Five Sketches™

Series 3 of the user-experience trading cards debuted at the 2009 IA Summit this week. Five Sketches™ is included in this set:

The trading cards are a growing set—each card lists one method or technique useful to our industry—and are provided as a perk wherever one of nForm’s speakers presents. The whole set is useful to:

help provide consistent terms.
illustrate the range […]

Currently, I’m conducting research on usability analysis and on how Morae software might influence that. My research gaze is rather academic, in that I’m especially interested in the epistemology of usability analysis.
One of my self-imposed challenges is to make my research relevant to usability practitioners. I’m a practitioner and CUA myself, and I have little time for […]

We know that human brains use patterns (or schemata) to figure out the world and decide what to do. This kind of cognitive activity takes place very quickly, which means we can react quickly to the world around us, as long as the pattern holds.
Here’s a pattern (or schema) that your brain may know: to put a card […]

I’m presenting the Five Sketches™ ideation-design method at the March 2009 Vancouver User Experience event, in Vancouver, Canada. The presentation is titled: Creating Usable Software Without Designers: It is possible!
I think the title is a bit provocative; the organiser wanted the topic to sound spicier. If it primes the audience for a good discussion, then that’s fine. […]

If you decide to forego the design stage and reuse or copy an existing GUI or interaction design, your life is easier.
But how do you know when you have a standard to follow?
An obvious place to find standards is in the precedents set by your own Development team. If your standards are not documented, consider […]

Leah Buley talked about generative design at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, today. Buley feels design methods are lacking in the set of professional tools we use for software development: “We don’t have so many good, reliable, repeatable design techniques.” I agree with her.
Buley tells how, in her first design session at Adaptive Path, she was handed a pen and […]

I’m a big believer in following the standards for GUI and interaction design. But when do you copy or reuse an existing design, and when do you design something new? Here’s my guideline for when to design and when to reuse or copy the GUI and interaction:

Reuse
When…
Design

…there is an external standard.
For example: the Vista UX Guide recommends […]

I have two stories about command buttons.
Quite a few years ago, a team member walked me through a new dialog box. He entered some data, and then unintentionally clicked the Cancel button. He made this error twice in a row, thus losing his changes twice in a row. I pointed out that the OK and Cancel buttons […]

For several years, I did usability testing on CAD-style software that was full of legacy code, some of which preceded Windows 98.
Some of that legacy code dealt with CAD objects that displayed on screen. To work with these objects, users had a choice of menu commands and toolbar buttons, supplemented by dialog boxes. For example, to move an […]

When businesses buy software, rather than choose the software with the lowest purchase price, they ought to consider the total cost of ownership—including the added productivity and enjoyment that usability and user-experience provide.
Every software company will say “our product is usable,” so how can you prove to prospective customer that you’ve really got usability?
Your product has […]