Wednesday, February 27

Win Consumers with Better Usability
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 don¥t agress, it¥s 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.
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Aesthetics and Usability
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...
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Tuesday, February 26

Usability Professionals' Association

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 1024x768 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.
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Sunday, February 24

STC Usability Web Site
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.
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dynamicScale - scaling websites?!
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...
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Thursday, February 21

Design Update
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.
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User Vision Articles
A collection of User Vision articles and presentations. User Vision is a consultancy dedicated to improving the user experience of websites, softwares or products.
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Tuesday, February 19

Human Factors International
...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"? dmitry¥s 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.
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Friday, February 15

Google Light
Another example of the light browsers! In this case, even the results are shortened - but that makes the results much harder to understand / to use / to judge.
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False prophets of Usability - Part 1
In the past few years usability has become somewhat of a buzzword. That's both a good and a bad thing. What's bad is that the meaning of usability gets muddied, re-interpreted and sometimes even set aside. You have software companies selling "automated usability testing solutions" (no one really sells products anymore). You have traditional graphic designers passing themselves off as "interaction" this and "user experience" that. And of course most of the "buyers" don't know what is what -- they're just buying instant 'usability" -- or so they think. I'm not saying I'm perfect, but there are clearly some folks in the "usability game" who are just jumping on a bandwagon and bringing their own version of snake oil with them.
As an example they describe the True Usabilityô method of NetConversions...
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Tuesday, February 12

Amazon light
Amazon is offering (testbed?) a light version of its service. The lightness, of course, refers only to its visual appearance - handling the same content and its basic functions.
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Information Architecture and Information Architects
A six-part essay on the information architecture community, where we are, and where we're going. By jjg
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