What makes a good usability evaluator? This study attempts to define the features and qualifications.

Miia Kososen verkkoyhteisöjä koskevan väitöstutkimuksen lektioluento.

The first European conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), which was dedicated to Usability and Design, was held in the beginning of December. Nearly all the presentations are available online and they are worthwhile exploring.

This paper presents a macro level model of design with three internally coherent modes of design. These are immediate des ign dealing with users’ immediate situated challenges, traditional product design creating generally appealing solutions, and remote design, which elaborates on preconditions for design such as knowledge, platforms and standards. The need for the model is justified by a discussion addressing a set of conflicting trends called design tensions within the design of complicated human-technology systems. These include technology, innovation, competence, readiness and generality tensions. Finally, the impact of immediate and remote design on design education and design business is discussed. (via Ville)

Why is it that many of the same companies appear repeatedly on lists of the best places to work, the best providers of customer service, and the most profitable in their industries? We can learn a great deal from organizations whose strong and adaptive ownership cultures give them a powerful competitive edge. Here are our top 10 lessons.

See the picture.

Created by Future Exploration Network’s Chief Futurist Richard Watson, also of NowandNext.com, the 2009 trend map moves on from the subway map theme of the last years to show the multi-tentacled hydra that is the year ahead. Core themes include: Uncertainty, Ageing, Global Connectivity, Anxiety, and Power Shift Eastwards.

Back in 2005 the leading user experience companies from France, Germany, Spain, UK and US met in Barcelona with a single common goal in mind: how to provide effective international user experience services to our clients. Having worked together on international projects for many years, we recognised that we were ideally placed to lead international user experience research. Thus, the UXa was born. (And still they don't know how to give titles to web pages.)

Servicedesign.org is a glossary of terms related to Service Design.

"We have reused Peter Kim’s wonderful predictions gathered from social media influencers, we summarized the predictions, used tag clouds to help you focus, added insights gathered from Read Write Web and of course, added our own inputs. So here it is – the first from the influencers and experts collection."

Overshare has increasingly been used to reference those who divulge excessive personal information, online as well as offline.

More than five million people are expected to use the internet to carry on shopping on Christmas Day, the online retail group IMRG says. IMRG estimates more than £100m will be spent online, compared with the £84m spent last year.

This is a wiki for capturing design patterns about service design.

This wiki aims at collecting cases, methods and reflections about Service design. (It has a weird name, tho.)

Constantly updated list of technology predictions for 2009, a round-up of what some of the leading industry prognosticators are saying about what they think is in store for everyone's favorite pervasive global network next year.

Next year is all about nichetributes, luxyoury and econcierge, to name a few of the key trends.

IDEO's How-to Guide offers principles of design for social impact and a menu of offerings for types of social impact engagements that might make sense for your firm.

Anyone who works with fast moving technology knows that there is always a new shiny tool that gets all the attention. It tends to change every few months and anytime you start to use a new tool, you do secretly wonder if it will be around all that long. By any measure, Twitter has passed these boundaries. It has been around for several years. Every day more and more people discover it and it's usefulness in their personal lives. Yet many of the people who declare themselves "converted" and have opened Twitter accounts aren't getting the best benefit.

Sosiaalinen media tarjoaa yrityksille merkittäviä liiketoimintamahdollisuuksia, mutta vaatii ajattelutavan uudistamista ja avoimuutta. Parhaita osaajia ei enää synny pelkästään koulun penkeillä ja yrityksissä, vaan yritysten ulkopuolella on paljon internetissä itseoppineita eri alojen asiantuntijoita, joiden osaaminen yritysten tulisi hyödyntää. Luovien liiketoimintamahdollisuuksien kehittäminen sosiaalisessa mediassa vaatii myös innovatiivisia muutosagentteja.

As soon as you work on developing a website or web apps in a large organisation, you usually can’t but help think, "Surely there has to be a better way to build this stuff." So many meetings, so many requirements and design documents, the pain of testing, and the inflexibility to focus on actually creating a good design – they all contribute to a process that feels bulky, cumbersome, and long winded.

Are you testing your design with humans or just test subjects?

