Five Sketches™

My television lets me step through the channels. To do this, I use the remote control’s CH button. Similarly, my television lets me page through the list of programs, five channels at a time. To do this, I use the remote control’s PG button. In fact, it’s one button for the stepping and paging functions.

The programs in […]

Three weeks ago, a client called me. They had just completed release 1.0 of a new Web application that will replace their current flagship product. The client was asking about summative usability testing to evaluate how well the product performs in the hands of users, because they want their customers to succeed.
Since the product is an […]

I was recently invited to join a design-specification review for a feature I’ll call Feature X.
As I listened to the presentation, I thought: “There are pieces missing from this spec.” When the time came for questions, I asked about the project’s scope. ”Your spec is titled Feature X, but I see very little X described in this document. What does X mean […]

If you’re creating user personas, How-To articles often tell you that you only need two or three personas at most. That’s fine for most web-design projects. However, if you are working on an enterprise-wide system that has modules for different types of professionals who each perform distinct and substantial tasks, then you will have a […]

Whether it’s ethnographic research, usability research, or marketing research, I’ve learned that the best insights aren’t always gleaned from scheduled research.
Here’s a photo of impromptu research, conducted by Betsy Weber, TechSmith’s product evangelist. I was her research subject. Betsy recorded me pushing sugar packets around a table as I explained how I’d like Camtasia to behave.

Betsy […]

The WordPress community recently ran a poll. Users were asked to choose one of 11 visual designs. The leading design got only 18% of the vote, which gives rise to such questions as:

Is this a meaningful win? The leader only barely beat the next three designs, and 82% voted for other designs.

I don’t know about the 18% versus 82%. I […]

Here are three techniques for eliciting more feedback on your designs:

show users some alternatives, so more than one design.
show users a low-fidelity rather than high-fidelity rendering.
ask users to sketch their feedback.

To iterate and improve the design, you need honest feedback.  Let’s look at how and why each of these techniques might work.
Showing alternative designs signals that the design process […]

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 […]