Category Archives: Usability

[UPA] March 12, 2009 6-8pm Open Book – Usability Testing with Mahtab Rezai

Mahtab Rezai, VP at EatonGolden will be talking about keeping usability relevant at the March 12 UPA-MN meeting (6-8pm at the OpenBook). $10 members, $30 non-members (Cash/Check only at the door).

MinneUX Meetup Jan. 6: Demo of Zanby.com “discount” usability

Hola MinneUX’ers–
Next month we have a slight twist to our meetups — Lynn Smith, local IA/IxD pro, will be presenting a demo of a very creative, non-facilitated “discount” usability test/heuristic evaluation, followed by open discussion about the methodology used, its rigor and validity — basically, “Is this a good way to gather feedback?” Lynn and [...]

Dictionaries and Usability

When you think of user interfaces you generally think of screens, buttons, knobs and maybe some documentation on how to use these objects. But lets get away from that for a moment, if you don’t mind.
One of the oldest and most relevant user interfaces is the book. Books generally include page numbers, blocks of text [...]

.gov Web design and Usability Guidelines

The US Dept. of Health and Human Services have a ‘Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines’ publication available on their web site. It’s a 161mb PDF file. That is ironic, isn’t it?
I’m skimming through this as a prerequisite for a project. Some of it is good common sense. But there’s also some scary specifics in [...]

Happy 2008. Let’s hope for better user experiences for ‘08!

While checking in to MNteractive for the last time before 2008 I noticed an interesting bit of trivia. The last 10 comments added to MnTeractive were all related to old posts pertaining how to fix some very annoying bit of technology:

fischer price fp3 player = headaches for dad
how to cancel a myspace account
how to delete [...]

Costco.com: Play Guess Your Membership Renewal Rate

Having a couple extra minutes today, I thought I’d renew my Costco membership online.
Here’s the process I expected:

Click Membership in the top nav of Costco.com
Click on a ‘Renew Now’ button
Enter my membership number and a credit card number
Get back to work

Instead, they made it much more “engaging”:

Click Membership in the top nav of Costco.com
Create an [...]

Curses

“Nearly every other computer system refuses to recognize curse words, and, in effect, condescend to their users. Apple, by recognizing the reality of English discourse, exhibits respect for their customers.” – Peter Merholz

An Engadget post discussing the future of Adobe Flash

I found this to be a very interesting read:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/
I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.
I [...]

Where did all our knobs go?

This weekend our 5-year-old decided to eat a screw. That meant I got to catch up on my Golf Digest and Popular Mechanics reading while spending a Saturday in the waiting room of urgent care.
As such, I ran across this article in Popular Mechanics: Bring Back Our Knobs: Analog vs. Digital. (* warning…audio plays on [...]

Click the what now?

Don’t ask me why, but our internal network update announcements are still sent via email in the SNP format which is basically a screen-shot of an access form (old habits die hard…).
So, I went to open one today and realized I don’t have the SNP viewer. So, I go to MS.com to download it and [...]