Usability Testing

CUE: A Usability Testing Bake-Off
In 1998, Rolf Molich held what we could call the first usability testing bake-off. He called it a Comparative Usability Evaluation or CUE. The CUE can help you improve your own usability practices by learning how others test their interfaces.

Looking Back on 16 Years of Paper Prototyping
Jared M. Spool discusses the lessons we've learned from practicing paper prototyping for 16 years. He'll share what's new about this valuable technique and what's still the same.

5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages
How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they've designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively? A simple usability testing technique can help design teams quickly measure how a content page performs with users. We call it the 5-Second Test.

Streamlining Usability Testing by Avoiding the Lab
The usability lab, with its fancy cameras, one-way mirrors, and comfortable observation suites, is often considered a can't-do-without necessity for conducting serious usability tests. Even those who feel it's not required will jump at the chance to use a lab when available. However, while studying successful projects over the years, we've found that usability testing can often be more effective when the team eliminates the lab from the process.

Usability Testing Best Practices: An Interview with Rolf Molich
UIE's Christine Perfetti asked Rolf Molich his thoughts on the best practices surrounding usability testing. Here's what they talked about.

Usability Testing: Learning from the Work of Others
Rolf Molich has conducted two experiments comparing the work of different usability teams, examining their practices, and looking for patterns and differences. His experiments provide extremely valuable material for sharpening individual usability practices.

Preventing Usability Problems from the Get-go
UIE has been researching how designs are created in the first place. Our goal is to identify those places where usability problems are first put into the design and to come up with ways to prevent it from the outset. In the successful teams, the same three techniques pop up again and again: field studies, personas, and usability testing.

Information Architecture

Web Content Management is Not Data Management
Web content management and data/document management require very different approaches. Data management is about storage; web content management is about using content to make the sale, deliver the service, and build the brand.

The Right Information
In our work, we often see many sites deliver information to the users, but it's not the right information. The absence of the right information takes many forms, but it always has the same results -- users can't accomplish their goals. To be successful, design teams must look beyond the navigation and links, and think about how users are going to use the information to accomplish their objectives.

Centralize Your Information Architecture
Gerry McGovern discusses why centralizing your Information Architecture can help you save your company money and win friends at the same time.

Information Architecture Made Simple -- and No Simpler
Right now is a great time to be approaching the redesign of a site's information architecture. The Web is not so new anymore. So much has been learned and figured out about what works and what doesn't work. Your job can be so much easier by adapting best practices.

Words Drive Action: An Interview with Gerry McGovern
UIE's Christine Perfetti and Joshua Porter recently talked with Gerry about the importance of an editorial perspective in a web development process.

Web Standards and Design

Web Standards in the Real World: An Interview with Molly E. Holzschlag
Joshua Porter interviews Molly E. Holzschlag, an expert in the World of Web Design, on the importance of CSS, the difficulties with workflow, and passing the Acid2 test.

Iterative Design: The Power of Cascading Style Sheets
Read how you can use Cascading Style Sheets as a tremendously powerful prototyping tool. Jared M. Spool shares how CSS enables designers to make very fast changes of both the content and the control and flow of a page.

Transitional Layouts Using (X)HTML and CSS: An Interview with Eric A. Meyer
CSS guru Eric A. Meyer talks about some of the issues that face web teams as they transition their designs to the latest standards.

No Standard for Migrating to Web Standards
In this article, we talk with Eric A. Meyer and Molly E. Holzschlag about the importance of web standards and why web teams should invest the effort to convert their legacy sites over to standards-compliant sites.

Got Doctype?
DOCTYPES are the declaration that appears at the top of a document, defining the document type and the document's adherence to a Document Type Definition (DTD). Molly E. Holzschlag and Eric A. Meyer have written a great article that describes the changing use of DOCTYPES.

Personas

Perfecting Your Personas
Cooper's Kim Goodwin, an expert in persona development, provides a few tips on avoiding the most common pitfalls of persona creation.

Three Important Benefits of Personas
UIE's research has surfaced obvious benefits from the persona technique, such as better designer agreement on important features and an in-depth understanding of the user's motivations. But, it also unveiled some benefits that we don't see discussed anywhere. Read about these other benefits here.

Personas: Matching a Design to the Users' Goals
Learn how personas can help designers tackle the huge challenge of designing products and web sites for a large number of different users.

Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
We recently had the chance to interview Kim Goodwin, Director of Design at Cooper, about persona development.

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data
Kim Goodwin, Director of Design at Cooper, explains the process of creating personas from research.

Seven Common Usability Testing Mistakes
As we work with teams all over the globe, there are mistakes that we see frequently. These mistakes are very easy to prevent -- if only the team members realized they were making them. Here are seven of the most common mistakes.

Business Strategy

Identifying the Business Value of What We Do
Resources in our organization are usually tightly constrained -- not enough time, money, or people to accomplish everything we want to improve. Knowing how to identify and communicate the business value of a project will substantially help it get approved and supported by the organization. Jared talks about the key five business value areas and how to relate design improvements into the overall success of the organization.

Persuasion Architecture

Thinking Beyond Conversion
Jeffrey Eisenberg discusses how teams need to change their design strategies to see dramatic improvements in site conversion rates. They must recognize that while their goal may be conversion, their practice must be persuasion.

Web Development Approaches

Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype
Jared M. Spool challenges the myth of Web 2.0, uncovering APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking, which suddenly give application developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly effective results.

Web 2.0 For Designers
Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter explore the new technologies that are making Web 2.0 happen, take a closer look at the new interfaces that demonstrate its power, and ponder the social effects it has on the people who both use and build it.

Deconstructing Web Applications
Hagan Rivers is a recognized pioneer in the area of Web Application Design. UIE's Christine Perfetti recently had the opportunity to talk with Hagan about some of the biggest challenges in the web application space.

Using Ajax for Creating Web Applications
By combining the sophistication of screen-based apps to the relative ease-of-implementation of paged-based apps, Ajax is a solid alternative for new interface development.