We are entering a new age of Web design and development where this concept is apparent now more than ever,” she says. “It’s not enough to have any old website – it must communicate your goals seamlessly to your audience through its rich content. When you take into account the diversity of methods used to access a given website – such as mobile devices – the result is a more dynamic and engaging web that must respond to the end users needs as quickly as possible.”

“In designing websites with the end user in mind, it’s important to take into account principles such as simplicity and clarity, with a focus on accessibility and customization. By tailoring your website to the individual, they’ll feel more appreciated and less like a faceless user who chanced upon your website. This translates into a positive experience for them as well as your business, brand, or service.”

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“Usability is a narrower concept than user experience since it only focuses on goal achievement when using a web site. By contrast, user experience is a “consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system”. This essentially means that user experience includes aspects such as human factors, design, ergonomics, HCI, accessibility, marketing as well as usability. An alternative way to look at this relationship is by subdividing user experience into utility, usability, desirability and brand experience. “

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“Children are becoming an increasingly important target group on the web. Good usability and high user experience are crucial aspects for a successful website. Early and repetitive user testing is the way to go. If we address children on our website, we need to focus on what they want. We need to include children as a target group in our user testing. In this post I’d like to take a look at usability testing with different age groups.”

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(via InfoDesign)

“In a recent column for Interactions Norman pointed out that the rush to develop gestural interfaces – “natural” they are sometimes called – well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated.

Recently, Raluca Budui and Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman group performed usability tests on Apple’s iPad, reaching much the same conclusion. The new applications for gestural control in smart cellphones (notably the iPhone and the Android) and the coming arrival of larger screen devices built upon gestural operating systems (starting with Apple’s iPad) promise even more opportunities for well-intended developers to screw things up. [...]

There are several important fundamental principles of interaction design that are completely independent of technology:
· Visibility (also called perceived affordances or signifiers)
· Feedback
· Consistency (also known as standards)
· Non-destructive operations (hence the importance of undo)
· Discoverability: All operations can be discovered by systematic exploration of menus
· Scalability. The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.
· Reliability. Operations should work. Period. And events should not happen randomly.

All these are rapidly disappearing from the toolkit of designers, aided, we must emphasize, by the weird design guidelines issued by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.”

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User research Is unnatural (but that’s okay), Part I
by Jim Ross
From the perspective of a participant, user research is not very natural. We ask participants to try to act naturally in the artificial environment of a lab, or we impose ourselves on their environment and hope our presence doesn’t affect their behavior. We often forget how unnatural user research can be and what effect it can have on participants.

Part II: Making user research more natural
To minimize the negative effects of these unnatural aspects of user research and get more realistic results, there are many things we can do to keep user research as natural as possible.

There should be limits to usability
by Peter Hornsby
People generally regard improving the usability of products or systems as a major part of our role as UX designers. While there are tradeoffs in all aspects of design, our assumption has generally been that products and systems that are easier to use are preferable to those that are harder to use. However, despite what seemed to be a common understanding, a number of articles have recently reported on research that suggests increased ease of use can be detrimental. This column examines the research underlying these conclusions and looks at some lessons UX designers can learn from them.

The UX of data
By Scott Jenson / February 17th 2011
Data storage in the cloud enables user experiences that would be impossible with only local storage, and creates a new facet of design: the UX of data.

2016: the user interface revolution underway
By Peter Eckert / February 24th 2011
New interfaces are not going to be uniform; devices and applications will not possess common protocols. For users, each interaction will have to be learned, so despite the improved usability of products, individuals will find themselves learning the quirks and standards of more and more technologies just to get the functionality they seek.

It has taken the opposite approach of Wikipedia and crowd-sourcing: all entries are written by leading figures who either invented or contributed significantly to each topic.

The new encyclopedia also features video interviews shot at different universities around the world.

The materials available for free, because the Interaction-Design.org people believe in the value of knowledge democratisation, where all can can get free access to world-class educational materials.

