iA » Designing for iPad: Reality Check

Usability Testing Tool Review: Usabilla We’re seeing a boom period in the development of new tools for usability testing, which is a great trend that foretells better web experiences in the coming years. Today I’m going to look at Usabilla, which my friend Keri Morgret and I used on her site Strike Models, which sells products for building remote controlled battleships. Service description: Usabilla shows screenshots of your choosing to testers and asks them questions which they answer by clicking and/or annotating over the image. You choose what questions to ask from a preset list and/or provide your own. You can provide the screenshots or just input the URL and Usabilla will take the screenshots for you. Usabilla hosts the test (it appears in an overlay). What the service isn’t: Usabilla does not recruit users for you from a panel that they manage. Here’s what the marked up screenshot looked like, with points (circles) and notes (squares). Value of insights obtained: Pretty high in many cases, perhaps 8.5/10. Some examples: 1. 2.

My five commandments for wireframing « Boagworld Design: The estimated time to read this article is 5 minutes I am a fundamentalist when it comes to wireframing. However, I am not writing this to convince you of the value of wireframing. Thou shall not neglect to wireframeThou shall not wireframe aloneThou shall not be afraidThou shall start with pen and paperThou shall test thy wireframes Let our sermon for the day begin with “Thou shall not neglect to wireframe”. Thou shall not neglect to wireframe From my perspective things start to go wrong when you decide to skip wireframing. This is such a small change it doesn’t need wireframing The client won’t pay for wireframes There isn’t time to wireframe The problem is that these objections simply are not true. Thou shall not wireframe alone Another big danger I have observed in wireframing is what one of our developers calls the ‘chinese whispers effect‘. I believe the best way to overcome this problem is to wireframe as a group. Thou shall not be afraid Thou shall start with pen and paper

The Value of Good Design Drawar has published a couple of interesting posts about the importance of design and aesthetics for online businesses last week. The main premise is this: businesses succeed and fail on the web regardless of how well designed their sites are. An ugly website will succeed if their product or service is good, so why bother making something beautiful? Now, Paul Scrivens' position on this is that you should care, and that pushing out something that’s just good enough isn’t what web designers should strive for. I agree. It’s not difficult to find examples of businesses with beautiful websites but no traffic. Of course on the other end we have pig ugly websites that are wildly successful. This will vary depending on your product or service, but in many cases it can and will make a difference. The easiest example is of course Apple. When your product is commoditized, you have to change the rules of the game. I don’t think this design advantage somehow only applies to hardware.

Designing for Social Interaction It took both the telephone and the mobile phone 15 years to amass 100 million users, but Facebook did it in 9 months. We see more and more people becoming connected on online social networks, and it seems our networks are growing exponentially. But the reality is, social networks rarely add to our number of connections. We’ve already met almost all the people we’re connected to on social networks. We’re already connected to these people offline. The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, and many users have many more.2 Yet despite having hundreds of friends, most people on Facebook only interact regularly with 4 to 7 people,3 and for 90% of Facebook users, 20% of their friends account for 70% of all interactions.4 We also see this with phone usage. We also have varied interactions with the people we’re not as close to. We have many diverse relationships with the people in our lives, yet the web doesn’t support this very well. There are three kinds of relationship ties: Conclusion

Andrew Parker - The Gong Show: Metric-Driven Design 10 Marketing Resources Every App Should Provide | Web.AppStorm This is for all you web app developers out there. There are ten resources every app should make easily available to members of the press, including bloggers, via their website. These are resources for people interested in sharing information, reviews or thoughts about your web app — with a few being tremendously helpful for your users. If you offer a web app or service, you need to check this list to see what kind of marketing you’re missing. Why? These are the top ten application and service resources, for both web and desktop, I find commonly missing. I would like to point out that this is coming from someone who evaluates 15-20 or more applications and services each week. 1. It might seem obvious, but a [relatively] high resolution logo is often hard to find when I’m reviewing an app or service. Logo The typical blogger almost certainly won’t contact you for a quality logo and will use something crappy, reflecting poorly on everyone. 2. Icon 3. Descriptions 4. Video Demonstration 5. 6. 7.

Realism in UI Design The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability. Shadows behind windows help us see which window is active. The physicality of the iPhone’s user interface makes the device more natural to use. In other areas, the improvements are questionable at best. Details and realism can distract from these concepts. The image on the left is a face of a specific person. At the same time, it’s obvious that some details are required. The circle on the left clearly shows a face. Let’s look at a symbol we actually see in user interfaces, the home button. The thing on the left is a house. The thing on the left is a home button. Let me explain this concept using an entirely unscientific graph: The button on the left is too realistic.

Faceted Finding with Super-Powered Breadcrumbs Most of the today’s finding interfaces do not support integrated finding effectively, often creating disparate search and browse user interfaces that confound people with a jumble of controls competing for their attention. In this article, I propose the Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb (IFB) design that integrates the power of faceted refinement with the intuitive query expansion afforded by browse. Although other breadcrumb-based finding interfaces currently exist, they fall short of expectations by ignoring design best practices. In contrast, breadcrumb is the superhero of the IFB design, dealing a decisive blow to many usability issues that plague today’s finding interfaces. The Challenge of Integrated Finding In his recent UIE webinar, Peter Morville lauded the advantages of integrated finding: “Browse and Search work best in tandem… the best finding interfaces achieve a balance, letting users move fluidly between browsing and searching.”1 Figure 1. Figure 2. 1. Figure 3. Figure 4. 2.

Ambient User Experience How do you perceive Walmart’s ambience? Next time you go into a department store, look for a couple of things: signposts (detailing where items are located throughout the store), cashiers (ready to assist you should you have any questions), and muzak (that oh-so-good, yet oh-so-bad “elevator music”). Do you think you would find them? I imagine so. The point of this exercise isn’t the visibility/audibility of these things, but their utility in a different sense. Our societal notion of a good retail store is defined in large part by what has worked (and what hasn’t) over the course of iterative experience design. These are the sorts of elements which make up ambient user experience, the experiences that subtly align with user expectations. How we experience Even “novel” ways of interacting with the world are themselves tempered by previous experiences. If a pair of scissors works, it works. Magdalena C.’s review on Yelp.com General ambient experience on the Web Search: let me help myself