Almost everything I’ve read about use cases focuses on describing what needs to be added to your product. Agile development says “get it working first, make it better second.” That means changing the way the software enables a user to do something they can already do. How do you manage […]
Business Analysis / Interface Design / Product Management / ROI / Software development / Usability / UX
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Modeling User Competency
Perpetually intermediate (competent) users. Users who briefly exist as novice users and never become experts. Most of your users are competent, and you should design for them. Competent users have different needs and different expectations than novice or expert users. How do you know your user’s competency levels, so you […]
Usability / UX
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2009 Bad Usability Calendar
Netlife Research brings us the 2009 Bad Usability calendar. Get it while it’s hot.
Austin TX / Usability / UX
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Bad Usability Calendar 2008
Netlife Research (company website in Norwegian) has done it again. Their 2008 Bad Usability Calendar is here and it is great. So great that it is hard to pick a favorite. Download it here. 2007 has more great examples. [Note: This is a short post- just got back from the […]
Business Analysis / Interface Design / Product Management / ROI / Usability / UX
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User Adoption ROI
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 […]
Business Analysis / Interface Design / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Usability / UX
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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. […]
Usability / UX
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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. […]
Design / Software development / Usability / UX
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Don’t Make Your Products Too Simple
Joshua Ledwell wrote a short article expressing his perspective on designing software that is neither too simple nor too complex. He also links to some excellent other articles on the topic.
ROI / Software development / Usability / UX
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Software Usability and Learning Curves
Learning curves have been studied for decades when evaluating manufacturing systems and proposing cost reductions. The Boston Consulting Group did an oft-cited analysis in the 1960’s that describes how people get faster at tasks through repetition. Peter Abilla looked at the extension of this to writing software. We look at how it applies to using software.