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“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 — usually incorporating a user experience specialist — then reference this documentation during implementation and upgrade processes. However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so... 
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“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 real people with disabilities throughout the design process, starting with initial user research and going all the way through final usability testing. This gets back to the issue of familiarity.... 
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” 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, and learning. The best teams focus on each stage appropriately, making sure they get the most out of it. While iterations can be very short, (we’ve seen teams that can iterate a dozen times... 
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“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 trying to incorporate usability testing into an Agile development process. Or maybe you simply want to pare down your process to make it shorter and less expensive. Completing usability testing quickly... 
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“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 the customer from A to B in language that is helpful and easy to understand. In fact, IA is the first step in meeting customer goals and can therefore increase brand awareness and product or service... 
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“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 make sure that I’m not missing out on the “silver bullet”, I decided to do a review of all the tools that I’m aware of.  You could (and probably should) distinguish between pure mockup tools... 
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“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 from wireframes to final design within the same app. That’s going to be one of the main things I was going to demo - recycling art assets from the wireframes to the final visual mockups.” From... 
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“The user experience team members learned to speak the same language by collectively discussing our ways of working and our deliverables. This process started with the kick-off workshop, continued during the review process of the diagram and deliverables descriptions and continues to this day when we discuss how to combine smaller ... 
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“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 setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context. To simplify, I pick my primary audience and the one activity which allows them to solve one... 
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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 tasks defined by the customer. In the sample video, it becomes clear the sponsored ads above the web page fold distract the tester and force the tester to scroll down for the data they want. Indeed,... 
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“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 be exploring the modern practices of lists as an element of web design and I will be showing you how to design better lists to add to the overall design of your site.” From WebDesignTuts. The... 
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“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 interface design is, at its core, Web design; however, its focus is mainly on function. To compete with desktop applications, Web apps must offer simple, intuitive and responsive user interfaces that... 
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“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 are independent of each other and can be toggled on a small top menu to affect the page view. Say for example you want to show your wireframes to your client in the “logged out” and “first time... 
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“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 site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem. The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The... 
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“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 Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. This should be common sense but you still see right aligned forms (so the form labels are next to the input fields) and navigation links. Read the full... 
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“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 to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form. We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how... 
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“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 I’m a sucker for live and video tape of usability testing, this one may be self-indulgent given my work creating Red Wrangler. Corel seems locked in the classic paradigms of client side... 
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“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 the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time. (Mathematically inclined readers will note that this increase is linear, not exponential.)” From UseIt.com, Jakob... 
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“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 has sparked a movement towards user-centered web design, a topic that covers accessibility, web standards, and interfacing. Check out these blogs for the latest and greatest in this people-centric... 
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“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 my list of 10 usability violations that are both particularly egregious and often seen in a wide variety of applications.” A good refresher from Jakob Nielsen. Read the full story  Read More →