“This is not to say that it doesnít have a significant role to play in user experience design. When done right, usability testing will improve your Web site and your development process, but the current culture surrounding Web site usability testing is such that it rarely benefits the design. Worse, this misapplication can undermine the acceptance of this important technique throughout an organization.”
Pink Numbers
And in response to the previous link: “Not content to have a permalink for each paragraph with an annoying visible hash mark, I have decided to invent a new extreme form of blog clutter. I call them Pink Numbers, and I found this great unobtrusive graphic to represent them. Just click on any pink heart to link directly to its associated word.”
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Purple Number Signs
“Until this weekend Iíd never heard of ìPurple Numbersî but theyíve been across the radar twice in the last day, first in some commentary by Chris Dent on the Atom-Identifier issue, then again over at Jonas Lusterís place… I look at these things and the idea of sticking a visible anchor on each paragraph to make it addressable seems like, well of course! In particular here at ongoing where Iím prone to write thirty-paragraph rambles with multiple allegedly-related arguments, it would make Mark Pilgrimís life so much easier if he could directly point at a paragraph thatís particularly wrong. The more I think about this, the more it seems like every paragraph on the Web should have its own address. I also like the soft unobtrusive purple, #c8a8ff. But I donít like the numbers.”
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Usability Testing Materials
“When conducting usability testing, the pressing need to meet technology requirements can mean that insufficient time is given to ensuring that other supporting materials have been prepared. The result can be a test in which the administrator feels uncomfortable and poorly prepared. As a consequence, participants may also feel ill-at-ease. The following is a list of materials that we regard as a minimum when running a test. Links to samples (in PDF format) are included where appropriate.”
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Interview with Donald Norman on Mental Models
“Intuition is a name that we give to knowledge structures that are so well ‘routinized’ that they occur subconsciously ó but intuition is something that requires a tremendous amount of learning. But give me any new phenomenon ó ask me about some topic on which I am not an expert and I will take whatever knowledge I have and derive a conceptual model to predict the behavior. That conceptual model is in my head ó it is mental ó hence the name, mental model. Basically, we take whatever we know and we expand it.”
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Jared Spool: The InfoDesign interview
“Each month, InfoDesign interviews a thought leader in the design industry, focusing on people who are identified with or show strong sensibilities to the design of information and experiences. This month, Dirk Knemeyer interviews Jared Spool. Jared is one of the most important ó and best-recognized ó voices in the field of usability. User Interface Engineering, the firm that he founded in 1988, is the world’s largest research, training and consulting firm specializing in website and product usability.”
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Emotional about design
“Former Apple fellow and design guru Don Norman has been influential on and offline. He tells Jack Schofield why products should now start making us smile.”
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The User Experience Cosmos
“Some time ago, as a result of my conversations with my friend and colleague Marco van Hout, I came up with the idea of applying the cartesian model to this User Experience world of [ours]: What if we could use a north-south axis to represent the duality between the digital and the analog, and also use an east-west axis to articulate the the duality between the emotional and the rational? Once represented, we could place in this territory anything we could come up with: People, resources, disciplines, webs or products… As in ancient maps, this is a rather subjective and personal representation of the territory.”
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Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
“The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines (Guidelines) were developed by the Communication Technologies Branch (CTB) of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Guidelines were developed to assist those involved in the creation of websites base their decisions on the current and best available evidence. The Guidelines are particularly relevant to the design of information-oriented sites, but can be applied across the wide spectrum of websites.”
