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The Insighter December 2005 |
Neo Insight's e-newsletter
on Usability topics and techniques.
We invite you to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter.
We were proud to help organize
and sponsor some of the events in The Usability Professionals' Association organized the event and sponsored 36 hours of rotating local activities around the globe. Many people contributed stories of everyday usability, providing practical illustrations of the application of usability. In We demonstrated some of our
usability testing methods, providing examples from our Morae digital test
lab software. We also created an audio/visual show entitled “A
Day in the Life of Usability” (7.6MB download)
which depicts how technology and usability pervade our lives. Designing for usability can save time and money, in ways that can be measured. For example, a usability evaluation of Bell Canada’s telephone bills resulted in a new design that reduced pages by 40% and the search time for finding information on the bill by 30%. A usability redesign of one of McAfee’s anti-virus software products was able to cut their support calls by 90% (download pdf article 350KB). The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offered some sample personas to help developers see users as “real people” and gain a better understanding of the ways in which these different users may use the web. Other events of interest from World Usability Day include: ·
At the ·
· A 24 hour web cast on Accessibility was part of the WUD event, and presentations are still available. Accessibility topics included testing, tools and methods, policy, research, organizational culture, and specific cases such as voice, telephony, podcasting, Web Services, and JavaScript.] · St. Louis provided an example showing that "usability is too big of an issue to ignore" based on "a shipping firm that lost customers when its Web site proved too complicated, didn’t provide basic information on its home page, and offered no way for clients to track shipments." · Two out of three people “have problems trying to figure out how to use new technology”, reported USA TODAY NOW. Technological advances –
such as Web Services, XML, mobile devices, and - How to separate and understand enduring human needs versus changing human expectations and behaviour, and how to use this to guide your design and development - How fundamental user-centred principles such as providing affordance at the point of need can help generate innovation and maintain a focus on your clients’ priorities - How quick and simple techniques, such as “Stress tests” and “Cognitive walkthroughs,” can provide rapid and inexpensive feedback on user issues. - How to apply usage-centred design techniques to manage technological advances that impact user behaviour Neo Insight is a founding member of the Ottawa Usability Consortium, a new professional organization aimed at “increasing and supporting awareness and practice of usability.” We are proud to support this organization during its formative phase. The consortium is actively signing up organizations and individuals at OttawaUsability.org. Learning more about usability
helps you to better understand your customers, the business value associated
with having a usable product or service, and the importance of having
the right information architecture. The Consortium has been formed to
provide usability-related resources in the Quote of the month "Apple understood that the iPod was about the entire experience ... the ease of getting the user back and forth." Donald A. Norman We invite everyone to subscribe to the Insighter, our monthly e-newsletter. If you wish to unsubscribe, just send us an unsubscribe email. |
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