“Many of today’s industrial products, with their ever-growing feature sets, have become too complex and difficult to use, leading to increased training costs and lost time, and in some cases, even robbing manufacturing companies of the very benefits that the features were intended to produce. But more vendors are beginning to take notice. Increasingly, as a way to differentiate their products and help customers become more productive, automation suppliers are stepping up their efforts to reduce complexity in their products and make them easier to use.”

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Michele, who is also European Regional Coordinator for the Usability Professional’s Association, spoke on the event’s theme of communication, and the relationship between communication and usability in research and design activities.

In this short video (with Japanese subtitles), Michele explains how both communication and usability practices boil down to gaining the trust of the customer.

“Some in the technology industry believe that a better alternative would be to simply replace the remote with smartphone apps like the one Mr. Lavoie uses. If you create a specialized smartphone app to control a TV or set-top box, you can pack the phone’s touch screen with virtual buttons in any configuration you like. [...]

[Other] companies are not sold on the idea of the smartphone as the remote of the future. They are selling a range of remotes armed with full keyboards, touch screens and motion sensors.”

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In this article, the author takes a deeper dive into smartphone form factors and discusses how much the form factor impacts the phone’s usability and the user’s satisfaction (or lack thereof) with the user experience.

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In the 19th century, if you needed to be able to accommodate sudden changes to layout caused by late breaking news, the easiest way to achieve this with physical type was to have interchangeable blocks of text with common widths. And thus we have the newspaper layout we know and, mostly, still love.

The web design of news is also deeply rooted in the technology of the time, with most major news websites optimised to work well in browsers that were released a few years ago, on desktop-shaped monitors. And most existing content management systems (CMS) are optimised around spitting out chunks of articles of broadly similar length, which are mostly displayed in the browser in broadly similar templates.

There might be the occasional dalliance with a different format, but broadly speaking, an article per page, with a strip of topic-based navigation on top is the de facto standard for delivering news online.

The growth of the smartphone market in the US and the emergence of a range of tablet devices are challenging this orthodoxy of digital news presentation.

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Related to this is the report by Jakob Nielsen on the iPad usability in general, where he critiques iPad apps being inconsistent and having low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles, he says, cause further usability problems. See also this Guardian article.

Demands for improved usability and developments in user experience (UX) have become pertinent due to the increasing complexities of digital libraries (DLs) and user expectations associated with the advances in Web technologies. In particular, usability research and testing are becoming necessary means to assess the current and future breeds of information environments such that they can be better understood, well-formed and validated.

Usability studies and digital library development are not often intertwined due to the existing cultural model in system development. Usability issues are likely to be addressed post-hoc or as a priori assumptions. Recent initiatives have advanced usability studies in terms of information environment development. However, significant work is still required to address the usability of new services arising from the trends in social networking and Web 2.0.

The JISC-funded project, Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries (UX2.0), contributes to this general body of work by enhancing a digital library through a development and evaluation framework centred on usability and contemporary user experience. Part of the project involves usability inspection and research on contemporary user experience techniques. This article highlights the findings of the usability inspection work recently conducted and reported by UX2.0. The report provided a general impression of digital library usability; notwithstanding, it revealed a range of issues, each of which merits a systematic and vigorous study. The discussion points outlined here provide a resource generally useful for the JISC Community and beyond.

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The New York Times has published an article that was adapted from the book I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works by Nick Bilton, the lead writer for The New York Times technology blog Bits. The book, to be published on Tuesday by Crown Business, examines the impact of technology on our lives.

“Now, we are always in the center of the map, and it’s a very powerful place to be.

When people want to know how the media business will deal with the Internet, the best way to begin to understand the sweeping changes is to recognize that the consumer of entertainment and information is now in the center. That center changes everything. It changes your concept of space, time and location. It changes your sense of community. It changes the way you view the information, news and data coming directly to you.

Now you are the starting point. Now the digital world follows you, not the other way around.”

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Juicy stories sell ideas
By Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks
Storytelling fits into the design process in many places. You probably know that collecting stories is key to user research and ensuring your UX designs tell a clear story makes the resulting user experiences better. But in this column, we’ll focus on that big moment when you have something to share and want everyone on your team to pay attention.

