Observing just a few users interact with a product or website can tell you a wealth of information about what’s working and not working. But to loosely quote Lord Kelvin, when we can measure something and express it in numbers, we understand and manage it better. Measuring usability allows us to better understand how changes
You go to your doctor for a checkup. You’re feeling fine but as a matter of procedure, your doctor orders a battery of tests and scans to be sure all is well. She runs 30 tests in total. A few days later she calls and tells you one of the tests came back positive–an indication
Most of us take to the skies for business or a vacation (some more frequently than others). And who hasn’t had a nightmare travel experience with delays, cancellations or getting bumped? While there is much written about the airline travel experience, a lot of time is also spent researching and purchasing those airline tickets online.
Usability is a lot of things. It’s about making interfaces easy to learn. It’s about preventing errors and reducing the time to get things done. It’s even about making an experience more satisfying and delightful. There are a number of methods to improve the usability of an interface. While it’s hard to identify one overarching
We’ve put together a visual timeline of the 100 year history of usability that we detailed in an earlier blog. This detailed infographic covers many of the key events, publications and people that have shaped the profession. If you’re obsessed with usability like we are, you can also purchase a 52 inch full-color version and
The quarter just ended for a graduate level class I taught on Usability at the University of Denver. Here are eleven questions I wanted to be sure everyone in the class could answer and understand. See how well you can answer some questions on the core concepts of usability, with an emphasis on usability evaluation.
It’s not terribly complicated, yet it’s not universally applied. When designing an application, website or product, three things help generate a more usable experience: an early focus on the users and tasks, empirical measurement, and iterative design. These three key principles were articulated by John Gould and Clayton Lewis almost 30 years ago in the
If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s research to help guide a design or inform product development, then you’ll likely want to look to the published literature. Despite the vast power of the internet and search engines, it’s still surprisingly difficult to know where to look to find relevant, peer-reviewed research. A simple Google search will
Usability is hardly physics or chemistry. But there are some important principles from decades of research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that apply to design and user research. Here are five famous laws that can be applied to improving the user experience of applications and websites: Miller’s Law of Short Term Memory Load: The psychologist
The profession of usability as we know it largely started in the 1980s. Many methods have their roots in the earlier fields of Ergonomics and Human Factors which began near the beginning of the 20th century and had a strong influence through World War II. While not exhaustive, the following is a timeline of several
