UsabilityBlog — Blogging about user experience, usability, and design — Page 2

My Usability Marathon Preso

October 14, 2009

I just posted my Usability Marathon presentation to Slideshare. (I love Slideshare btw…no surprise; Rashmi Sinha started out as a UX person.)
I’m getting good feedback and nice retweets on Twitter; which is a good sign.
Normally, I’d pull some choice quotes to whet your appetite. But I’ve got a pile of storyboarding and wireframing to do [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Time Zone Drop-Down List Fail

September 25, 2009

Click to view full size

In general I try to be strategic, which usually means talking about “big” user experience and staying oriented on the business value of UX.
But every once in a while I just have to point to a particularly bad interaction, then cluck my tongue and wag my finger.
So it is with this [...]

Comments Read the full article →

My UXmatters.com Article On Testing Your Own Designs

September 22, 2009

In my last post I advised that my pending UXmatters.com article would be covering the topic of whether designers can usability test their own designs. The article is now available here. In it I presented feedback from several people about the wisdom of testing one’s own designs, and generated some recommendations for how to do [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Testing Your Own Designs: Discussion

September 10, 2009

I’m putting an article together for UXmatters on the topic of usability testing and validating one’s own designs. My goal is to develop some guidelines for self-testing.
I’d love to get your feedback on some questions I have:

Testing your own designs: all-around bad idea? Or is it possible to do it well?
If so, what should you [...]

Comments Read the full article →

The End of “Just Google It”? Twitter-Based Search Behavior

September 8, 2009

Let me be up-front about this from the beginning: this is a half-formed thought. But its implications are very, very interesting.
So here’s what just happened: I had a desire to take in some emerging thoughts in the user experience field. I wanted some fresh thinking, some exposure to new presentations.
For about 8 years, my first [...]

Comments Read the full article →

“Beyond Here Be Dragons” – Or, Don’t Design For The Edge Cases

September 4, 2009

Click to view full size

Found this on Digg.com today, and promptly added it to my “Questionable_Designs” set on Flickr.
What a great example of after-the-fact design modification.
It makes me wonder what the context was. Did someone set this up for a young child or an older relative? Or did they do it for themselves?
In any case, [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Questionable Designs: A Flickr UI Collection

September 3, 2009

I’ve been collecting and tagging pictures of interesting user interfaces on Flickr for about three years now. Typically I’ve blogged them one at a time.
It suddenly occurs to me that UBlog readers may be interested in seeing the whole set now that it’s pushing 75 pics.
So here’s the link. Enjoy!
Questionable Designs ::? [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Low-Rent Usability Tech Tip: Remote Usability Testing With Observers Watching

August 29, 2009

Today’s post is a simple little usability testing “tech tip.” It’ll help you run a remote usability test with a participant running an app or browser on your test machine while other remote observers are watching the session.
My investigation into this started when I was asked to conduct remote usability test sessions for my client. [...]

Comments Read the full article →

ProductCamp Austin Summer 2009 – User Experience Presos

August 26, 2009

For some reason this slipped my mind for the last two weeks. On August 15th I delivered two talks at ProductCamp Austin 2009. Before I link you to the talks I wanted to give hat tips to the crew who put together this ProductCamp. It was a fantastic, energetic, and crowd-driven “un”conference, and I highly [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Many Questions About HuffPost & Facebook Connect

August 23, 2009

Click to view full sized

Welcome to the brave new world of ubiquitous social networking and the mashing up of traditional media and social networking.
In the past I’ve held forth on how opaque I feel Facebook’s applications are about what information they share, and how uneasy it makes me to respond to cause requests, games, contests [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Teaser 2: UPA 2009 UX Industry Salary Survey

August 18, 2009

I know, I said I’d release the UPA 2009 UX Industry Salary Survey last Friday. Unfortunately, paying work and family time prevented me from finishing the report.
But I’m telling you now that I’ve submitted the “members only” full report and the public report to the UPA office, and they should have it posted within 24-36 [...]

Comments Read the full article →

It’s About The Unknown Problems…What Do You Do About Them?

August 4, 2009

When performing user/design research, us UX researchers go into the field with ideas about the problems you’ve been asked to solve. But it’s nearly always the case that we come out of research sessions having identified a whole host of new and unexpected problems. This is so common, I’ve even added a section to my [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Teaser 1: UPA 2009 UX Industry Salary Survey

August 3, 2009

Normally I suck at promotion. Particularly self-promotion, which is obviously a problem for my user experience consultancy. But since this is the last year I will be leading the Usability Professionals’ Association salary survey project (I go off the board after this year), I thought I’d go out with a bit of a pop. I [...]

Comments Read the full article →

My Printer Is A Time Vampire

July 21, 2009

(Click picture to view full-sized)

I know that as a professional user experience practitioner I should avoid angry rants, as they’re (mostly) unproductive.
But here’s the thing: I am PISSED OFF right now, I feel cheated and abused by this printer’s designers, and I have no real recourse except to call out the manufacturer and tell them [...]

Comments Read the full article →

New UXMatters Article: 8 Things You Should Be Doing In Your UX Practice, But Probably Aren’t

July 20, 2009

So I’m seeing a nice little Twitter spike about my latest UXmatters article “8 Things You Should Be Doing In Your UX Practice, But Probably Aren’t.”
It was a column borne of equal parts desperation and writers’ block. Then I remembered how much mileage Cracked.com gets out of the “X Things” format, and decided to try [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Video Conferencing The Hard Way

July 19, 2009

(Here’s another guest post from Andreas Bossard of News of The Future. He actually submitted this about two weeks ago, and I’ve just been too busy with project work to post it…my bad. My apologies, and thanks for the pic and post Andreas! -Paul)
The following user interface of a video-conferencing system cries for simplicity. It’s [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Bad Sign-In Experience @ Amazon

June 30, 2009

(Click image to view full-sized)

(Note: It must be “beat up on Amazon day” here in Central Texas, because I just noticed that Russell Wilson over at Dexo Design just posted an article about Amazon’s “can’t sign in from home page” problem.)
After all these years, Amazon still hasn’t fixed that wonky “new customer” / “returning customer” [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Bad IVR: If You Need Something From Me, How About Letting Me Know?

June 23, 2009

Once again I had a sub-optimal experience with an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
I called AT&T to check on the status of my service call – we haven’t had dial tone on our land line since mid-Saturday – and the system asked me to input “my ten digit phone number, starting with the area code.” [...]

Comments Read the full article →

(Hope You Like The) New UsabilityBlog Design

June 16, 2009

Unless you’re using a screenreader (or a feed reader, duh…) you probably noticed the updated visual design I launched today.
Hope you like it. The blue was starting to get to me.
Shouts to Sandeep Gayke for the Wordpress coding fu. Recommended.

Comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

Recent Posts
March 2010

M T W T F S S

« Feb

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31
Blogroll
Meta