Usability Stories

Stories about usability.

Contrast is King in Design

Tweet“If you can make a solid design in black, white, and shades of gray, it will often allow you to translate your design to almost any color combination—as long as that color combination maintains the same level of contrast between the visual elements. Create your sketches and roughs in black and white and then create comps in grayscale. This workflow not only allows your mind to stay focused... 
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Quick and Dirty Remote User Usability Testing

Tweet“There are three basic approaches to conducting quick remote interface tests, whether you’re testing live websites, designs, wireframes, or prototypes. The approach you take will depend mostly on how you feel about people—do you want to talk to users face-to-face, or use one of the many new UX tools and let computers gather the information automatically?” From A List Apart. Really... 
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6 Tips for Better Branding with Avatars

Tweet“We’re living in a social media world, and, like it or not, our avatar is often the first impression others get about us as we interact virtually on social networks, blogs, microblogs and other online communities. Our avatars are a representation of our brands — our personal brand or our company’s or organization’s brand. But how many of us are thinking strategically about our avatars?” From... 
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Xobni Organizes Your Outlook Email

TweetAs a web designer and coder, I collect tons of emails and attachments from clients that have to be carefully tracked and easily found. And many projects have three, four, or more people attached. Often I have to dig out their contact information to make calls. Awhile back, I found Xobni, a software tool with an odd name that should be in every version of any email software. Now they have a Plus... 
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UI Pattern Documentation Review

Tweet“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,... 
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Google Voice Launches, Perfect for Small Businesses

TweetGoogle stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms. Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired... 
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10 Steps to the Perfect Portfolio Website

Tweet“A personal portfolio website is all about promoting you. You are a brand, and your name is a brand name. No one is going to know about your brand unless you get it out there; and if you’re a Web designer, developer, writer, gamer or any other type of creative, then it’s essential that you have a good portfolio website.” From Smashing Magazine. A basic but thorough list of what... 
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20 Tips for Better Conference Speaking and Presentations

Tweet“I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20... 
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Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with Disabilities

Tweet“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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An Overview of Prototyping and Interactive Design

Tweet“In the broadest sense, all kinds of design artifacts are prototypes. Pencil sketches, blocks of wood, storyboards, wireframes, foam-core models, pixel-perfect state renderings, clickable demos, and functioning production code are all strategies for representing a thing being designed. However, in the world of interaction design, we usually reserve the term for ... 
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