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24 Sep 09

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine

  • A study by UX Matters found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. On many forms, labels are put to the left of the fields, creating a two-column layout; while this looks good, it’s not the easiest layout to use. Why is that? Because forms are generally vertically oriented; i.e. users fill the form from top to bottom. Users scan the form downwards as they go along. And following the label to the field below is easier than finding the field to the right of the label.
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27 Feb 08

Coding Horror: I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users

  • I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.


    Startups don't have hundreds of internal users, so it's important to release to the world much sooner. When FriendFeed was semi-released (private beta) in October, the product was only about two months old (and 99.9% written by two people, Bret and Jim). We've made a lot of improvements since then, and the product that we have today is much better than what we would have built had we not launched. The reason? We have users, and we listen to them, and we see which things work and which don't.

  • Listening to users is a tricky thing. Users often don't know what they want, and even if they did, the communication is likely to get garbled somewhere between them and you. By no means should you ignore your users, though. Most people will silently and forever walk away if your software or website doesn't meet their needs. The users who care enough to give you feedback deserve your attention and respect. They're essentially taking it upon themselves to design your product. If you don't listen attentively and politely respond to all customer feedback, you're setting yourself up for eventual failure.
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Feature Presentation: Financial Page: The New Yorker

  • You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just
    paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble
    begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they
    also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a
    store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only
    once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of
    simplicity. A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana
    Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were
    given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more
    than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the
    subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from
    twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features
    was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called
    “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options
    they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.

27 Jan 08

Interview with Jakob Nielsen [Usability and Information Architecture]

  • It's important to remember that most web sites are not used repeatedly. Usually, users will visit a given page only once. This means that the efficiency of any given operation takes a back seat to the discoverability and learnability of the feature. Therefore, interaction techniques like drag-and-drop should almost never be used on web sites. Instead, focus on showing a few important features and making them accessible through a single click on a simple link or button.
  • Remember: just because you love technology and advanced features, it doesn't mean that your customers do. They just want to get in and out without worrying about your web site. So take it easy on the features.

BetterDesktop

  • We do usability testing at Novell because we want Linux to be easy-to-use and easy-to-learn. Usability testing provides us with a reliable way to measure how well different software designs meet these goals.
  • We do usability testing at Novell because we want Linux to be easy-to-use and easy-to-learn. Usability testing provides
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