User Interface Engineering

Usability Tools Podcast: Successful Web App Usability Techniques, Part 1
Recorded: January 25th, 2007 from the studios of UIE
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 17 min | File size: 9.6 MB
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (9.6MB)

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I explore usability techniques for web-based applications. Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. When we’re researching the usability of a content-based site, we’re focused on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations that we need to account for.

Because this is a big topic, we’ve divided it into two podcasts. In Part 1, Brian and I lay down the framework for what our usability research needs to tell us about our web-based application. In Part 2, will look at the techniques for finding that information.

In this episode we cover,

• The differences between hub-and-spoke and interview-based web applications
• When in the design and development process we look to user research
• 5 major classes of usability concerns to consider when testing web apps

Here are some UIE resources on web apps that relate to this episode,

• Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications—Research Article
• The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications: Web Apps Tour 2007 – Learning from Successful Designs—PDF Report
• The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications, Part I: Structure and Flows—PDF Report
• The WebApp Summit, March 2008—in beautiful Coronado, California

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Podcasts, Usability Tools Podcast, Web Applications . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.