Lisa Mullinaux's Bookmarks

So, the usability of forms is often massively important to the
overall usability of a Web site. That’s why we decided to subject some
of these forms to a quick round of eyetracking tests and have analyzed the
resulting data to better understand what makes Web forms usable—or unusable.

It takes a little time to get used to the new ribbon menu, but when you do
it’s easier and faster to work with.

A great improvement over older versions is that you have access to previous
captures and can jump freely between them and copy and paste as you like. The
annoying preview mode has also been removed, which is great.

In the image below I have pasted in Snagit inside the Snagit Editor so you
get an overview of both.

• Unifying force: It ensures that all employees are informed
  and receive a consistent message.
  
• Narrowcasting: It aggregates and distributes specialized
  news so that each user gets a filtered view with just the information he or she
  needs.

1. Define a number of core employee tasks.
   
2. Find out how frequently people perform these tasks.
   
3. Find the loaded hourly cost of an average employee in your company. (Or, for
   a more advanced approach, segment employees by major job categories and run this
   analysis for each segment, using average costs for people in that segment, as
   well as their frequency of use.)
   
4. Observe and time people as they perform the defined tasks with your current
   design. For timing, a simple stopwatch will suffice; you don't need special
   equipment or a fancy usability lab. Indeed, we often collect benchmark metrics
   for clients by testing in a small conference room.
   
5. Multiply the following numbers: time on task, each task's frequency, the
   employees' hourly rate, and the number of intranet users. The result is how much
   it costs the company to have employees accomplish the tasks using the current
   design.
   
6. Adjust this cost estimate to account for the tasks you didn't measure. For
   example, if you measured 1/3 of the core tasks employees do, you should multiply
   your measured numbers by 3 to get a decent estimate for all tasks. This, of
   course, assumes that you didn't focus the testing on the intranet's
   best-supported or best-designed areas, but rather on a representative and fairly
   chosen sample of tasks.