Three reasons why persuasive design isn’t enough to influence change
By Colleen Jones
While there is a lot to like about using design to improve our behavior and our world, achieving that is a tall order. If persuasive design is going to work on a large scale it needs to be complete. Colleen Jones lists three reasons why persuasive design is not enough to make all of its good intentions come to life.

Recruiting participants for unmoderated, remote user research
By Jim Ross
It seems new, online tools for conducting unmoderated, remote user research emerge every week. While this method of doing user research and these tools have generated a lot of interest and discussion, it is also important to consider how best to recruit participants for unmoderated studies. Though one might assume this would be similar to recruiting for moderated studies, very different methods of recruiting are necessary to find the large number of representative participants unmoderated studies require and convince them to participate.

Usability for mobile devices
By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain
The mobile space is the new Wild West of technology. Much like the Web during the 1990s, mobile is the new domain at the forefront of innovation. Users are discovering new capabilities, integrating them with their daily lives, and experiencing new interaction models. The tech equivalent of indie bands, independent developers—working solo or in small teams—can create innovative new software in the form of mobile applications. These apps have the potential of launching a few software engineers from dorm rooms and garages into tech giants, in the tradition of Google or Facebook. Of course, accompanying this new era of innovation is a new set of usability concerns for software that runs on mobile devices small enough to fit in your pocket, which you can use while simultaneously walking around and interacting with the world around you.

According to Spillers, gender as an audience sensitive criteria (differentiation) is barely present in North American technology product design (where it is much easier to do) let alone Web experiences. In Asia there is more design innovation in this area, he says, and Spillers cites the example of Toshiba’s Femininity series.

Comscore just released a new study last month (June 30 2010) entitled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.

The worldwide study adds some key insights into the growing research on gender differences on the Web and in particular around social networking usage. Spillers reports on the key insights and their implications.

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(via Usability News)

“Create your website for your users, advise Steve Johnston and Liam McGee in “50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website“. Every design decision should be referred back to what we know about the users of the site, not simply to the beliefs, prejudices or even brilliant insights of the site owner or the site?s designer, the authors urge.

In this user-centred world you can only pursue your goals through supporting the goals your users have, because your users don’t start on your home page; they start at Google, as reads a sobering thought in the book. Typically, the users type in a query that reflects their goal, and the pages that Google returns will be those that Google believes supports that goal, namely the most ‘useful’ pages it can find.

And if the users arrive on your site and do not immediately see something that suggests their goal will be supported, they will leave, the authors caution. Reminding that the web is a pull medium, not a push medium, they note that the power is with the user, not the site owner, which is why it is more important to design for their goals than for yours.”

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Ethnography in UX
by Nathanael Boehm, user experience and social interaction designer for the Australian Government, Canberra, Australia
“In this article, I want to look at ways in which UX professionals can conduct research, usability testing, and evaluation for the upper rungs of the Human-Tech Ladder—the social elements of technology design and how people interact with a particular technology while working together within an organization.”

User Experience Balance Scorecard
by Sean Van Tyne, user experience director at FICO
“As user experience becomes more established as part of an organization’s overall strategy, a comprehensive Balance Scorecard must include user experience. It would be beneficial for UX leaders within organizations to understand the Balance Scorecard system and how to map their UX groups’ objectives to their organizations’ business strategies.”

International UPA 2010 Conference: Research Themes and Trends
by Michael Hawley, VP Experience Design at Mad*Pow Media Solutions LLC
“For the first time in its history, the International Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference took place outside of North America. [...] Unfortunately, it was impossible to attend all of the sessions, but in this conference recap, I will outline several trends I recognized.”

“Stories can help you collect, analyze and share qualitative information from user research and usability, spark design imagination and keep in touch with your audience. Storytelling and story listening are not a new methodology, but something you can add to your current practice to deepen and richen your understanding of users and their experience.

Three places where stories are a good fit are:

• Collecting stories from your audience to create a richer picture of how, when and why they use your products and documentation.
• Adding stories to personas to share your audience analysis, blending facts and information to make an emotional connection.
• Using stories for more naturalistic usability testing (planning those stories, or gathering them on the spot).”

Read articles: WritersUA | Johnny Holland