Is Usability simplicity? What should companies do if customers notice that competitors are just the mouseclick away (they noticed it since the beginning of the web). Kevin Scoresby (who used to be director of usability at marchFIRST) claims that Web site accessibility = usability (I donÅ0Ö7t agress, itÅ0Ö7s just a part of the game), he calls for the customer experience (again, that e-word) and points out basic usability rules: Understand your users, Keep it extremely simple, Let users be anonymous…This point of view is focused on website usability and is based on best practice.

An interesting Study (1999) dealing with aesthetic and formal questions of interface design concering usability. Kiana Matthews focuses on both software and hardware interfaces, cultural differences, basic perception rules.
The study is a well-researched starting point.
Excerpt:… interface aesthetics may play a greater role in people’s attitudes towards computerized systems than we might be willing to admit. The relationships between a priori perceptions of the ease of use of an automatic teller machine (ATM) (termed ‘apparent usability’) and other variables. These included factors believed by HCI professionals to enhance usability (termed ‘inherent usability’) and the appearance (beauty) of the interface. Surprisingly, high relationships were found between the interface judgments of aesthetics and apparent usability (r = 0.59). The correlation between the apparent usability and inherent usability factors were mostly negligible…

upa has founded a german branch (German Chapter), hopefully they will test the usability of their website soon. Well they are giving a slight warning: These pages are optimized for MS Internet Explorer starting from version 4.0 at a screen resolution of at least 1024×768 pixels. A smaller resolution as well as using of other Browser can falsify the appearance (translated by babelfish).
Again, this is another engeneering approach to usability.

During the conference a “User Testing” laboratory will run all day long. The purpose of the session is to provide an opportunity for conference participants to 1) observe user testing of museum Web sites in action; 2) volunteer to participate as a user test subject and discover some of the problems users have on unknown sites; and 3) volunteer their site to be tested. We encourage people to drift in and out of the session all day long–as they move, for example, from one talk to another. Each user test will last 20 minutes or so (with time for audience comments and questions). Therefore, it will be very easy for individuals to observe and even participate in this session without having to sacrifice a large amount of time.
More about Usability? See designing usability, a weblog dealing with usability questions.

This web site is a forum to share information and experiences on issues related to the usability and user-centered design. It is the home of the Usability Special Interest Group of the (worldwide) Society for Technical Communication. Articles on Intranet Design and Patterns in Design or general information about prototyping techniques like interactive sketching are interesting.

A new serverside-technology allows the (re)sizing of any website to any current browser window size. But: does this malkes really sense? Using flash, there are some examples that show how the arbitrary size of a visual design (from font sizes to line thickness) can REACT on the resizing of a window. But having a static (html) content, it affects more damage to a site. But: there might be upcoming concepts of resizable content that re-acts on a algorithmic design…

WAP war gestern - Locality Mobil ist heute
Alle Welt spricht von der multimedialen mobilen Information. Gezeigt werden uns aber nur kurze WAP-Texte.
Locality-Mobil wird diesen Zustand jetzt ändern und startet den ersten regulären mobilen multimedialen Städteführer mit Fotos und ausführlichen Texten. Abzurufen ist dieser mobile Dienst mit jedem HTML-fähigen Mobilfunkgerät (Pocket PC, Smartphone).

It’s done! The Usability blog, existing now for nearly two years, has been updated. First of all, the name and the design changed. As we are a design company and design is our profession I wanted to point out the design focus in our view of “usability”. So we called the weblog designing usability, showing that this is a constant process, that it is a matter of design the usability question as well as designing usable artefacts and information devices. I hope there will be a longer statement in the about section soon to provide you with a much more structured definition of designing usability. In the meantime: enjoy the links and articles - and feel free to comment on them!
If you want to refer to this blog please be sure to update your links to www.syntax-design.de/usability.

A collection of User Vision articles and presentations. User Vision is a consultancy dedicated to improving the user experience of websites, softwares or products.

…ensuring usability through software ergonomics, human factors and design artistry.
Design Artistry? What do they mean? Another company that knows: The most important thing you can do to make your site usable is to create an intuitive navigation structure.
But what ist “intuitive”? dmitryÅ0Ö7s design lab also stretches this point:”a neat, consistent, and intuitive navigational interface”. The MasterMind Expolorer describes different ways of “intuitive” navigation, like WebBrain or Thinkmap. What we see there is that intuition leads to a new. yet unknown, way of navigation - what seems to be more promisingt than using old metaphors…tbc.