8 Stages of Corporate Usability Awareness

Posted on:

Jakob Nielsen identifies 8 levels of adoption of usability by corporations. He calls them the stages of corporate usability maturity. There is definitely a continuum of adoption and appreciation for usability in companies today. By understanding the eight levels we can determine how best to increase the commitment to usability on our projects.

User Centered Design and Bridging The Canyon of Pain

Posted on:

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.

Bad Usability Calendar From Netlife Research

Posted on:

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.

Goal Driven Upgrades

Posted on:

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.

Flesh Out Those Wireframes

Posted on:

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.

Office 2007 UX Victory

Posted on:

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.

Foundation Series: User Experience Disciplines

Posted on:

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.

Death by a thousand cuts: Usability problems add up

Posted on:

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 […]