Better usability equals lower costs

Pragmatic Marketing has a really good article on how McAfee reduced its support costs by improving usability. The article also contains a list of 23 tips to improve a UI. I’ve summarized the list here, but it doesn’t do the full article justice.

Start the UI design before you build the product.
Understand your software from a [...]

Bill Gates on Microsoft Usability

I have no idea if this is real, but it’s pretty funny either way.
“Let me give you my experience from yesterday.
I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.
The first 5 times I used the site it timed [...]

The 10 Commandments of Web Design

Yeah, I know these types of lists are a dime a dozen, but I still find them interesting to read. Here is Business Week’s Top 10 Commandments of Web Design…

Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
Thou shalt not hide content.
Thou shalt not clutter.
Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an [...]

Nielsen’s latest Alertbox

Mr. Nielsen does a great job at keeping us honest in his latest Alertbox article for June 23, 2008.
Here’s a sample.
“We often observe users who hesitate before clicking or initially misinterpret information, but then correct themselves before they get into trouble. In such cases, it’s tempting for the design team to simply utter a collective [...]

Manipulating time and space

New Media Buzz has done a very good retrospective on one of Jared Spool’s recent speeches. The article focuses on “…how important manipulating time and space is for the user experience. And if you look at TV and Film, a lot of the concepts…have been practically applied for more than a century: and we all [...]

The Usability Of The Latest BlackBerry Phones

The latest BlackBerry phones are fitted with quite a few of the best features. The sets come with large TFT screens with control buttons and keypad placed adjacent to each other. However, the designs of the handsets differ from one another. Most of the sets are fitted with a QWERTY keypad. This enables the user [...]

Usability critical for good mobile security

he consequences of a data breach can be far-reaching and complex, but in almost every case the cause is simple. An employee, the ‘average user’, has either taken a shortcut around the security procedures or lost a device with critical data in a public place, or both.
Randy Sutton of Ottawa’s Elytra Enterprises asks, “How many [...]

Usability or user experience - what’s the difference ?

“So what does User Experience include?…It includes all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective.”

What’s more important? Usability or features?

I found this Information Week article interesting.
“Only 1% of survey respondents said software functionality is a factor for realizing the value of a software deployment.”
I know that I personally prefer usability. If I can’t use the feature, why have it. Most users also say they prefer usability. But in my experience, if you give the [...]

Electronic version of the hanging chad

Voting with (Little) Confidence
I’m not a big fan of electronic voting machines in principle; however, if we’re going to use them, they better be usable. We don’t want an electronic version of the hanging chad.
“Ben Bederson, an associate professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, was part of a team that [...]