Five Sketches™

Involving users throughout the software-development cycle is touted as a way to ensure project success. Does usability testing count as user contact? You bet! But since most companies test their products later in the process, when it’s difficult to react meaningfully to the user feedback, here are two ways to get your testing done sooner.
Prioritise. […]

When you’re researching users, every once in a while you come across one that’s an anomaly. You must decide whether to exclude their data points in the set or whether to adjust your model of the users.
Let me tell you about one such user. I’ll call him Bob (not his real name). I met Bob during […]

When a product’s users are scarce and widely dispersed, and your travel budget is limited, usability testing can be a challenge.
Remote testing from North America was part of the answer, for me. I’ve never used UserVue because the users I needed to reach were in Africa, Australia, South America, and Asia—continents that UserVue doesn’t reach. […]

I’ve spent some time working with legacy products—software for which the core code was written before “usability” was a term developers had heard of, back when developers were still called programmers.
I remember my first conversation—held last century—with a developer about his users and the usability of his legacy product. I used Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing […]

When I conduct usability studies, I use a laptop and Morae to create a portable and low-cost usability lab. I typically visit the participant on site, so I can look around. I provide a scenario that participants can follow as they try using a new software feature. Morae records their voices, facial expressions, on-screen actions, clicks, […]

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 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 […]

Tongue in cheek: “I’m officially a Certified Usability Analyst, now, because I have a stamp.”

To learn more about Certified Usability Analysts, visit HFI Connect: The user experience community.