Archive of Usability Articles

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.

Stephen Turbek, at Boxes and Arrows, tells us how to get better results from our wireframes. Wireframe prototyping can provide feedback early in the design cycle, reducing costs and improving the quality of the final software. By putting a little flesh on the bone, we can get even better results.

Microsoft Office 2007 has a completely new user interaction paradigm.

The old interfaces for Microsoft Office 2003 (and earlier) organized the menu structures around features or capabilities. Each grouping represented tasks that appeared to be related in functionality. This, unfortunately, doesn’t help the user very much. The new interface is very task based, and organizes capabilities based upon the task the user is currently performing. What the Office team has done is innovate. And the innovations differentiate them from every other business application I’ve ever seen.

UX, pronounced you-ex, is the shorthand for user-experience. It represents the science and art of tailoring the experience that users have with a product - in our case, software. UX is a relatively new term, rapidly overtaking HCI (human-computer interface) and CHI (computer-human interface) as the acronym du jour. There are several disciplines within this field, we’ll introduce each of them.

In Those “Minor” Usability Annoyances, Daniel Read at developer.* writes in on a topic that resonates with me.
Daniel describes working on a critical application with multi-year, continuous development and a couple hundred internal users. I’m currently helping a client incorporate automated unit testing for a similar enterprise application, and Ive helped teams manage the [...]

Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability

Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold.
Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users.
Interrupt the user’s workflow with pop-ups and other modal interruptions.
Limit [...]

Kathy Sierra writes a great post in her blog, Creating Passionate Users, that talks about the requirement to make things interesting.
The driving objective is to accelerate the user adoption curve - which Kathy calls the Kick Ass Curve. Any user is initially forced to focus on the tool, and not the task. The [...]

An application lives or dies by its ability to allow users to achieve the goals that drive the creation of (or purchase of) the software.