“Adding confidence intervals to completion rates in usability tests will temper both excessive skepticism and overstated usability findings. Confidence intervals make testing more efficient by quickly revealing unusable tasks with very small samples. Examples are detailed and downloadable calculators are available.” (Jeff Sauro – Measuring Usability)
All posts from
June 2004
Why visual form matters for information architecture
“(…) the full version was recognized more than the content only version, recognized more than the form only version. The interesting finding is that when the form version was recognized, it happened twice as fast as for the other versions. (…) this is because the cognitive processing of visual information happens faster than that for verbal information. While there is some truth to that, let’s play detective and identify what cognitive mechanism is the culprit here.” (Rashmi Sinh) – courtesy of victor lombardi
It’s time to get serious about metadata
“When it comes to the Web, there is nothing more misunderstood than metadata. Technical people search vainly for a way to automate its creation. Many editors and writers want nothing to do with it. And yet without quality metadata a website cannot properly achieve its objectives. It’s time to get serious about metada.” (Gerry McGovern)
Out with the New! The IA Summit at Five Years
10 Accessibility Blunders of the Big Players
“Web accessibility is about making your Website accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled), regardless of what browsing technology they’re using. More and more countries have passed laws stating that Websites must be accessible to blind and disabled people. With this kind of legal pressure, and the many benefits of accessibility, the big players on the Web must surely have accessible Websites, right?” (Trenton Moss – sitepoint) – courtesy of deswozhere
Papers from the Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference
New York May 17-22, 2004 (WWW 2004) – courtesy of elearningpost
Victor Lombardi: The InfoDesign profile
“Victor Lombardi is actively participating in the fields of information architecture and interaction design. He co-founded and served on the board of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. He slaved away as designer for a number of companies, most notably four years at Razorfish. All this while teaching at the Parsons School of Design. He also led the information architecture practice at a global financial services company. Noise Between Stations is Victor’s personal website.” (InfoDesign: Understanding by Design)
Voting and Usability: Top 10 Things to Read
“This is a large field, and there is a lot of material to read. If you are just learning about voting, it can e a bit overwhelming. To help out, we’ve assembled a short list of the most critical readings on voting and usability.” (UPA)
UXnet Soft Launch
“User Experience (UX) is an emerging field concerned with improving the design of anything people experience: a web site, a toy, or a museum. UX is inherently interdisciplinary, synthesizing methods, techniques, and wisdom from many fields, ranging from brand design to ethnography to library science to architecture and more. (…) UXnet is dedicated to exploring opportunities for cooperation and collaboration among UX-related organizations and individuals.” (UXnet Mission)
Making Knowledge Management Work on your Intranet
“In the information economy, the longevity of an organization is based as much on the sophistication of its knowledge management practices as it is on traditional differentiators such as the strength of its products, the talent of its employees, and its marketplace reputation and partner relationships. Simply speaking, as actionable and insightful information becomes the currency of an organization, there are few other ways to tap into any latent potential lost in the office corridors.” (Shiv Singh – Boxes and Arrows)
User Experience Honeycomb
“For me, user experience design is a big hive: a dynamic, multi-dimensional space where there’s still plenty of room to build new boxes and draw new arrows, at least for the next ten years.” (Peter Morville – Semantic Studios)
An Introduction to Information Architecture
“Information architecture (or IA) is the science — some would insist art — of defining the structure, organization, navigation, labeling and indexing of a Website. It is the role of the information architect to decide how a site should be structured, what kind of content it should host, and how to accommodate future growth. In short, information architecture defines the backbone of a Website.” (Subha Subramanian – sitepoint) – courtesy of xblog
Quality metadata makes for successful web content
“Metadata is a web writing skill. It helps your readers quickly find what they need. Metadata is an essential part of successful web sales and marketing efforts. It helps influence people to buy. In every sense, metadata can drive action. It can help you achieve your objectives.” (Gerry McGovern)
Ten Best Government Intranets
“Redesigning an intranet for usability often more than doubled the use of these award-winning designs from ten public-sector organizations.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Managing Content with Automatic Document Classification
“News articles and Web directories represent some of the most popular and commonly accessed content on the Web. Information designers normally define categories that model these knowledge domains (i.e. news topics or Web categories) and domain experts assign documents to these categories. The paper describes how machine learning and automatic document classification techniques can be used for managing large numbers of news articles, or Web page descriptions, lightening the load on domain experts.” (Rafael A. Calvo et al. – Journal of Digital Information Vol 5.2)
Search Engine Optimization and Non-HTML Sites
“The mistake of building entire sites in Flash is not just an amateur’s mistake – many leading Web designers, who are paid copious amounts of money, do the same thing. Sometimes the use of Flash is the only way to achieve a specific function (e.g. Web-based games), so you need Flash for that feature – but do you need it for the whole site?” (Alan K’necht – Digital Web Magazine)
Toward a Critical Practice in Design
“A critical practice challenges prevailing values through works based in some other set of values. This is a form of conscientiousness. In a world where technique has too often become an end in itself, a culturally critical attitude has become essential to meaningful design. How to seek and identify a problem is as important as how to solve a problem.” (Usability News)
90% of All Usability Testing is Useless
“When done right, usability testing will improve your Web site and your development process, but the current culture surrounding Web site usability testing is such that it rarely benefits the design. Worse, this misapplication can undermine the acceptance of this important technique throughout an organization.” (Lane Becker – Adaptive Path)
Web site usability quiz
“Test your knowledge of basic Web usability principles.” (Human Factors International)
How to get great content from people
“There is a need to connect the person who creates the content with the person who reads it. Content creation must be seen as an important and valuable task within the organization. When a piece of content delivers value, the person who created it should be praised and rewarded.” (Gerry McGovern)
