What happens in the end-to-end experience? Can the intended audience find what they’re looking for? What is the actual problem being solved? Are you designing the right product for the customer need? Information architecture, accessibility, findability, taxonomy, interaction design, research, usability, case studies, interviews, surveys, and more.
User-centered design professionals pay special emphasis to one type of stakeholder—the users of the system—arguing that user experience needs to be carefully crafted to satisfy user needs. While understanding user needs and goals is certainly necessary, it is often not sufficient for producing a successful design.
Continue readingEnterprise 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 readingWith 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 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 readingIn part one of this article the discussion was one of views, forms, and the manner in which they could be combined into a task structure known as a hub. This installment expands on those themes by exploring two other types of task structures commonly employed in web applications–wizards and guides.
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