HealthCare.gov’s Account Setup: 10 Broken Usability Guidelines McKayla Maroney Was Doing The “Not Impressed” Face At Age 8 Most Popular Paintings & Photos From Getty’s Online Art Collection The Tweeting Bra Versus Breast Cancer Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Usability
First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users
To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior. The way to get user data boils down to the basic rules of usability: Watch what people actually do. Do not believe what people say they do. Definitely don’t believe what people predict they may do in the future. — Jakob Nielsen Read more →
3 Laws of Usability
Don’t make me think! It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. — Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think Read more →
User-Centered Design
Design should: Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment (make use of constraints). Make things visible, including the conceptual model of the system, the alternative actions, and the results of actions. Make it easy to evaluate the state of the system. Follow natural mappings between intentions and the required actions; between actions and the resulting effect; and between the information that is visible and the interpretation of the system state. In other words, make sure that (1) the user can figure out what to do, and (2) the user can tell what is going on. — Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things Read more →
Infomaki: An Open Source, Lightweight Usability Testing Tool
Infomaki is an open source “lightweight” usability testing tool developed by the New York Public Library to evaluate new designs for the NYPL.org web site and uncover insights about our patrons. Designed from the ground up to be as respectful of the respondents’ time as possible, it presents respondents with a single question at a time from a pool of active questions. In just over seven months of use, it has fielded over 100,000 responses from over 10,000 respondents. — The Code4Lib Journal – Infomaki: An Open Source, Lightweight Usability Testing Tool Read more →