Posts Tagged ‘usability’

World Usability Day was established in 2005 by the Usability Professionals Association. Each year, design professionals come together to discuss how to “develop technologies in a way that serves people first.”  On November 8, 2018, professionals met at almost 100 locations around the world to discuss the how to “Make Life Easy.” I attended World […]

Part 1 of 2 As a usability researcher it’s important for me to stay aware and informed of guidelines for designing user interactions. Also, I want to be literate about topics within user experience design. So Dan Saffer’s book Microinteractions – Designing with Details caught my attention. His text is interesting; it focuses on the importance […]

From a PM/AM perspective, we are expected to keep the client happy (fulfill their objectives and vision), be the voice for our internal team and help produce a relevant and useful product while staying on time and in budget. Neglecting one and overdoing the others can cause issues with the overall success of the project, […]

I’ve seen a lot of bad CMSs. Systems that take multiple steps and six different screens to publish and categorize a page. In-page editing that looks completely different once it’s published. And my favorite was a previous client (I led a project redesigning the intranet for a state’s judiciary department) who had an employee that […]

Lately, it seems I’ve been experiencing a rash of extremely uninformative and even appalling error messages on iPhone apps. The latest one, shown in this post, made me laugh out loud. “Bad User,” I was told. I felt like a 1950s Catholic schoolgirl getting rapped on the knuckles with a ruler. Bad User! It’s looking […]

I attended the Big (D)esign Conference last week, and as with UPA 2011, I was inspired and challenged by the opening keynote, Transformational Space: The Power of Place. Gwen Harmon, Director of Governmental and Community Affairs for the National Civil Rights Museum, (NCRM) talked about the museum and plans for renovation to create a greater impact on […]

Tom Ross at Noupe.com wrote a great article about what makes a great call-to-action button on a website. As we all know, encouraging visitors to take the action we want them to take is vital to increasing conversions (leads/sales) and ultimately turning your site into a revenue driver for the business. I took Ross’s suggestions […]

At UPA 2011, Michael Rawlins, Lori Hawkins, and Jeff Sauro presented about Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM), a tool for estimating the actual movements and the time to perform each step that a particular UI design requires for users to complete a given task. KLM offers a way to analyze the time on task required by a design […]

The US Department of Agriculture announced yesterday a new icon to replace the food pyramid that has been the image for nutrition in the US for almost two decades. MyPlate provides a more usable image that matches the real-world use for this information. It provides “an uncomplicated symbol to help remind people to think about their […]

Recently I attended Ginny Redish’s Plain language, Web Sites, Documents, and UX: You can do all that!, event hosted by the Usability Professional Association (UPA), DC Chapter. As usual, when I attend dc events like IXDA and other miscellaneous UX meetups, I am usually the anomaly visual designer in the room. The thing that I enjoyed […]

Jakob Nielsen is a widely recognized usability guru. Here is a sampling of some comments about him in the press: “the king of usability” (Internet Magazine) “the guru of Web page usability” (The New York Times) “the world’s leading expert on Web usability” (U.S. News & World Report) “one of the top ten minds in […]