How well can users predict task-level usability?

Ask a user to complete a task and they can tell you how difficult it was to complete. But can a user tell you how difficult the task will be without even attempting it? It turns out the task description reveals much of the task’s complexity, so users can predict actual task ease and difficulty

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Does Prior Experience Affect Perceptions Of Usability?

Are attitudes about usability constant? If we think something is unusable today, will we think it’s unusable tomorrow, next week or next year? How much does prior experience affect how usable we think a websites or software is? Enough to pay attention to. In a recent assessment, prior experience boosted usability ratings 11% for websites

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Top 10 Research-Based Usability Findings of 2010

5 Second Usability Tests: Ratings of website usability after only 5 seconds are the same as those after 10 minutes. Unmoderated Usability Data is Mostly Reliable: Data from remote usability test takers is rather similar to lab based studies except for task-times which differ more substantially. Cheaters: Around 10% of paid usability testers will cheat

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25 Resources For Measuring Usability

Books Measuring the User Experience by Tom Tullis & Bill Albert Beyond the Usability Lab by Bill Albert, Tom Tullis & Donna Tedesco Practical Guide to Usability Testing by Joe Dumas & Ginny Redish Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen Practical Guide to Measuring Usability (also available electronically) by Jeff Sauro Handbook of Usability Testing by

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5 Classic Usability Books

The books on this list have done more than sell a lot of copies (some have only sold a modest amount). They have been influential in providing material that has helped establish the usability profession. 1. A Practical Guide to Usability Testing by Joe Dumas & Ginny. Redish (1993) One of three books on the

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97 Things To Know About Usability

You are ultimately measuring an interface not users. Tell the users you are measuring the interface not them. Usability testing is not QA testing. Usability testing is finding problems with user interactions. QA testing is identifying problems with code that also impacts the user. Usability is a combination of user-attitudes and performance about an interface.

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7 Living Legends Of Usability

Love them, hate them, admire them or ignore them. These seven living legends aren’t one-hit wonders. Their work has had and will continue to have a large impact on the field of usability for some time. Here they are in alphabetical order:   1. Joe Dumas “Dr Usability” is author of dozens of articles on

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The Five Most Influential Papers In Usability

I compiled a list of papers that have had a large and lasting influence on the field of Usability and User Experience. I then asked Jim Lewis and Joe Dumas, two pioneers in this field for their top five.  There was considerable overlap in both the papers and topics suggesting that while there may be

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Want To Improve Usability? Count Calories

When babies are born in the hospital nurses measure every feeding and diaper change. When you want to lose weight with Weight Watchers you log everything you eat using a point system. When you want to improve usability beyond obvious problems you need to record: symptoms:  lower completion rates, lower satisfaction ratings, longer task times

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Is Usability A Science?

Is manufacturing a science? Is marketing a science? Is engineering a science? None of these are sciences. But they all can be informed by science or ignore science. To be “scientific” is to rely on observation and measurement instead of intuition and superstition.  Controlled experiments, surveys, observational studies, testing and validation can be used in

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