Usability

25 May 2010 0739H

Conducted international remote usability testing the other day

Rather interesting experience. Client was in Cleveland, which is only an hour time difference, but the server was in Bangalore (India!) being run by a colleague between 11:30PM and 1AM their time. Somehow we got Microsoft Live Meeting working and were able to get them to take control of the Bangalore computer, so they could [...]

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08 Feb 2010 2330H

World’s most helpful dialog

Thank you Borland for your extremely helpful dialog from your very reliable product, CaliberRM. And here’s our winning dialog, which I am now seeing on a regular basis:

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28 Oct 2009 1429H

On great user interfaces

Great UI work can’t be done after the fact. Great UI can’t be a patch to things. It can only happen as a result of deep understanding of user needs and user testing. Once the product is rolled out, it’ll take a revolution to change what’s in place.

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21 Nov 2008 0734H

Big change ahead

When I first started as a designer in this field about 12 years ago, one of the first things I remember wanting to design was the information displays on medical devices. It looks like I will finally get my chance! After a few grueling months of interviewing and constantly running into jobs being placed on [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1419H

Isn’t that . . . marketing’s function?!

Was reading a white paper from HFI the other day. Said they wanted to move beyond usability, which as I’ve noted in previous posts, as we typically experience it, is more normative than it is positive. In essence they described what Grokdotcom might call Persuasion Architecture, but which they are calling, Persuasion, Emotion and Trust. [...]

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18 Sep 2008 1005H

Vast oversimplification probably, but

If you invest in solid user experience, interaction design, and usability as central to your corporate values, then you don’t have to spend millions on an expensive media campaign, nor do you have to hire all these “gurus” to help people out: Besides the TV ads, Microsoft is adding content to windows.com, creating a related [...]

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08 Sep 2008 0706H

Just because it works in a u-test. . .

doesn’t necessarily mean that the user will be incented (incentivized?) to take an action. In other words, beyond the role that user experience plays in making things findable and easy to use — for those of us who work in e-commerce, anyway — there is this other role we play in promotion of features. For [...]

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26 Aug 2008 1519H

Something surprising

The other day I watched my four-year-old niece show exactly how conversant she is with the web. She is conversant to the degree that she can input in her own name and password into a site, and knows what the major web conventions are, and can play games with relative ease. Kinda makes you wonder [...]

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08 Aug 2008 0858H

Poka-yoke example

From Adobe Media Player. Prevent the user from triggering an error by designing error out of the application: Disable the Accept box until the user accepts the agreement, and don’t let them go forward until they accept the Terms. Or allow the user to quit. Simple.

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02 Jun 2008 0624H

UX-dojo-storming PotteryBarn.com

Oh. Looks like W-S brands’ UX & Dev teams down at the north end of Van Ness have been hard at work lately. Let’s look the numbers: #21 on the Internet Retailer Top 100, $1.1 billion worth of stuff sold online last year, up 19% from the previous year, 7.1 million visitors a month, 6% [...]

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