Posts Tagged ‘ usability ’

Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome. One of the discount usability movement’s basic tenets is that we need a drastic expansion in the amount of usability work done in the...
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If you don’t really want people communicating on your site … you don’t really want feedback on your articles … you do really want to spam people … you do really want to “monetize eyeballs” … and you don’t really care that your brand is in the toilet … Then you act very web...
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This is a great quote on usability from Whitney Hess‘s recent article on Mashable. She’s actually defining usability in reverse … by saying what it is is not: David Malouf, professor of interaction design at Savannah College of Art & Design, explains that “while usability is important, its focus on efficiency and effectiveness seems...
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Sometimes when doing business online, you want to know where your users are coming from. If you don’t do it the right way, they’ll waste little time telling you where you can go. Zinio, a digital publications company, wants to know where you live: But they don’t geo-locate IP addresses, which would accomplish the...
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Usability is the new motherhood and apple pie: unquestionably good … and almost as hard to find. Everyone agrees that software should be user-friendly. But what does that actually mean? I’ve been architecting a LOT of desktop software in the past few months, and I’ve been revisiting some of my ideas about usability. While...
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I’m working on a usability project for desktop software right now, focusing on “UI strings.” UI strings are the messages that you see in an application … what it tells you. Obviously, the better these are written, structured, and presented, the easier the application, and the better your experience with it. Four things are...
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Complaints are too easy – I like to blog raves as well as rants. I’ve just received excellent, above-and-beyond, unexpected great services from two class organizations: Blurb, and the Nielsen Norman Group. Blurb recently printed the book I did for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. A number of books arrived with scratches. I emailed...
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Every time I see something like this in the mainstream press I think: clueless. There’s little question the iPhone pulls a lot of great wireless functions and applications into a very cool package. But most of those features aren’t exactly new. Google Maps for mobile? Practically any smartphone user can download the application to...
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I would bet a lot more money than is in my pocket right now that 50-75% of electronics returned are not, in fact, defective by damage or second law of thermodynamics. Rather, I suspect they are defective by design. Today my wife and I fought with our cordless phone system (tip: if it’s a...
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