Usability is No Longer Enough

The next wave of the information age is about designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust (PET design™).

You still need good usability if people can't find something they can't be persuaded by it but soon usability will no longer be the key differentiator it has been. It's often not enough to design a website that is easy to navigate, understand, and transact on. Just because people can do something doesn't ensure that they will.

The future of design is about creating engagement and commitment to meet measurable business goals. Whether your site is e-commerce, informational, or transactional, you must motivate people to make decisions that lead to conversion. This could be getting people to: * buy a product * sign-up for a newsletter * donate to a cause * ask their doctor about a drug * vote for a candidate * invest in your company

The interactive online environment offers far more opportunities to influence decision making than traditional advertising or marketing channels. Yet understanding people's subtle emotional triggers requires a rigorous set of new techniques, the results of which can even conflict with classic usability best practices.

How NOT to conduct a usability test

Funny video I saw on You tube of Charlie Chaplin. They test some product with Charlie on a new product. This is really funny - but how not to test a product.

NYC-UPA Oct 16 Event: Eye-Tracking for Usability

NYC Usability Professionals Association presents: (Event Details)

Eye-Tracking for Usability Testing:
Seeing what people do and hearing what they say is the heart of usability
research. But what's the brain doing? Nielsen Norman Group used eye-tracking
technology to watch hundreds of people's eyes as they used the Web, doing a
plethora of different tasks and using different websites. Seeing exactly
what the user is looking at – and not looking at – is like getting to sneak
into his brain for a little while. Kara Pernice Coyne will discuss how she
conducted this research and present some of the findings from it. She is the
co-author with Jacob Nielsen of the upcoming book, Eyetracking Web
Usability. Event Details

Speaker:Kara Pernice Coyne, Director of Research, Nielsen Norman
Group

Usability in Multilingual contents & labels

For any application - multilingual content & labels should be screened thoroughly. This make the internationalisation part a successful.

General check in handling content is QA check in spelling, grammatical error, breaking longer sentence to shorter.

Once translator gets a request to translate, most of the time translators do subjective translation than word by word. Subjective translation is an appropriate way of translating the content or label than word to word translation.

Real challenge starts while translating the engineering or medical terminologies i.e. scientific terminologies. For example to translate words like "Tighten ARM knob/Toeout on Turns and Lockangle" Translator needs better understanding of the system.

translator or copyrighter action points:

1. Understanding the system
2. Understanding the end users.
3. Content should be subjective
4. Simple, easy to read & remember.
5. All navigation items - labels should be short.
6. Should be ready with different label (with same meaning) to implement it as per the users preference after the usability testing.

Evaluating labels & content:
Copywriter & translators feel that they are always 100% perfect with their labels. But the end users are the best one to judge the accuracy of labeling and content. Best way to evaluate menu labels is by usability testing.

Usability testing on multilingual sites:
Usability engineer will test the application with the users to check how comfortable users are with the labels used.
1. Choosing users.
2. Conducting test.
3. Analysing the result

Analysis result:
At this stage users understanding on labels and contents can be measured quantitative and qualitative. Statistical data & feedback from users will help content writers and translators to understand the end user expectation.

Usability Magazine

A new UX web magazine 'UX Matters' has launched on World Usability
day, with a welcome editorial and five in-depth articles on usability,
IA and design.

http://dev.uxmatters.com/index.php

Study: Usability and User Experience of iPhone

Image Courtesy

Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric Inc. has conducted a usability test with iPhone (News - Alert) customers who purchased their iPhones on the first day of its U.S. release. The goal of this study was to determine overall ease-of-use factors and general usability issues among motivated early adopters who had experience with the iPhone within the first week of ownership. more...

Also Read:

• iPhone's user experince - iPhone Stress Test
• The iPhone User Experience: A First Look
• IPods is not good for Heart - A study says
• Free video for Ipod users
• Very interesting Web-Site Ratings
• Is New Google product Search a Flaw?

Usability market to grow 20% in 2007

The UK market for usability and accessibility will grow by 20% in 2007 to a value of around £180 million, according to a new report published this week by E-consultancy.

Research for the 2007 Usability and Accessibility Buyer's Guide found that increased competition in the online marketplace is driving investment in a user-centred design approach. more...

Website Usability Award

Auto Trader, the on and offline motoring magazine, is setting up the Auto Trader Website Usability Awards for the motor industry in an attempt to drive best practice.

The awards will be based on the company's Website Usability Study, now in its third year and carried out by eDigital Research. The study looks into various aspects of usability including quality of customer service, design, navigation, search tools and research information. more....

