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 […]
Design / Lists / Software development / Usability / UX
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Top five usability blunders (and fixes)
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 […]
Process Improvement / Requirements / ROI / Software development
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The Best Way to Improve ROI is With Good Requirements
Statistics that support the critical need for requirements management improvements…
Foundation series / Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Foundation Series: Structured Requirements
Karl Wiegers wrote the book on structured requirements – Software Requirements, 2nd Edition, Karl E. Wiegers. If you are involved in managing requirements, you should own this book. Even if you don’t follow his approach to managing requirements, or don’t like how he deals with use cases, you should still […]
Foundation series / Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Foundation Series: Software Process (Waterfall Process versus Incremental Process)
A software process is the set of activities required to create software. This process can be defined with very precise steps, roles and responsibilities. The process can also be defined with a more fluid set activities in pursuit of concrete, high level objectives. Or software can be created without explicitly […]
Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Marc Clifton’s Advanced Unit Testing articles
In a previous post, we mentioned a link to the first in a series of articles by Marc Clifton at The Code Project, a .NET resource site. Here are the links to all 5 of the articles in Marc’s series.
Reviews / Software development / Software Reviews / UX
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Watson from Intellext
OK, you have to go download Watson, which provides contextual search (of the web, from your desktop). The context that it uses is whatever application is open on your desktop – specifically MS Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, IE and Firefox. This morning I was working on a “How to design unit […]
Usability / UX
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Getting Past The ‘Suck Threshold’
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 […]
Communication / Requirements / UX
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More on talking to your audience
I was reading ok-cancel today, and saw an article about getting UI designs ‘through the gauntlet’ of different groups of people at the client. Kevin and Tom consistently provide great insights on how to thrive in the HCI world, providing insights both in how to navigate customer-politics and processes, and […]