IT Solutions Blog

• Does usability exist? How Usability is like Intelligence (by Jeff Sauro) – very interesting analogy to intelligence and a first approach to relating the three usability areas Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction and how (and how much) they contribute to Usability ‘u’.
• The Case Against Vertical Navigation (by Louis Lazaris) – While I think the argumentation in this blog article is mislead by current design trends and biased in some way, I find ’shaking our world’ good from time to time so we can re-think the way we’re used to doing things.
• Bad Usability Calendar 2010 – What would be the New Year without another one of their great Usability Calendars – Enjoy!
• Curating Comments Threads (by Chris Coyier) – interesting discussion and good points about how to make comments more meaningful.
• Live, Free webcast: Confessions of a Public Speaker – Probably you’ve heard already, Scott Berkun has his book out, and he’s offering a free, 90 min. webcast about it, don’t miss, sign up now.
• The future of UI will be boring (by Scott Berkun) – Scott seems to be on mushrooms lately judging by the level of activity. Here another really good read about the future of UI design, love the ‘rookie trap’.
• jQuery 1.4 has been released (by John Resig) – right in time for jQuery’s birthday, big news for a great JavaScript library, better iframe support, flexible events. My tip: get it!!

Suggested reading:

Confessions of a Public Speaker

Scott Berkun. O’Reilly Media 2009, Hardcover, 240 pages, $13.99

Marti Hearst generously made her upcoming book “Search User Interfaces” available for reading online. She is definitely not a newcomer to the scene and the book for sure not a Best-Of compilation, moreover the book is written in an academic fashion that backs up its theses usability studies, log studies, or some other form of proof (like it!) – like Harry Brignull states: “Caution: actual thought may be required when reading this book.”

Contents: Search User Interfaces

The book has two main parts: search fundamentals (Chapters 1-7) and advanced topics (Chapters 8-12).

0: Preface
1: Design of Search User Interfaces
2: Evaluation of Search User Interfaces
3: Models of the Information Seeking Process
4: Query Specification
5: Presentation of Search Results
6: Query Reformulation
7: Supporting the Search Process
8: Integrating Navigation with Search
9: Personalization in Search
10: Information Visualization for Search Interfaces
11: Information Visualization for Text Analysis
12: Emerging Trends in Search Interfaces
References
Index

Suggested reading:

Search User Interfaces

Marti A. Hearst. Cambridge University Press 2009, Hardcover, 408 pages, $31.99

We, the people, have been around for quite some years now. Computers, software, applications and the web not so much. Therefore it is clear that applications have to adjust to the people and not the other way round.

Many design principles have developed throughout the decades, but the main difference of user-centered design to others is that

UCD tries to optimize the user interface around how people can, want, or need to work, rather than forcing the users to change how they work to accommodate the system or function.

Purpose of UCD

UCD answers questions about users and their tasks and goals, then use the findings to make decisions about development and design.

UCD seeks to answer the following questions:

• Who are the users of the application?
• What are the users’ main tasks and goals?
• What are the users’ experience levels with the application?
• What functions do the users need from the application?
• What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
• How do users think the application should work?

Benefits & Return of Investment

• Increased usability
  • Higher degree of customer satisfaction
  • Continued business
  • Higher revenues
• Project management optimization
  • Focus on important functionality early
  • Unforeseen user requirements
• Reduced costs
  • Training costs
  • Help-Desk calls and service costs

UCD Principles

• Focus on users’ needs, tasks and goals
• Spend time on initial research and requirements
  • Identify your target audience and observe them (accomplishing their tasks)
  • Let users define product requirements
• Emphasis on iterative design process
• Evaluate system on real target users

Summary

Nobody could state it simpler than Susan Dray: “If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work”.