Five Sketches™

I received a brochure in the mail, titled Time for a Tune-up: How improving usability can improve the fortunes of your web site. It recommends this blend of usability methods:

Expert reviews focus on workflows and give best results when the scope is clearly defined.
Usability studies are more time-consuming than expert reviews, but is the best […]

I received an e-mail from someone at the 2008 IA Summit about Jared Spool’s declaration that UCD is dead:
 —  —  — Forwarded message —  —  — 
From: P
Date: Sun 13/04/2008, 2:54 PM
Hi Jerome,
I’m at the iA Summit in Miami right now, and hearing about all of the things that are going on makes me think of you. One of the interesting sessions was Jared Spool’s keynote […]

Do you ever wonder how effective expert reviews and usability tests are? Apparently, they can be pretty good.
Rolf Molich and others have conducted a series of comparative usability evaluation (CUE) studies, in which a number of teams evaluate the same version of a web site or application. The teams chose their own preferred methods—such as […]

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the worst mistakes in GUI design are domain-specific. Usually, he says, applications fail because they:

solve the wrong problem.
have the wrong features for the right problem.
make the right features too complicated to understand.

Nielsen’s last point reminds me of what a product manager once told me: many users of highly specialised software […]