brightly colored food » Usability/User Research

NYT Magazine Article on Teen Blogging

chad — Sat, 10 Jan 2004 03:21:57 +0000

After interviewing a number of first year undergrads about their use of IM and blogs last semester, this article definitely echoed some of the things I heard…

UsabilityNet

chad — Fri, 30 May 2003 04:58:57 +0000

Just stumbled across UsabilityNet. Not a bad little overview of usability, with a nice table of methods (though their typography could use some work). Similar to Usability.gov, but from the EU.

From Research to Personas

chad — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 21:17:21 +0000

Kim Goodwin from Cooper has a nice short article that gives some insight on analyzing data gathered from ethnographic inquiry in order to produce more valuable personas.

Web Navigation

chad — Tue, 22 Oct 2002 17:06:15 +0000

Those who really want to delve into issues of web navigation might want to check out this Masters thesis: Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation: Usability Metrics and User Behavior. It’s by David Danielson, and his thesis was advised by Terry Winograd and Clifford Nass.

You might also want to check out his list of Important Works for Web Navigation.

From Surfmind

Becoming a Usability Professional

chad — Mon, 22 Jul 2002 21:00:25 +0000

In Jakob’s latest column, he describes what he thinks makes a good usability specialist. I agree with his points about experience and ability at detecting patterns, but I don’t buy his claim that the ability to arrive at a “conceptual insight that can drive the design” is one of the most important skills to have – it seems that the usability specialist is acting as a designer at that point, rather than an evaluator.

It’s a subtle point, but clearly differentiating your observations and patterns surmised from any of your design recommendations is one of the most valuable ways to gain credibility with team members. It’s fine to serve in the roles of a usability specialist and an interaction designer/information architect, but it’s worth making a definite distinction between the two roles that are being played (even if many of the skills are the same).

Experience counts for so much. If you have the means, work with older, more experienced (but not dogmatic) usability professionals. The mix of doing a lot of testing alongside someone who’s a seasoned vet is worth…so…much.

He also plugs NNG’s 230 Tips and Tricks for Better Usability Testing. It’s good, not life-changing, but definitely worth buying if it’s on the company, and much more concise than most of worthwhile usability books on the shelves. If you’re allergic to Jakob (I’m not, but some I know are a bit sensitive to his sensibilities), note that it’s written by Rolf Molich, who has done some great work of his own.

Gibson Affordances and Norman Affordances

chad — Wed, 26 Jun 2002 17:34:23 +0000

Found another good article called Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept [pdf] that describes differences between J.J. Gibson’s original concept of affordances and how it was later extended by Don Norman. It gets a bit nitpicky about how each has used the term affordance, and goes so far as to do a literature review on usage of the term affordance in various CHI Proceedings, but it’s worth reading if you use the term, and it’s also a great jumping point to other literature on affordances.

If you aren’t going to read the whole article, here’s what the authors define as the main differences:

Gibson’s Affordances

Offerings or action possibilities in the environment in relation to the action capabilities of an actor

Independent of the actor’s experience, knowledge, culture, or ability to perceive

Existence is binary – an affordance exists or it does not exist

Norman’s Affordances

Perceived properties that may or may not actually exist

Suggestions or clues as to how to use the properties

Can be dependent on the experience, knowledge, or culture of the actor

Can make an action difficult or easy

From McGrenere and Ho, 2000

Affordances and Visual Perception

chad — Sun, 23 Jun 2002 06:55:57 +0000

Killing time waiting for class to start, I’m reading a book on visual perception. It’s covering J.J. Gibson’s theories about perception, which revolve around what he called “affordances” – yep, the same ones Don Norman writes about. Don Norman has two good articles that clarify and extend the use of the term for the design realm, and they’re both worth a read. Another article on affordances in software design discusses in more detail why interface elements are “perceived affordances” rather than “real affordances”, an important distinction. Sorta makes you wonder about the perceptual advantages for tangible computing interfaces – does anyone know of research in this area? Also, Gibon’s work on affordances came out in the late 70′s. Does anyone with more of a background in cognitive or neuroscience know if/how his theories have been updated?

Here is a selection of quotes from Gibson and others about affordances. Gibson’s take on affordances as being crucial to visual perception, and the emphasis on the relationship between the viewer and the object that’s perceived as having an affordance, especially when considered with the surrounding context, set him apart from most others who’ve studied visual perception, almost to the philosophical level – read the quote from Abram toward at the bottom. Here’s some related info on information pickup theory, the general theory of perception that affordances are based upon. And if you really want to keep dorking out, here’s a google search on gibson and affordances.

Flirting as Interaction

chad — Wed, 22 May 2002 02:53:14 +0000

Elan recently linked to the Guide to Flirting, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford. He linked to it because, well, he’s a flirt (and he’d be the first to admit as much). But it got me thinking a bit, and it’s worth a link for a couple of other reasons…

It’s a concise and generally accurate overview of the behavioral interactions that occur when people flirt. Everyone engages in flirtation, so it’s both a universal and highly personal topic. My undergrad thesis focused on sexual selection as an evolutionary force, so I once spent a lot of time reading up on stuff like this. Yep, who knew biology could be so interesting?

Many of the readers of this site are designers of some sort – call it infousabilinter-experitechtual design or whatever’s hip this week. As people all engaged in similar work, we become highly accustomed to thinking in a very particular way about people and their behavior when we design: we call them “users”, we watch them in carefully controlled, semi-scientific settings, we create aggregated yet highly specific representations called “personas”, and so on. Sometimes I need to remind myself that a designer’s mental model for understanding human behavior is just that – a model – and as such it’s worth challenging. Reading about flirting behavior is a fun way of shaking up our generally pragmatic view of interaction and the act of designing for interaction. Go read about The Jack Principles for another whack on the interactive head.

Finally (and most importantly), it’s pretty damn funny reading some cheeky English social scientists talk about the scientifically correct way to hit on someone at a party.

So, anyway, go read and apply your newfound knowledge. At the very least, knowing some of this stuff makes an otherwise boring party much more fun to observe….

Text Messaging on Mobiles

chad — Fri, 17 May 2002 18:37:07 +0000

BBC article on a redesign of cellphone keypads – it does an elegant job of interspersing two separate sets of keys amongst each other. The article mentions that the designer was the head of human factors at Apple for five years. I wonder if this will actually end up on any mobiles….

Boxes and Arrows

chad — Tue, 12 Mar 2002 15:55:55 +0000

Well, after months of work, it’s up.

Boxes and Arrows

Christina put it nicely: “sometimes you can find content; sometimes you have to go make content.”

If I might toot my horn for a sec, check out my interview with Jakob Nielsen. It was great interviewing him – like most people, he’s a lot more engaging one-on-one than onstage at a conference.

We did the interview when he was doing a seminar at Intuit a couple of months back. I felt like we covered a lot of topics that he hasn’t really had a chance to address elsewhere. The interviewing gig was fun, so I may be doing more of it in the future.

Hope you like the site. I’ll be carrying out ongoing usability testing and gathering feedback, so feel free to drop me your comments.