Column Two

Angela Quail has written about assessing the validity of personas. To quote: Robust Personas are personas we can stand behind with confidence. We have conducted stakeholder interviews, internal research interviews, general industry and domain research, ethnographic field research, and we have tried hard to shoot holes in what we ...

Frank Spillers has written an article on the usability of third-party applications. To quote: What many companies are doing is writing usability guarantees into the contracts so that vendors are forced to adhere to your standards before they win the contract. This is the most direct and legally binding way to ...

Jakob Nielsen writes about bridging the designer–user gap. To quote: The wider the gap between your situation and the users, their tasks, and their context, the more you need a systematic usability process to inform and adjust your design. In most design projects, the gap is wide indeed and you usually ...

Andrew Hinton has written an article on personas and design documentation. To quote: In User Experience Design circles, personas have become part of our established orthodoxy. And, as with anything orthodox, some people disagree on what personas are and the value they bring to design, and some reject the doctrine ...

Jared Spool has written an article on designing account sign-in. To quote: Designing an account registration and sign-in process that doesn't frustrate users turns out to be very difficult to achieve. It looks easy at the outset, but a pile of subtleties can sneak up on your experience, making something ...

Jared Spool responds to recent criticisms of personas. To quote: Some products, like the tools built by 37Signals, don't need personas. Not because the folks at 37Signals have any special powers, but because they themselves are the personas they want to build for. They build tools they like to use ...

Jessica Enders has written an article on usability problems with healthcare questionnares. To quote: Reviewing the 60 randomly selected forms this way, we were surprised to discover that every single form contained at least one error. Half of the patients made between 1 and 5 errors on their form, with the other ...

Jared Spool first published an article on conducting usability tests with 30 observers. To quote: 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 ...

Steve Baty has written an article on conducting stakeholder interviews. To quote: A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, ...

Jared Spool has written an article on the 7 components for a successful web site redesign. To quote: We've spent the last five years studying teams involved in major redesign efforts. Some teams regularly produce innovative, user-satisfying enhancements to their sites. Other teams work hard, but their efforts result in ...

Jakob Nielsen has written an article on banner blindness. To quote: At all levels of user engagement, the finding is the same regarding banners (outlined with green boxes in the above illustration): almost no fixations within advertisements. If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done ...

Nick Myers has written an article on research underpinning good design. To quote: If you've ever had to present visual design to a group, you probably have your own collection of similar horror stories. But why is it that a group of otherwise level-headed adults can't seem to have a ...

Jim Nieters and Garett Dworman have written an article on business models for in-house usability teams. To quote: We presented these four organizational models as examples of business models that we could analyze during the SIG. We then opened the discussion for ten minutes to allow a free exchange about ...

Luke Wroblewski has written an article on web application form design. To quote: Quite rare is the Web application that doesn't make extensive use of forms for data input and configuration. But not all Web applications use forms consistently. Variations in the alignment of input fields, their respective labels, calls ...

Patrick Kennedy has written an article on illustrating persona concepts, as part of their development. To quote: First, an idea to help illustrate the concept of taking explicit user research and shaping this into discrete personas. Most people I have mentored find that the most difficult step is going from ...

Daniel Szuc has written a very thorough article on walking through product design with stakeholders. To quote: You are the lead designer -- or perhaps even the sole designer on a product team. You have just completed your product design, and it

Luca Mascaro has written an article on what he calls agile UX, that is, applying UX techniques in highly-constrained projects. To quote: The site was online after three weeks. Though the project was not perfect, it turned out well. How did we manage this, considering that we followed all of ...

Colleen Jones has written an article on making persuasive cases for user-centered design. To quote: Making the case for user-centered design (UCD) is a topic of recurring discussion for UX professionals. Much of the discussion has centered on strictly objective approaches such as cost-benefit or return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. However, recent ...

Christine Perfetti has written an article outlining tips for getting buy-in for usability testing. To quote: For more than seven years, I've been teaching and coaching design teams on how to conduct usability tests and gather user feedback early on in the development process. One of the questions that comes ...

Michael Beavers has written an article on setting up stakeholder interviews. To quote: Interviewing is both art and science, and it is something that any UE practitioner with a little additional time and moderation skills can employ to extract clear business requirements. Without this foundation, business requirements can be unclear ...

Jared Spool has written an article on applying usability testing in real-life projects. To quote: If you trace any usability problem to its inception -- the point where the problem was introduced into the design -- you'll find the same underlying cause: someone on the design team didn't have a ...

Leisa Reichelt has posted an article on a groupwork technique called design consequences. To quote: For my recent BarCamp session I shared a design technique that a colleague and I developed quite recently that we've found to be quite successful in both generating great design ideas and developing consensus about ...

Jared Spool has written an article on usability testing as a training tool. To quote: His initial solution was to hire a consultant to run some usability tests, gather the essential information, write a report, and present it back to the team. I had a different idea: I suggested we ...

Lisa Halabi has written an article on expert reviews vs usability testing. To quote: One question we're often asked is which method is best: usability testing or expert usability reviews? Well, if they were sports cars, expert usability reviews might be a Porsche (pretty decent car and better than no ...

Hugh Macleod has posted an end-user manifesto for web and application design, originally created by Danny V. The first five items: 1. Don't waste my time. 2. Help me do the right thing. 3. Respect my decisions. 4. Design well, and guide me to make the right decisions by that design. 5. Don't lie ...

Sav Shrestha & Kelsi Lenz have published results of research into eye gaze patterns on websites. To quote: From this study we have replicated what Nielsen (2006) called the "F" pattern of viewing for a text-based webpage as shown in Figure 8. With a few exceptions, we also found the ...

Shawn Medero has written an article on paper prototyping. To quote: As interfaces become ever more complex and development schedules seem to get shorter and shorter, you may find it useful to give up your user-interface modeling software for awhile in favor of something simpler. All you need is paper, ...

Erez Kikin-Gil has written an article introducing his new UX Radar, a way of visualising all the difference facets of experience design. To quote: Based on the UX Honeycomb, I have designed a UX evaluation tool

Martin Hardee from the Sun.com team have published a set of design comic templates. To quote: You can use these characters and scenes in storyboards, presentations and brainstorming during product development; they're free for you to use. I do ask that you include a short credit in your finished work ...

Henrik Olsen has written an article on how to avoid common pitfalls when prototyping. To quote: Are there any downsides of prototyping? Not really. But as with everything else in life, you might stumble and hurt yourself if you don

Todd Warfel has posted details on his Task Analysis Grid, a way of communicating user needs to stakeholders. To quote: One of the greatest challenges we face in the design field is communicating design decisions to other stakeholders (e.g. Business unit, Marketing, Engineering). We're often forced to attempt this through ...

Jonathan Follett has written an article on icons and digital wayfaring. To quote: Of all the objects that occupy our digital spaces, there are none that capture the imagination so much as icons. As symbols, icons can communicate powerfully, be delightful, add to the aesthetic value of software, engage people