Five Sketches™

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 […]

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 […]

Here are two usability stories that are currently underway.
The first project
This weekend I got a Skype call from a usability consultant at a very large firm that is, in turn, working on a project for a very large insurance company. The usability consultant was just assigned, but the team is nearly finished building an online […]

I was talking to a B2B product manager who told me “The industry we target sees little difference between our product and our competitors.” Their plan is to differentiate their product from its competitors. My question: to make your software different from that of the competition, should you mainly add new functionality or mainly improve the usability?
Bob Holt addresses this […]