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Now this is an article that grabbed my attention straight away!
Often when I think about web usability and usability heuristics I think about it from a commercial perspective. I think about my clients and the type of sites I would normally work on: Finance, government, retail, travel, telco’s… you get the picture. But one genre I haven’t considered in much detail is the blog.
Tom Johnson has just published a really useful and well researched article on his blog, I’d rather be writing. The post, entitled Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog — Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers’ Experiences really does cover a lot of ground.
I’ll leave it for you to take a look at the post yourself, but in summary his 20 tips are:
- Pick a topic for your blog
- Encourage comments
- Make it easy to subscribe
- Include an About page
- Present your ideas visually
- Keep posts short and to the point
- Use subheadings for long posts
- Link abundantly
- Make headlines descriptive
- Archive by topic
- Include a list of related posts beneath each post
- Allow users to contact you offline
- Present your real viewpoint
- Write for your future employer
- Include a Top Posts section
- Provide an index
- Get your own URL and match it to your blog’s title
- Include a Recent Posts section …
Marking your own exam
On the Ixd Discussion List at the moment there’s a discussion being held about the difference between the role of the interaction designer (often written as IxD or IaD) and usability specialist.
In a nutshell, the interaction designer will design user interface behaviours and user interactions on a site, hopefully based on previous research that’s been conducted. The usability specialist conducts research that informs and evaluates these decisions from a user perspective, throughout the development of a site or system.
Many interaction designers will argue that it’s an essential skill to have experience in user research and general usability principals. This seems logical to me. What doesn’t seem logical to me is this: conducting user-based evaluations (or other usability testing) of your own designs.
Is it possible to mark your own exam without influence from business requirements, client pressures and ego? I think it takes a very strong character to do so and I also think there’s something to be said for independent evaluations. Personally I’m not convinced that it’s the ideal way to develop with true user focus, but it seems to be happening out there a bit.
What are your thoughts and experiences?
Usability Stifles Creativity!
I often read comments across various usability and interaction design mail lists discussing the pro’s and con’s of user testing.
One argument that seems to come up again and again is the impact of user testing on the creative process. Experienced designers and user experience professionals frequently debate whether user testing actually stifles the design process and hinders true creativity in design.
Take navigation for example… Usable site navigation is considered so important that there is an industry of roles dedicated to it throughout the development of a site: Interaction designers, information architects, usability specialists, accessibility experts, Ajaxian god like creatures… you name it. And don’t forget the Flash developers!
But back to my point about user testing verses straight up design… is it possible to produce creative, functional and usable designs that haven’t involved some type of ‘user intervention’?
I think so. But I do think it depends on the skill of the designer, the user and the type of site.
Take a look at Etsy, a site for sellers and buyers of handmade things – basically an online craft market (not a bad geek destination for a Sunday morning date, huh?!). The site’s been around for about a year …
Autopostback + Checkboxen=Dumb
Why you should not use checkboxes combined with autopostback.
Usability heuristics for web development teams
Often when clients have a relatively low budget for usability testing, or a short amount of time in which to conduct it, an ‘expert’ or an ‘heuristic’ review will be run by an experienced usability practitioner. There are slight differences between the two, with the expert review entailing a less formal evaluation process than the heuristic review. But all things considered, they’re pretty much in the same ballpark time wise… So I suppose that means cost wise too.
There are a number of advantages in conducting either type of review. As I mentioned above, where resources are limited, they can be an effective and efficient method of assessing a site; the time and cost associated with recruiting, interviewing and paying test participants is negated. These evaluation methods can also be conducted very easily and consistently throughout the life of a site, providing a benchmark as well as a periodical health-check.
In conducting an heuristic review, a series of guidelines or checkpoints is used by the usability expert to assess a site (or application). In conducting an expert review however, these specific guidelines may not be utilised, with the practitioner relying on their expertise of general usability principles to review the site …
Where are all the visited links?
Something I’ve become aware of lately is the near extinction of the visited link state. In a recent comparative review of six industry-related government websites, only one site displayed visited links. And even then it was only on content text links, rather than the main site navigation. I have to admit, it really surprised me; after all, it’s hardly a technically advanced site feature!
But it’s more widespread than a handful of government sites…
Over the past few months I’ve reviewed a stack of sites for The Mc Farlane Prize as well as the more recent AIMIA awards, and I’ve been quite amazed by how few of the sites incorporated visited links.
Let’s not forget that these sites are submitting their work to be judged for “excellence in web design” (The McFarlane Prize), “showcasing the industry’s best innovations and projects” (AIMIA).
Now I don’t mean to infer that these sites aren’t of the “excellent” category simply because they don’t highlight visited links. But what’s going on?
In my last post, James Edwards asked me about my thoughts on “the crossover between Usability and Accessibility”, and I think the visited link is a great example of …
Usability for Developers
If there’s one thing that’s caught my attention in the past six months, it’s an increase in the variety of web roles incorporating usability. I’ve noticed this across a number of areas: job posts, industry events, online discussions and personal tagging on social networking sites such as Web Connections. SitePoint has even released a Usability Kit and launched this blog. I find it interesting because it signifies a shift in the importance the web community appears to be placing on usability within the development process.
Do a quick job search (go on, I’m giving you an excuse!) and you’ll find it’s quite common to see Front End Developer, Information Architect (IA), Producer and Visual Designer roles all requiring knowledge of usability to some extent. I’m using the term ‘usability’ generically here, to incorporate user testing, user experience and interaction design, but in essence, what I’m talking about is working with a user-centred approach to site development.
But what about me?
I’m Lisa Herrod, a Senior Usability Consultant at Access Testing. I’ve been working on the web for the past 8 years in various roles including: design, development, accessibility, usability and even (in a universe far from here) a teacher …
Usability Double-whammy!
Usability.
We think we know what the word means, but many people struggle to define or describe it. Of course, we always know when something is usable, because it feels “intuitive”. And we certainly know when something is not usable, as it frustrates the heck out of us.
We might read a bit about the topic of usability every now and then, or feel inspired to actually apply some user-centred design techniques or perform structured usability testing in our day-to-day work. Personally I find myself getting all fired up about this stuff after attending a conference, but a few days afterwards the practical reality of a daily routine means it falls by the wayside.
So how much from the masses of usability theory do we actually use when we build our web sites, and how much goes out the window in exchange for our own judgment calls, or for something that we know has worked in the past? Do you need to be an expert with academic credentials to be able to apply this stuff? Sometimes even the experts fail to agree, or the theory is far removed from the practical, or it forces us to sacrifice aesthetics to get …
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