Nika Smith
The mobile device and application market has grown rapidly over the last few years, allowing users to stay in touch and work with data more effectively on the go. Text entry methods vary significantly across devices, raising an important question: Which input methods actually work well for entering text?
Damon van Vessem
Great websites guide users to content with elegance and ease, through usable information architecture and a pleasing visual design. But, user experience doesn’t stop there. Users spend more time engaging with your site’s content than using its navigation or admiring its style. Once on the right page, it’s the quality of writing that delivers the value.
Nika Smith
Social networking and content sharing web sites like Facebook and Flickr make it easy for users to connect and share details of their lives with others. Unfortunately, it is all too common to hear stories of users unknowingly sharing embarrassing status updates or photos with their professional colleagues, due to misunderstanding or ignoring available privacy settings in these sites.
Jen Amsterlaw, PH.D
When designing a new system (or redesigning an existing one), it’s important to keep the user’s real-world context in mind. A lot of thought and effort will hopefully go into making sure the product delivers the right set of features, has the right look and feel, and abides by standard UI conventions. But designs that seem solid conceptually can still fail if they do not take into account how real users will interact with them in the real world.
Heidi Adkisson
In the ideal world, every design decision would be informed by user research or usability testing. But in the real world, that’s not always possible. Sometimes, you just have to rely on your own internal decision‐making abilities. Below are some tips we’ve found helpful for increasing the odds of a successful user experience, regardless of the resources available for a project:
John Dirks
Blink Staff
The ingredients are simple: two people, a quiet place to sit and talk, and a video camera to record the session. Still, getting the most out of an interview requires careful planning and a thoughtful technique. Here I share some insights that guide my own approach to interviewing.
John Dirks
To determine what usability study participants look at and take in while viewing online media, we used to watch their mouse cursors, interactions with links and controls, and body language. We also listened carefully to their think-aloud narratives and comments. These traditional testing techniques, however, could never tell us definitively what users notice and what they don’t. Eye tracking usability studies open up a new frontier.
Jen Amsterlaw, PH.D
Seniors are increasingly using the web to shop, find news and information, and connect with friends and family. But many websites are not designed with seniors in mind. You can make your website more senior-friendly by following a few simple rules of thumb… and the end result is often improved usability for users of all ages.
Heidi Adkisson
A couple of months ago, I was part of a panel discussion on “Real-World User-Centered Design.” The topic was the outgrowth of questions from a more introductory forum on user-centered design (UCD) principles. After the introductory forum there were still many burning questions—specifically, how do you adopt and adapt UCD principles to real-world organizational constraints?
Heidi Adkisson
In the year 2000, there were two neatly divided user experience worlds: the world of the web and the world of desktop applications.
Heidi Adkisson
If you’re not familiar with mind mapping, it’s a handy way to visualize ideas and the connections between them for all sorts of contexts.