"Every blogger has the same list I do. A list of things they want to fix on their blogs, if only they had the time (or technical ability). Over the next 30 days I’m going to tackle the small things and big things that I have wanted to change on my blog for months (and sometimes even years) since I launched it. More importantly, I’m going to share the results of the project here, in case some of you readers are comtemplating doing the same thing with your blogs, or just interested in seeing how this experiment turns out. "

"One of my colleagues fends off lots of cold calls from all sorts of companies wanting to speak to various directors. The IT suppliers seem to be the easiest to get rid off as she politely asks them if the software is accessible (she usually has to explain why that’s important to the RNIB) and that seems to do the trick in getting rid of 90% of the sales folk."

First of all, less is sometimes more. We all know that, but it was really obvious in this case: Pownce was the Twitter fan’s dream come true, adding groups, file sharing and several other highly requested features without cluttering the service with too many options. However, sometimes simplicity and lack of options are what differentiates a service and makes it worth your while.

"Candlelight is romantic."

This toolkit offers an overview of the methods and techniques which can be used throughout the user-centered design process.

Half (48%) of tech users need help from others in getting new devices and services to work, and many experience tech outages when there is a glitch with their home internet connection, computer, or cell phone. Coping with these failures is a hassle for many tech users and helps to distance them from technology use.

"Syksyn mittaan olen useaan kertaan joutunut keskusteluun jossa toinen osapuoli miettii verkkosivujen vieritystarvetta. ‘Kyllähän sivun pitää näkyä kokonaan ilman vieritystä’, on sanottu, kuten on myös ‘Vieritys on huono juttu, sillä käyttäjät eivät vieritä’. Että häh, siis anteeks’ mitä? Viimeksi kun tarkistin kalenterista, totesin ettemme enää elä 1990-lukua."

Your content needs to sound like a human being crafted it, not like a system regurgitated it.

Be consistent. Pick one language variant and stick to it. Varying the style confuses everyone and signals poor attention to detail, says Jakob and for the first time ever, uses a smiley in his column!!

"Unless you know for sure that your web site is something people want, no amount of SEO or usability input is going to make it successful for years to come. Make every dollar and minute of your time on your project productive, and be honest about who your project is really for."

"Olen tässä viime vuosina ihmetellyt erilaisten designin ja markkinointiviestinnän parissa toimivien suunnittelutoimistojen palveluiden paketointia. Ilman pienintäkään ylimielisyyttä on syytä todeta, että toimistojen palvelupaketit ovat usein ihmeellinen kokoelma keskenään ristiriitaisia asioita (/käsitteitä), liian usein keskeneräiseltä tuntuvia prosessikuvauksia ja samalla kummallisella tavalla tekoluovia (yritetty väkisin keksiä pyörää uusiksi)." Vaikuttaa mielenkiintoiselta blogilta.

Articles, spreadsheets, links, and other resources related to usability metrics.

Feeds. Widgets. Social media. Search. You read about them all the time and use them in your work. And according to this year’s Razorfish FEED report, consumers are adopting these new technologies faster than the industry pundits would lead you to believe.

What makes an effective UX team is the completeness of the skillset across all the members. The roles of individuals are secondary — a team with generalists will always be more flexible than a team of specialists. Specialists help when the local economic conditions support their being there. Yet, specialists have general knowledge, so they can be flexible and interact with the rest of the team in a productive manner.

"You can’t really generalize what women want, because you always have to consider the trade-offs. If I do need and like the functions, I will probably overlook the size issues. Choosing a phone is a lot like choosing a boyfriend. You cannot look at just one aspect of the product – he may be handsome, but he may have a personality problem. A mobile phone is something that you wake up with and go to sleep with."

Design is about many things. Above all, it's about clarity, and intentions and about putting yourself in the position of the end users (or the customers, students, audience, etc.). When designs are not well thought out, even though it may all look good from our point of view, users get frustrated, confused, or even angry. Anyone who has used a poorly designed user interface on a mobile phone, for example, or gotten lost while following the signs on the freeway in a new city understands these feelings. And anyone who is squinting to see a figure or read a quote on a PowerPoint slide is experiencing a bad design of sorts.

The Art & Science of CSS now as a free downloadable book.

With the banking sector moving towards consolidation, it is crucial that customers are understood, reacted to and rewarded for their loyalty. With the UK office of national statistics estimating that almost half of the UK population is now banking online, the role of the website in the customer journey has never been more important to financiers.

Working through Screens is a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.

Apparently even the cooking recipes can not be usable enough.

