A partial chronicle of the journey I took to get here.
Implied contracts Every user choice is an implied contract. Be mindful when offering them. Honor implied contracts.
- Kathy Bateman
Last year we decided to have a garage sale. Since I usually look in the online classifieds for our local paper when I want to shop at garage sales I decided to place an ad there for our sale.
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Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
-- Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
Recently I found myself searching for a new rubber stopper for a piggy bank. I needed a short and wide rubber stopper or cork. The hole in the piggy bank has to be big enough to get the coins out of the bank yet the stopper must be short enough to allow room for many coins to fit in the small bank.
Not knowing where to find an item with this shape I started by searching the websites of some big name hardware stores. My hope was to visually scan pictures of items until I saw what I wanted and then drive to that store to buy it.
Read MoreOne of the wonderful resources shared in Klemmer's HCI course are the articles by Nielsen Norman Group. Specifically, here are three we used to help us evaluate assignments during class. How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation discusses how to use a small set of people to examine an interface for usability issues with a list of criteria (heuristics) as an evaluation tool.
10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design presents some of the most general principles of interaction design. This list can be a good starting point for what to look for when evaluating an interface.
Severity Ratings for Usability Problems provides a way to prioritize the issues found with an interface.
Next up I'll be using these as guidelines as I search the web to find sites with usability issues.
For anyone interested in learning UX I highly recommend taking Scott Klemmer's Human-Computer Interaction course from Stanford Online. It is one of the massive open (free) online courses available through Coursera. During April & May this year I participated in the third run of this class. I learned an incredible amount through the online videos, quizzes, assignments, peer-review and student interactions. If possible, set aside the 10-12 hours a week to complete the full studio track.
In the next posts I'll be putting into practice some of the things I learned and share some helpful resources. Enjoy!
I love organizing stuff. For a while I considered become a professional organizer. There is a special joy in making a space cleaner and neater. (My 7 year old self does not believe I’m really saying this.) Organizing for yourself is easier, I think, than organizing for someone else. You know where you’ll look to find things. You know what makes sense to you. You know you’re always going to take your shoes off first thing in the door so why bother putting the shoe rack any where else?
If you organize for somebody else though things get sticky. It doesn’t matter where you put your shoes in your house if you’re organizing someone else’s front hall. Sure you could put the shoe rack there and it would look great with all those shoes you put on it for a week, maybe two. But if your client doesn’t ever take off shoes until reaching the bedroom it won’t get used. That shoe rack you so carefully placed becomes just another shelf to dump random stuff on.
So what do you do?
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