Students are multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They're enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines.
This guide provides information on Web usability at the University of Ottawa - more specifically, it provides background information and presents the results of our usability tests.
The Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines (Guidelines) were developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in partnership with the U.S. General Services Administration. This new edition of the Guidelines updates the original set of 187 guidelines, and adds 22 new ones. Many of the guidelines were edited, and numerous new references have been added. There are now 209 guidelines.
Over the past 2 weeks, we conducted usability testing of 2 proposed search prototypes and of our proposed navigation menus for the Web site redesign. View the following presentation for a summary of our findings from both studies.
"There are three basic approaches to conducting quick remote interface tests, whether you’re testing live websites, designs, wireframes, or prototypes. The approach you take will depend mostly on how you feel about people—do you want to talk to users face-to-face, or use one of the many new UX tools and let computers gather the information automatically? Read on to find out which route is best for you."
Site maps are a secondary navigation feature — a humble role that they share with breadcrumbs. Indeed, the arguments in favor of site maps are the same as the arguments for breadcrumbs:
The good news is that while users vary widely in the ways they search, their behaviors follow a limited number of identifiable patterns. By examining the factors that cause variability in user behavior and considering personas that illustrate those variations, we can identify common search behavior patterns and the interface affordances that support them.
One of the discount usability movement's basic tenets is that we need a drastic expansion in the amount of usability work done in the world, and to make this happen we need more people to take on usability assignments.
We’re happy to announce that, as promised, our Infomaki usability testing tool has been released Open Source under the GNU General Public License. If you would like to tinker with its inner workings, you can grab a copy at https://sourceforge.net/projects/infomaki/.
This report describes the second round of usability testing done on the Yufind catalog interface. The particular areas of emphasis in this round of testing were to examine how undergraduates:
Slides from talk at Adaptive Path's User Experience Week, 2005. Lots of good library stuff, with pictures of scenes and places and web pages marked up with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one showing what works or what doesn't.
The web is ever-changing; this Core Process applies to all design and redesign projects, from the simplest to the most complex. Use this book as a mutable resource. Adapt it into a methodology that works for you. Call it a plan, call it a roadmap, call it a guide -- we call it Workflow That Works, because that's what it is.
"Based in London, UK, Webcredible offers a range of usability & accessibility services for websites, intranets, mobile devices & applications. We research, design & build interfaces to support user requirements & business goals."
Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.
So, we set out to create our own rapid-testing usability laboratory from scratch, and last Tuesday we launched it, in rough beta form. Nicknamed Infomaki*, it’s showing a lot of potential even in its first 48 hours.
"I invited five Georgia Tech students (various majors) to volunteer (damn, the price of coffee isn’t what it used to be) to conduct a basic keyword search on five next-gen library catalogs. Basically, I told them that I wanted their first impressions, whatever came to mind. I told them to think about it as if I were designing a new catalog, tell me what they liked and disliked."
"The Stanford Online Accessibility Program has been established to provide guidance to the Stanford Community as they use various online means to share information to their respective constituents. The program has the mandate to assist web designers and online content creators in producing material that is accessible to the greatest audience possible. The program achieves this through the promotion of Universal Accessibility and web standards compliance."
“The typical product team has no coherent strategy for cases when there are no search results. Most teams spend the bulk of their design phase working on the search results pages for a successful search.”
Spontaneous, unobtrusive usability testing software for designers and developers. * Capture screen activity * Video the participant’s reactions * Record the participant’s voice * Add chapter markers on the fly * Control recording with the remote * Export to Quicktime
"The new Common Look and Feel Standards for the Internet were developed to reflect modern practices on the Web, changes in technology and issues raised by the Web community over the past six years as well as to improve navigation and format elements. The standards were rewritten to eliminate duplication and conflict with other Treasury Board policy instruments and were reformatted to improve their structure and organization."
Peter Morville is "working on a new book (and talk) about the future of search, and I've created a seed collection of patterns and examples to support my research."
"Server log files are inappropriate for gathering usability data. They are meant to provide server administrators with data about the behavior of the server, not the behavior of the user. The log file is a flat file containing technical information about requests for files on the server. Log file analysis tools merely assemble them in a conjecture-based format aimed at providing insight into user behavior. In the commentary below, I will explain why the nature of the web, the HTTP Protocol, the browser, and human behavior make it impossible to derive meaningful usability data from server logs."
"Opengazer is an open source application that uses an ordinary webcam to estimate the direction of your gaze. This information can then be passed to other applications."
"Use Morae to record exactly what customers do and say, discover patterns in the data, key in on significant moments, and build a compelling case for how to improve the customer experience."
"Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design is an intermediate-level book about interface and interaction design, structured as a pattern language."
Peter Morville's collection of screenshots illustrating examples of search patterns around the web. "A sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns."
"We performed a usability evaluation of four New Zealanduniversity online library catalogues. The evaluation foundsevere usability problems with online catalogues---wefound so many problems we were forced to use a cardsorting technique to understand and c
"The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of the usability studies used by the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries during the redesign of their website."
"Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is comp