User Experience Design

"In October 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users. This was a follow-up survey to a previous survey. We received 665 valid responses to the screen reader user survey. More in-depth analysis and documentation on the free-form responses will be available in the future.

A few disclaimers and notices:

* Totals may not equal 100% due to rounding.
* Total responses (n) for each question may not equal 665 due to respondents not answering that particular question.
* The sample was not controlled and may not represent all screen reader users.
* Care should be taken in interpreting these results. Responses are based upon user experiences with web content that is generally inaccessible. We cannot help but wonder if responses may have been different if screen reader interactions with web content were typically very positive.
* Data was analyzed using JMP Statistical Discovery Software version 8
* We hope to conduct a survey of this nature again in the future. If you have recommendations or questions you would like asked, please let us know. Additional analysis of this data and details on the responses to open-ended questions will be available in the future."

To make menus and links simpler you have to think like a customer. You also have to reduce the number of links and focus on the task at hand.

Jesse James Garret on the state of User Experience 2009-10-10

10Gui proposes a touch-based multi-click interface.

"Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted.

That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation.

10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way."

"From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues. "

Bill Scott and I have reviewed hundreds of RIAs while compiling examples for our book Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, and subsequent talks and articles. We recently realized that we had amassed quite a list of applications. Thinking other designers and developers might be interested in these resources, we applied two simple criteria to identify the top fifty:

Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it's also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. When it comes to site search, user experience designers are often sidelined like the single person at an old flame's wedding: Everything seems to be moving along without you, and if you slipped out halfway through, chances are no one would notice. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.

Understanding of your site visitors' intent is one of the most delightful parts of web data analysis. In this article, we'll learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data-data that's easy to get, to understand, and to act on.

But let's take a step back. Why should you care about this in the first place? Good question.

In the good old days, people dutifully used site navigation at the left, right, or top of a website. But, two websites have fundamentally altered how we navigate the web: Amazon, because the site is so big, sells so many things, and is so complicated that many of us go directly to the site search box on arrival. And Google, which has trained us to show up, type what we want, and hit the search button.

Avinash Kaushik demonstrated that site search analytics (SSA) is a powerful tool you can use to assess customer intent quantitatively. In SSA, as with all flavors of web analytics (WA), you can work from the top-down; by starting with clear, measurable metrics based on your organization's goals, you can benchmark and continually optimize the performance of your content and designs. While goal-driven analysis is wonderfully useful, we'll explore a different, "bottom-up" approach that relies on pattern analysis and failure analysis to help you understand your users' intent in qualitative ways that complement the top-down approach.

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.

Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

Tables get a bad rap-especially in the Web world where, once upon a time, Web developers misused them for HTML layout. But tables are still very useful for the purpose for which they were originally intended-a way to show relationships among discrete data points.

Some think the best way to demonstrate the value of usability in a corporate setting is to emphasize the resulting cost savings. While that may be sage advice in some organizations and industries, following it in the information technology and government arenas would cost you respect and a meeting. For some years, I was guilty of following this tack-before I discovered what really matters to executives, learned how finances and budgets work, and realized the true value of user experience lies not in cost savings at all, but in intangibles.