Five Sketches™

If your user persona includes an image, which type of image helps the team produce designs that are more usable?

The illustration on the left?  Or the photo on the right?
According to Frank Long’s research paper, Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design, photos are better than illustrations. Teams whose user personas include a photograph […]

Three-quarters of the way through a Five Sketches™ session, to help iterate and reduce the number of possible design solutions, the team turns to analysis. This includes a usability analysis.
 
After Œ informing and defining the problem  without judgement  and  generating and sketching lots of ideas  without judgment , it’s often a relief for the team to […]

On the IxDA’s discussion list for interaction designers, Liam Greig posted his “human friendly” version of a heuristics checklist based on Nielson’s originals and the ISO’s ergonomics of human-system interactions.
Here are  just the headings and the human-friendly questions, which are useful at a project’s design stage.

A design should be…

transparent. Ask: Where am I? What are my options?
responsive. Ask: What […]

It’s been a year since that flash of insight hit me. Looking back, getting to what I now call the Five Sketches™ ideation-design method was an interesting journey.
The setting. I was working on a two-person usability team faced with six major software- and web products to support. We were empowered to do usability, but not design. At the time, the team was in the […]

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 […]

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 […]