Reading blogs doesn’t have to be an exercise in futility or a waste of time. Your blog addiction can serve you well by with these blogs that are sure to make you smarter. These blogs bring you information about politics, technology, art, literature, an international perspective on life and culture, and much more. Become a regular reader of these blogs and who knows how intelligent you will be in the end.

Gmail otti käyttöön koko joukon ulkoasuteemoja, ja aikuiset ilakoivat kuin lapset konsanaan.

…se mikä mulla on kotona! Jei! Tein hyvän valinnan.

People are from earth. Machines are from outer space. I don’t know what kind of manners they teach in outer space, but if machines are going to live here in our world, they really need to learn to behave properly. You know, when on Earth, do as the earthlings do. So, hey machines, you need to become socialized. Right now you are arrogant, antisocial, irritating know-it-alls. Sure, you say nice things like "please" and "thank you," but being polite involves more than words.

In website usability, one of the hardest obstacles to overcome is the mentality of "This is what I would do." Whenever we hear Person A (or B or C or D, etc.) say this phrase, it means that Person A is not focused on users. It means that Person A is superimposing his or her personal beliefs and characteristics onto users. In search usability, we also dread hearing this phrase. Whenever we hear, "Well, this is what I would do," then we know that Person A (or B or C or D, etc.) is not focused on searchers. However, if you tell Person A that he/she is not focused on searchers, the immediate response is typically denial or defiance. Of course Person A is focused on searchers! Search usability professionals must deal with these preconceived notions about search all of the time. Here are some guidelines to help other SEO professionals effectively respond to this somewhat misguided mentality.

People getting into design research often wonder what gear they need. While there’s some interesting concepts for dedicated research hardware, a camera and a notebook are enough to do great things. You may not be tackling complex ethnographic study, or a granular time and motion analysis, but for gaining insight into real world context, getting out of your office and being with your users is fundamental and isn’t rocket science. Like many dedicated research consultants point out, being *good* at field work takes practice and dedication. But getting started just takes getting out the door and looking at the world in a different way. And sometimes, to capture that different way, you need a camera. But which one?

Interaction designers answer three questions: How do you do? How do you feel? How do you know? Even the simplest appliance requires doing, feeling and knowing. I can flip a light switch and see (feel?) the light come on; what I need to know is the mapping from switch to light. The greater the distance from input (switch) to output (light)- the more difficult and varied are the possible conceptual models – the longer the delay between doing and feeling, the more dependent I am on having good knowledge.

How difficult can it be? See Jaiku!

From this study, it can be seen that both genders appreciate ease of use in a product and that women focused on form over function as evidenced through certain keywords, alternatively suggesting that they may be willing to learn how to handle a product later if at first they feel that it looks good. On the other hand, men focused on functionality, and also image-driven factors established by iconicity, while including an interest in technological advancements.

A recent research shows that iPhone is every bit as usable as all the other Apple products.

In a challenging business environment, there is no substitute for having an innovative and distinctive brand expressed in “experiences that rivet minds and run away with hearts.” Marty Neumeier identifies how design drives this reality, embracing not only products and services but also processes, systems, and organizations. To succeed, companies must be agile, nurture inventiveness, and have an enterprise-wide appetite for radical ideas.

"A common refrain is, that UX should never be a department, but must be ingrained in the company. The theory is that if it's one department then no one else will bother to work on it. There's only one problem with that concept: no one but us UX folks have this discussion. There is no reason good design, or user-centered-anything will occur without an organizational structure to guide them to it. You can be sad about this, but I've learned to live with the truth that this is how corporate entities work."

As much of the stuff that we use to do things becomes smaller and end up in more (social) contexts we will not only evolve new use-practices but it puts a greater emphasis on communicating our intended use to people in proximity.

It is, not surprisingly, common for alternative text to be completely absent, but it is probably even more common to see inappropriate use of the alt attribute. In most cases this is caused by well-meaning people using the alt attribute to describe the image itself instead of the function it has or the content it presents.

There are a few lessons from Barack Obama's campaign that apply to our world of user experience consulting.

Sähköisiä ääniä jäi rekisteröitymättä, koska hölmöt tavikset unohtivat painaa ok:ta ennen äänestyskortin poistamista. Tietoviikon Afteri-toimituksen tekemä teknologia­poliittinen analyysi paljastaa, että tilanteesta kärsivät eniten ne ehdokkaat ja puolueet, joilla on hölmöimmät kannattajat.