Archive of UX Articles

No matter how good your quality process is, you are introducing bugs. This article reviews the places where bugs are introduced in the software development process (from stakeholders to users), and reviews ways to address those bugs.

We use actor hierarchies to organize the different users of a system. Different people play different roles, and thus do different jobs. We use different actors to identify and organize those people. When deploying a system globally, we usually discover people that do the same jobs, but do them differently. Incorporating the notion of personas lets us deal with this.

A couple weeks ago we wrote about Outside-in Software Development, by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer. One of their ideas about stakeholders and goals has got us thinking about traceability.

A heuristic evaluation (or heuristic analysis) is a quick, low-cost usability analysis of the design of a user interface. Pareto’s rule tells us that we can get 80% of the results from 20% of the effort. And that’s where discount usability tests like a heuristic evaluation come in to play. Formal, and more detailed usability studies yield better results – but cost more and take more time. A small investment can pay off big with a heuristic evaluation.

Visualizing complex data can be very difficult. There are almost as many ways to visualize data as there are data to visualize. The Ralph Lengler and Martin J. Eppler at the Visual Literacy Organization collect many of them for us in a periodic table.

There are at least 7 ideals to keep in mind when designing a user interface. Shmula tells us about them.

Amy Hilman has written an outstanding article with the boxes and arrows staff about how to get that first UX (User Experience) project started at your company. Most companies don’t include user experience (UX) research as a key part of their product development process. But all companies will benefit from it.

Implementation continues on nexus, and we’ve re-factored the way that items in a bundle are ordered, as mentioned in our earlier post. We talk a little about affordance, and show a couple screen shots.

In our previous article in the series on the development of nexus, we discussed navigation and information architecture. We identified the challenge of filtering articles by category and by level of experience (beginner / expert), while also viewing the articles along a characteristic (most-viewed, highest-rated, etc). Between both url-creation and visible site-navigation, the challenge we explored was how to present one facet or dimension as primary and others as secondary.

One of our readers presented a third alternative – faceted navigation.

We have an interesting information architecture challenge as part of our agile project. We have talked about browsing and searching articles organized both by category (product management, business analysis, etc) and by level of expertise (beginner, expert). We’re also rating and reviewing the articles, which introduces the ideas of “latest”, “most reviewed”, “highest rated”, etc.

This presents us with a three-dimensional way to approach structuring the information and navigation of the site.