Usability Tools and References
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Human-Centered Design Toolkit - Case Studies - IDEO
For years, businesses have used human-centered design to develop innovative solutions. Why not apply the same approach to overcome challenges in the nonprofit world? This project, funded by International Development Enterprise (IDE) as part of a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, sought to provide NGOs and social enterprises with the tools to do just that. IDEO, in collaboration with nonprofit groups ICRW and Heifer International, developed the HCD Toolkit to help international staff and volunteers understand a community’s needs in new ways, find innovative solutions to meet those needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind. The HCD Toolkit was designed specifically for NGOs and social enterprises that work with impoverished communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert | How
As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell the products or services on offer . For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing. Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors. For example, a study 3 on children showed that after being shown a Santa Claus cap, they were more likely to share candy with others.
Durability of Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbo
Jakob Nielsen 's Alertbox, January 17, 2005 Summary: About 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid, though several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today. The usability field is getting on in age, and we now have the cumulative wisdom of more than twenty years of user research at our disposal.
The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me , an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off. Designing a great user interface can be a challenge, even for the most seasoned designer. Countless factors need to be taken into consideration and the difference between a good UI and a great one often boils down to paying close attention to the smallest details.
9 Essential Resources for User Interface Designers
Last week we presented 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – we discussed various rules and guidelines from marketing, such as subliminal suggestion, prevention of choice paralysis, AIDA-principle, attention guide and the Gutenberg rule. The main idea was to help designers and developers create a design that would help the site to grow and become a success the financial point of view. As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing. This article presents further principles and rules that will help your site convert .
7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert | How-To | Smashing
Mobile Application Usability
When our company chose to adopt an Agile development process for new products, our User Experience Team took the opportunity to adjust, and consequently improve, our user-centered design (UCD) practices. Our interface design work required data from contextual investigations to guide rapid iterations of prototypes, validated by formative usability testing. This meant that we needed to find a way to conduct usability tests, interviews, and contextual inquiry—both in the lab and the field—within an Agile framework.
Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-Centered Design
usability
The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me , an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off. Over the last few weeks, we’ve gathered together some great resources and information on constructing amazing user interfaces . Here, we’ll take a closer look at 10 beautiful interfaces — five for the web and five for mobile — that you can use as reference points in your own design.
10 Excellent User Interface Designs to Learn From
mobiReady - dotMobi compliance & mobileOK checker
The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device. Need to improve? Visit to learn about all things mobile
Balsamiq
Using @balsamiq today to create mockups for our #CRO clients. Web designers, check it out. So good. http://t.co/aaiNbMWj @balsamiq http://t.co/denj2jXS is an amazing tool.
Check to see if your IP addresses are listed with nearly 70 DNS based anti-spam databases! Will your mail server be blocked by DNSbl filters? Probably the most common way of detecting spam is rejecting mail that comes from mail servers known (or believed) to send spam. This is done by taking the IP address of the remote mail server, converting it to a domain name using the ip4r format (a.b.c.d becomes d.c.b.a.lookupzone.com), and doing a lookup to check if that IP address is listed in one of the databases. Just because the IP is listed with a particular blacklist does not mean that you are sending spam, just that particular blacklist suggests not to accept mail directly from that IP address. Most residential Cable/DSL IP addresses that are dynamically assigned will indicate that they are blacklisted, meaning you should be sending from your ISP's mail server, not a mail server running on your own internet connection.
Blacklist Check
113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group)
Summary: These design guidelines are excerpted from our book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed which contains more details, including copiously annotated screenshots of 50 homepages. While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high. Your homepage is often your first — and possibly your last — chance to attract and retain each customer, rather like the front page of a newspaper.B2B Usability (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings. Many business-to-business (B2B) sites are stuck in the 1990s in their attitude toward the user experience.Jakob Nielsen 's Alertbox Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word "usability" also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. There are many other important quality attributes.
Usability 101: Definition and Fundamentals - What, Why, How (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Home Page Design Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Jakob Nielsen 's Alertbox, May 12, 2002 Summary: A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment. Homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world.This Season: Zoomerang Gives Back to Worthy Non-Profits — Voted By You! Quickly and easily create free online surveys to get the insights you need. With Zoomerang's online survey software, you can build a survey in minutes with free access to over 100 professionally-designed online survey templates . Then, analyze and share your results by creating creating customized charts , posting them to your blog or website or just exporting your data to Excel, PowerPoint or a PDF. Get Started with Free Survey Training, Demos and Tutorials