User research is now a critical tool in the toolbox of design teams. However, it only works well if you involve the right participants in the study.
Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the [...]

This week, I had the great honor of speaking with Dana Chisnell, noted usability expert and principal at Usability Works, a consultancy based in San Fransisco. Dana is also the co-author of the recently-released second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing, a book so fine, I agreed to write the foreword.

 

 SpoolCast: Usability Guerillas with Dana Chisnell [23:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Jared Spool describes eight common account sign-in mistakes we see all the time in usability tests.

The landscape for building applications is always changing. In the ’80s, we built them out of “dumb terminals” and DOS screens. In the ’90s, we used GUIs. In this millennium, we get browser-based technologies, like Flash, Flex, Javascript, and Ajax (and now new technologies on the horizon, such as Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight).
Whenever a [...]

UIEtips 9/27/07: The Power of Comics for Understanding User Needs
As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need to find ways that effectively convey just how people will use the product and integrate it into their lives. Recently, more and more organizations and design teams have turned to comics to communicate [...]

This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about User Interface Engineering’s groundbreaking study on download time. In this study, we found the actual download time of a page didn’t impact a site’s usability.

 

 Page Download Time [21:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Jared M. Spool recently had the chance to talk with Steve Mulder about how to create effective personas based on user research as well as valuable tips for convincing your organization to adopt personas into the design process.

UIEtips 8/15/07: Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about users’ goals and behaviors. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle.
One [...]

UIEtips 8/07/07: Web 2.0 — The Power Behind the Hype
Over the past few years, the world of web application development has seen the emergence of a new set of approaches such as APIs, RSS, and Folksonomies that have come to be known collectively as Web 2.0. These new approaches allow developers to easily create [...]

Editing your site’s content can be an exhaustive and time-consuming job. However, it’s absolutely critical to your site’s success. In her great new book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, Ginny Redish gives several helpful guidelines that design teams should keep in mind when working on their site’s key messages.