The simple way to increase site usability

There is an interview on infoworld with site usability expert Steve Krug claims that having outsiders test a site all the way through the design cycle is both important and overlooked.

IDG News Service recently had a chance to talk to site usability expert and consultant Steve Krug about best practices and major mistakes in Web design. Here is an edited transcript of the chat with Krug, who runs a one-man consulting firm called Advanced Common Sense in Boston, has a Web site called Sensible.com, and wrote a book titled Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Interview continues on info world website.

Hyderabad To Host Conference On Usability Of Technology

Hyderabad will host a three-day national conference and workshop on maximum usability of technology, starting Monday.

USID 2007, a national event on 'living in a digital world - challenges for designers and engineers' is being organised by USID (Usable Software Interface Design) Foundation at Hyderabad International Convention Centre. more...

No improvements in Web Usability in last 10 years.

Web Usability Guru - Jacob Nielson feels that there is no much improvements in webusabiltiy for past 10 years. As Web usability testing enters its 14th year, it's worth asking how early results have held up to recent user research.

"Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines" 10 years ago, Nielson wrote an article on the changes in Web usability from 1994 to 1997. A few of his original findings were no longer valid a mere 3 years after they were issued. But most of the 1994 guidelines held true in 1997 -- and they're still correct today. Read more on "Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines" from useit's Alertbox.





Also Read:

• Nielson view on MySpace acquire of PB
• Jacob Nielson - Web 2.0 'neglecting good design'
  

Jared Spool Interviewed by Carolyn Snyder at STC 2007

Jared is Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering. He's been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers. Jared has guided the research agenda and built UIE into the largest research organization of its kind in the world.

Jared Spool Interviewed by Carolyn Snyder at STC 2007. Following are topics included in the recordings:

• How do you break into the usability field?


• How has the field of usability evolved?
• What’s the future of technical writing?
• How do you handle difficult clients?
• What role should user testing play in design?

Recorded: May 14th, 2007 in Minneapolis, MinnesotaBrian Christiansen, UIE Podcast ProducerDuration: 1h 25min File size: 39 MB

Recorded Interview is UIE Brainsparks.

Usability 2.0 WebGuild Event

Overview of Usability 2.0 event:

The WebGuild organized event on Usability 2. Google & Yahoo! also participated in Usability 2.0 event. What is the next generation of web usability? What are some of the usability gains and challenges arising as a result of Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax; how is usability viewed within companies today; and what is the ROI of good usability practice. Learn about the next generation or evolution of usability from usability 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond on the web including what has changed, and what are the challenges and the implications for designers, developers, users, and marketers. The panel will also speak to top usability trends, best practices, usability dos & don'ts, techniques, processes, quantitative versus qualitative considerations, etc. to creating highly usable and successful sites and webapps. Learn from the pros in charge of highly successful sites how to make your webapps and sites highly usable and successful!

The video is featuring few eminent speakers - Sean Kane (Netflix), Jon Wiley (Google), and Luke Wroblewski (Yahoo! Inc.).

Google Video:

Also Read:

• Chat integration in E-Mail: Google Vs. Yahoo


• IPods is not good for Heart - A study says


• Crop, sharpen, make pictures pop. Get the free Google Pack


• Adobe Dreamweaver cs3 - Review


• Unread disclaimers & policies


• Froogle: Now called as Google Product Search

user experience and usability in NetVibes

user interface

First and foremost thing I noticed was, in the User Interface there is no Logo of NetVibes Used. It enhances the User Experience by making user feel it more personal. Netvibes thinks one step ahead of not promoting their brand Logo. Visual Hierarchy of the site is very good. Each and every widget can be customized with different color based on our priority and interest. This facility is basic among all personalisation web applications. Unique thing in this user interface is you can share the widget (netvibe calls module)via messanger, mail, on blog or myspace.

Design Patterns

Comparing with the personalisation application like My Yahoo or Google or MSN, even NetVibes has followed the same approach of consistency in Design Pattern and which is in sync with the site behaviour.

Usability

Simplicity is the main mantra for the increase in ease of use - usability in Netvibes. Once we login, user immediately finds very common interest readymade available. And starts filling. When I felt that Iam not registered, they show a modal window for registration and its easy to register. Usability is taken care even in Modal Window. While tabbing to each field, it shows the system status by highlighting the label and shows tick mark when we move to next row to show that information provided is correct.

Over all its cooool application with good usability and intuitive user interface.

Suggest Usability