Guidelines. We seem to have a love-hate relationship with them. At the same time we construct them, we worry they’ll come back to haunt us. How did guidelines get such a bad reputation?
Continue readingMaking guidelines part of the team
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Remote Contextual Inquiry: A Technique to Improve Enterprise Software
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Enterprise software usability is difficult to evaluate because the standard product shipped on a CD is almost always customized when it is implemented. How then can we learn about the design issues that actual users encounter with customized software?
Continue readingObserving the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
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With all the attention to usability over the last five years or so and the wonderful swelling of information-architecture-related books just since 2001, you would think we would have enough methods and advice to keep our projects in perfect tack. But so many of these resources, excellent though they are, tend to be more about how to pilot the ship than how to find that all-important star and keep it in sight.
Continue readingCard Sorting: A Definitive Guide
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Card sorting is a simple user-centered technique for obtaining insight into the structure of a site. But is it really so simple? This definitive guide to card sorting includes detailed instructions on how to execute and analyze a sort, plus helpful hints to improve your sorts. It is the first in a series of articles about card sorting.
Continue readingInformation Architecture: A Rose by Any Other Name…
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The efforts to define our field and our role are understandable by-products of our economic times and of forces in our contexts of practice. What are the pressures behind this quest for definition? What are the options (and potential advantages) of refusing to pigeonhole ourselves?
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