Usability

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 hold, [...]

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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 site [...]

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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 instance, [...]

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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% conversion rate,
Average ticket of [...]

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18 Mar 2008 1945H

A season of usability!

Every season is usability season, we might protest. True, though frankly I can’t find a better way for a budding interactionist to get into the discipline than by providing usability services for open source software. Ellen Reitmayr is running the show: 9 students will get to participate on some very sexy high visibility projects. Check it out. 

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16 Feb 2008 0950H

The end of cart?

Rehashing an old post from last year, but, now, everywhere it can be seen that the walls that form that decade-old convention of shopping cart as a label are crumbling down. Bag, basket — “my gear” even, on one site — it does not really seem to matter to people, so long as there is [...]

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19 Jan 2008 0842H

Astronomy book for the blind

Via NPR the other day, it doesn’t do justice to the book, “Touch the Invisible Sky,” to say it’s merely an astronomy book for the blind, but there are fantastic images used to communicate the world beyond our world, images that the blind can’t obviously see. How then to communicate the majesty of space when [...]

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