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

I’m very excited about our upcoming Virtual Seminar presented by my good friend, Larry Constantine. If your team is facing an aggressive deadline for your web site or product launch and you don’t have the time or resources to conduct in-depth user research, you’ll want to gather everyone around for Larry’s presentation on September 27th. [...]

Because there’s a large number of design agents and stake holders involved and often a small number of available tests to observe, we can find ourselves in a situation where we need to have many observers in one session. It’s not unusual to have 30 or more observers sitting in a single usability test. Here’s how we pull it off.

UIEtips 9/11/07: 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages
It’s hard enough creating usable designs when there is ample time and plenty of resources, but what do you do when that’s just not an option for your design team? One of the most common reasons designs fail users is because the design team didn’t have the [...]

This week, Christine and Jared discuss the genesis and value of five-second usability tests.

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: 5-Second Usability Tests [16:07m]: 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.

We’re big fans of the KJ Technique, a method that helps teams rank the important issues for a focus question, such as “What are the most important usability problems we need to fix in this version of the design?” or “Which user populations are most important to our business?”
In the method, teams brainstorm on potential [...]

UIEtips 8/21/07: Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products
At User Interface Engineering, we’ve spent two decades researching the usability and design techniques employed by both successful and unsuccessful development teams. We’ve focused our research agenda on identifying the key techniques successful teams utilize to consistently produce usable products on time and within budget.
Because we [...]