30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of

Advertisement You don’t have to agree upon everything. As a professional web developer you are the advocate of your visitors’ interests and needs; you have to protect your understanding of good user experience and make sure the visitors will find their way through (possibly) complex site architecture. And this means that you need to be able to protect your position and communicate your ideas effectively — in discussions with your clients and colleagues. In fact, it’s your job to compromise wrong ideas and misleading concepts instead of following them blindly. In this context nothing can support you more than the profound knowledge of fundamental issues related to your work. In this article we present 30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood. Usability: Rules and Principles You can learn more details about Shneiderman’s Rules For Design in Wikipedia: Shneiderman’s rules for design. Psychology Behind Usability It's done.

Dumbster - Fake SMTP Server The Dumbster is a very simple fake SMTP server designed for unit and system testing applications that send email messages. It responds to all standard SMTP commands but does not deliver messages to the user. The messages are stored within the Dumbster for later extraction and verification. The Dumbster slots itself very easily into your testing strategy. The Dumbster is useful in the following scenarios: System testing an application. The Dumbster is written in Java and is open source. The following is a simple example of how to unit test the email components of your application The Dumbster may be downloaded from the Dumbster SourceForge project page: The JavaDoc is here. Any questions, bug fixes, suggestions should be submitted through the Dumbster forums on the SourceForge project page: Donations are gratefully accepted and will be used to pay for hosting and beer in that order.

First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users (Alertbox) Summary: To design the best UX, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior. Users do not know what they want. In past years, the greatest usability barrier was the preponderance of cool design. Most projects were ruled by usability opponents who preferred complexity over simplicity. One of the main advantages of the "dot-bomb" downturn is that cool design has suffered a severe setback. Public websites, which formerly focused on building awareness, now aim at making it easy for customers to do business.Intranets are similarly refocused on improving employee productivity. Happily, glamour-based design has lost and usability advocates have won the first and hardest victory: Companies are now paying attention to usability needs. Unfortunately, winning a battle with usability opponents doesn't win the war with complexity. Watch Users Work When and How to Listen So, do users know what they want?