Archive of UX Articles

There is such a thing as too much choice. For new users, too much choice (or control) is too much. For experienced users, too little choice is a problem. Ease of use usually comes from reduced control - but users don’t stay “new” for long. There’s a “canyon of pain” to quote Kathy Sierra in that transition from “new” to “experienced.” We call them “competent” users and we have to help them cross the canyon of pain.

There are three main models for selling software. You can hire a direct sales force. You can spend a lot on marketing and advertising. You can let your users sell the software for you, a technique commonly known as viral marketing. There’s a catch with viral marketing - users have to like your software.

Its easy for us to overdo almost anything. Kim Goodwin offers some good advice about how not to overdo it when using personas as part of our software development process.

Actor Hierarchies give us an overview of the people who will interact with the system. We can extend this model to provide a visual indication of how use cases are distributed through the organization. Further, we can leverage a hierarchy to show how use cases are rolled out to the users - a targeted communication for our stakeholders.

There are 15 ways for someone to shutdown a laptop running Windows Vista. This adds unwarranted complexity to our software. How can we avoid the same problem in our software?

Johanna Rothman just wrote an article titled Implicit Requirements are Still Requirements. She points out that her expectations were not met, even though her needs might have been. Johanna also implicitly begs the question - how do we gather implicit requirement?

Michael Shrivathsan just wrote an article presenting five tips for creating products with great design.
Michael’s List

Start with the user interface. [Roger Cauvin adds, start with a working first iteration]
Work closely with UI designers.
Pay attention to details.
Simpler is better.
Be brave.

Our Thoughts
User centric design is the core of UX and interaction design. It is the most [...]

What a great way to demonstrate 12 key usability concepts - creating a calendar where each concept is demonstrated. You’ve heard the saying - “If you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning.” Here is that saying manifested in calendar form.

Mike Mace provides us with some great insight about market research - helping us to avoid ‘the blender’ and ‘the gap’. The gap is a reflection of the inability of most customers to innovate. The blender is the loss of useful market information into a homogenized input that pushes only the lowest common denominator - again stifling innovation. We have to avoid the blender and the gap to get useful data from our research.

Kathy Sierra writes (another) great article at Creating Passionate Users. This time, she talks about why users don’t upgrade and presents ways to get users to install the latest version. We focus in this article on one way in particular - using goal-driven documentation to encourage upgrading.