I bet you can tell I’m cleaning out my inbox.
Jen wrote:
I enjoyed your December 10th article, on assessing UX skills, so I sent it around to my colleagues. It was favorably received, but the folks on the alias found that one core skill was missing: the creation of UI mockups, particularly interactive mockups.
The places [...]

Bruce McCarthy offers this great writeup of our recent Virtual Seminar on Building Robust Personas.
A while back I wrote a piece about personas where I talked it about why it’s a bad idea to base your personas on a single real individual. Using a real person as a substitute persona might seem like a good [...]

Yesterday, I gave my Virtual Seminar on Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less. If you missed it, you can watch it on demand.
The session went well, but we ran tight on time and I didn’t get to all the great questions. Brian and I were just talking and we’re planning a followup podcast [...]

The always intriguing Christopher Fahey commented on yesterday’s post about Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas:
Personas provide a fabulous way for people who understand their audience/users to communicate their understanding to people who do not understand that audience in a rapid and meaningful way. They are also a great way for people who have different understandings [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the Interwebs about how personas are a useless tool. 37Signals’ Jason Fried recently wrote:
We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.
Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to [...]

A while back, I wrote about a question our friend Cheryl had about the KJ technique.
Recently, Cheryl got back to me about her company’s reaction:
A few months back you kindly responded to my inquiry about facilitating a KJ Analysis session. The team did a great job and I was relieved as a couple of [...]

In usability tests where we incorporate interview-based tasks, the participants interests are discovered, not assigned. Unlike traditional task design methods, the test facilitator and participant negotiate the tasks during the tests, instead of proceeding down a list of predefined tasks. There are many situations where this is the appropriate way to test a product.

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: Interview-Based Tasks for Usability Testing [29:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 [...]

We’ve had some great comments on my post, Usability Tests with 30 Observers. Here are my responses.

This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about one of UIE’s most valuable usability testing techniques, Inherent Value Tests. Inherent Value Testing gives the team important information about how well a web site communicates the inherent value the designers are putting into the site.

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: Inherent Value Tests: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download