designs" (above). Using this as a closer
- Contracts
- Pricing and getting an agreement
- Forming an effective client advisory board - breadth, depth, effective relationships, expectations
- Locating and fostering subject-matter experts
- Building client trust in your handling of their assets
jon udell argues that there are lessons to be learned from browsers in his article How Rich is the Rich GUI.
In one crucial way, the rich GUI is tragically disadvantaged with respect to its poor browser cousin. Trying to sort out a permissions problem with IIS 6, I clicked a Help button and landed on a Web page. The page could only describe the tree-navigation procedure required to find the tabbed dialog box where I could address the problem. It could not link to that dialog box. This is nuts when you stop and think about it. Documentation of GUI software needs pages of screenshots and text to describe procedures that, on the Web, are encapsulated in links that can be published, bookmarked, and e-mailed. A GUI that doesn't embrace linking can never be truly rich.
udell quotes comments on the article in his blog.
i also found this very short article on browsers vs. flash:
Flash's greatest weakness, though, is the browser's greatest strength. The browser is an engine for displaying -- and interacting with -- structured documents. The mission of Flash was always to complement the browser, not compete with it. That remains a proper division of labor.
chris macgregor (flazoom.com) posted his UIE8 presentation on the roi of ria's. he presents some very high roi numbers for yankee candle, miniusa, bluegreen vacation rentals, greenbriar hotels, and footjoy. there are lots of links to examples too.
chris also authored articles on each of the RIA types he has defined so far:
The Configurator
benefits:
* Faster feedback to the user based on their selections.
* Reduction in order errors. The visual feedback helps the user make choices they understand.
* Integration with the server is transparent to the user.
* The overall configuration process takes less time.
Simplified Forms
benefits:
* Faster feedback to the user based on their entries.
* Higher and faster completion rates.
* A reduction in page flipping, and in bandwidth costs.
* Integration with the server back-end is transparent to the user.
Product Finders
benefits:
* Improves on standard search capabilities.
* Easier to understand and use than advanced search syntax.
* Increases user success rates in finding the products they need.
* Remove familiarity hurdles for finding products.
* No need to download software, Flash is already on 90% of user's PCs and is a tiny download compared to stand alone software.
* Flash user interfaces can make learning the application easier (when Flash developers practice good usability methods)
* Same application can run on multiple platforms and in multiple browsers.
The Brick Testament is the Reverend Brendan Powell Smith's bible scene creations made entirely of legos. the scenes are amazing and the photos he took of them are well done as well.
the sap design guild has a tons of resources called Design Tidbits - many are specifically geared towards sap apps but there are several that apply to any product.
there are good resources in other sections of the site too. it seems they've organized the content by the type (article, tidbit, etc.) rather than by subject matter. an bad choice in my opinion. what do i care if the information i'm reading on prototypes is an article or a tidbit?
some good ones:
The Art of Hiding - talks about the principles behind hiding and displaying laarge amounts of info in software.
Screen Layout - explains the different methods for laying out interface elements on a screen.
Concept Statements and Website messages - the usefulness of creating a concept statement for the site and then the messages you want to communicate to site visitors.
Creating an Interaction Design - describes the interaction design process
Do Traditional Design Processes Apply to Portal Design? - another examination of the design process as applied to the development of a portal site
Fitts's Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
scott berkun's application of fitt's law to the web
via sigia:
collection of writing for the web resources:
Jakob
Sun
webmonkey
web style guide
university of mn - lots of resource links on writing
via dan saffer:
nico mcdonald's article in the guardian Second Sight is a very brief argument that designers need to trust their own intuition and experience in order to drive innovation. focusing entirely on usability dilutes innovation.
Too much user focus may be a barrier to innovation. Research is likely to tell us that users desire an improvement on something they already understand. Ask them if they would use a proposed innovation and they will say no - and then adopt it when they have seen its utility demonstrated. Recognising this, designers should rise above the interests of particular users and push their own intuition for innovation. They might note the sentiment of BBC titan Lord Reith, who when asked whether he was going to give the people what they wanted, replied: "No. Something better than that."
