Group items tagged

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done 'by rule' rather than 'by thought'. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision

In this article, we'll take a detailed look at the design, layout and usability of Craigslist and point out some areas where we feel change and improvement are possible. This is only one opinion of what could be done to improve the site. Our goal is to demonstrate the process of evaluating a website in certain areas and determining specific improvements that can be made. Hopefully this will help other designers who are attempting to evaluate websites of their own or of clients.

. Our User Experience Research team has found that people evaluate the search results page so quickly that they make most of their decisions unconsciously. To help us get some insight into this split-second decision-making process, we use eye-tracking equipment in our usability labs. This lets us see how our study participants scan the search results page, and is the next best thing to actually being able to read their minds.

The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to "easy to use," but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer. A more precise definition can be used to understand user requirements, formulate usability goals and decide on the best techniques for usability evaluations. An understanding of the five characteristics of usability - effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn - helps guide the user-centered design tasks to the goal of usable products.

In my experience, a common misperception of the evaluation of content quality is that its scope is limited to the correction of typos and grammatical errors. Correcting spelling and grammar only scratches the surface. To truly consider content quality, we need to examine its quality along several dimensions. Consequently, the content quality checklists that follow cover everything from usefulness to voice to accuracy.

University of Minnesota Duluth: Information Technology Systems & Services - Usability Body of Knowledge

ve reviews I've outline

when people consider products for future use, "desirability" is a primary consideration. When people consider a product for immediate use, "feasibility" considerations become a priority. "For example, consumers who contemplate purchasing a new word processor for future use give great weight to quality-related features only, whereas those who consider purchasing it immediately attach importance to the feasibility of learning how to use it as well,