Usability Archive

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UI Pattern Documentation Review

“To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization. Development teams —... 
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Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with Disabilities

“Such problems often come from trying to make a Web site accessible without understanding how people with disabilities actually use the Web. The challenge for UX designers is to find ways of including... 
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Anatomy of an Iteration

” Unfortunately, we’ve found that many teams don’t know how to iterate effectively. Good iteration is a deliberate activity, with four important stages: planning, implementing, measuring,... 
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Quick Turnaround Usability Testing

“It starts with any number of scenarios: Design and development have taken too long to produce a prototype, you need to release in three weeks, and you suspect there may be design flaws. You are... 
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Educating Clients about Information Architecture

“I often tell clients that IA [information architecture] establishes the baseline, or foundation, for a solid site structure. It helps create the traffic patterns and navigational routes that get... 
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Review of 16 User Interface Design Tools

“People constantly ask me what the best prototyping or mockup tool is.  My standard answer is “whichever tool you are most comfortable/experienced with.”  But just to cover all the bases and... 
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Using Adobe Fireworks to Create Interface Design Prototypes

“So my choice of using FW for prototyping is most definitely not a statement about it being a great prototyping tool overall, just that it works great for me personally because I can go all the way... 
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Integrating Information Architecture Deliverables in a Web Application Development Methodology

“The user experience team members learned to speak the same language by collectively discussing our ways of working and our deliverables. This process started... 
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Shades of Grey: Wireframes as Thinking Device

“I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem... 
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Inexpensive Usability Testing for Your Website

UserTesting.com provides usability testing for your site for $19/test. Their sample for Travelocity is interesting (not least because I really want to visit Waikiki). The tester talks their way through... 
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How to Design the Perfect List

“Lists are a beautiful way to display content and information in a very easy to scan, easy to read method. Lists are found on most blogs to list posts, comments, tags, or links. In this post we will... 
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10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques

“More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks very attractive. Web application... 
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State Based HTML Wireframes with Polypage

“Ben pointed me to an interesting set of HTML wireframes which use Polypage. Polypage expands HTML wireframes or mock-ups and allows for the creation of page states. Furthermore, the various states... 
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The $300 Million Dollar Button

“It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce... 
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Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability

“Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the speed with which users can scan the menu and select their preferred options.” From... 
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Sign Up Forms Must Die

“I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager... 
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Video of Paper Prototype Usability Tests for a Web Site Publishing Tool

“Here’s an interesting video showing how a paper prototype usability test helped the usability team at Corel find flaws in a preliminary design of a website creation product.”From GUUUI. While... 
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Middle-Aged Users’ Declining Web Performance

“Between the ages of 25 and 60, the time users need to complete website tasks increases by 0.8% per year. In other words, a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish... 
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Top 100 User-Centered Blogs

“Web designers often concern themselves with optimizing sites for spiders from Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, but pay little attention to creating sites that real people can use. This problem... 
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Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes

“All that said, there are still plenty of general guidelines for application UIs — so many, in fact, that we have a hard time cramming the most important into our two-day course. Here’s... 
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