You want your software to be used, not to sit on the shelf. You can’t achieve the ROI of your software if people don’t use it. And you can’t achieve the ROI of your software by forcing people to use it either. Some will fail to achieve the benefits, and […]
You Are Creating Bugs In Your Software
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.
Global Actor Hierarchies and Personas
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. […]
Managing Stakeholder Goals
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.
Foundation Series: Heuristic Evaluation
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. […]
Interface Design: Visualization Methods
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.
Humane Interface Design Philosophy – 7 Tips
There are at least 7 ideals to keep in mind when designing a user interface. Shmula tells us about them.
The First UX Project
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 […]
Nexus – Drag and Drop
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.