Jared Spool is in his element in this highly entertaining and informative interview (in audio) where he answers questions from the audience at the 54th Technical Communication Summit.

Topics included:
- How do you break into the usability field?
- How has the field of usability evolved?
- How do you handle difficult clients?
- How do you handle powerful Dilbert-like engineers?
- What role should user testing play in design?
- Why do programmer watching usability test get flat foreheads?
- What is the best thing about users? Answer: "...eventually they die".

Links:

• Podcast: Jared Spool Interviewed by Carolyn Snyder at STC 2007 

Henrik Olsen - June 10, 2007

See also: Interviews (30)  Audio and video (48) 

Matthew Haughey has noticed that the people who click on ads are usually one-time visitors who are lost and will never return to the site again. Regular visitors come for the content and quickly learn to visually filter out the ads.

So why not turn of ads for signed up members and regular visitors? Matthew Haughey gave it a try and found that he lost virtually nothing.

Links:

• How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs 

Henrik Olsen - June 07, 2007 - via Signal vs. Noise

See also: Ads (9) 

Business Week has published a review of Bill Buxton's book Sketching User Experience.

To quote:

"Sketching User Experience is, nominally, a book about product design. But it would be just as accurate to say that it's a book about software development, or, more generally, about the often broken process of bringing new products to market..."

"For Buxton, the need to rethink the development process by inserting design into the front-end is all the more urgent because new technology ... introduce new levels of complexity to the challenge of product design."

"Buxton takes pains to distinguish sketches from prototypes, which are more detailed, more expensive, and more focused on testing or proving a single idea. If sketching is about asking questions, prototyping is about suggesting answers. Sketching takes place at the beginning of the development process, prototyping only later."

Links:

• Business Week review of the book 
• The book at Amazon.com 
• The book at Amazon.co.uk 

Henrik Olsen - June 03, 2007 - via Putting People First

See also: Books (47)  Prototyping and wireframing (119) 

Google has published a 45 minute video with Jared Spool talking about online branding:

"What's the most effective way to strengthen a brand on the internet? Recent research shows that it isn't using traditional branding techniques. In fact, those tried-and-true methods can actually hurt your brand, if implemented poorly.

In this presentation, Jared Spool will discuss how User Interface Engineering's recent usability research has uncovered some fascinating truths about how people perceive brands on the internet."

Links:

• Strike Up The Brand: How to Design for Branding (Google video) 

Henrik Olsen - May 31, 2007 - via Usability In the News

See also: Audio and video (48)  Ads (9)  Talks and presentations (18) 

According to Jakob Nielsen, having a good interaction designer doesn't eliminate the need for a systematic usability process. It's true that you're better off hiring a good designer over a bad one. But it's wrong to rely solely on the genius of a designer for several reasons:

- It's hard to get hold of a top 100 interaction designer
- Even superb designers can have bad ideas
- Usability tests provide empirical data on which ideas work and which don't
- User research provides insight into what customers need
- Even a very good design can be improved though iterative design and testing

Links:

• The Myth of the Genius Designer 

Henrik Olsen - May 29, 2007

See also: User research (23)  The design process (24)  Usability testing (68) 

Sometimes forms are so complex that it's necessary to provide extensive help. In such cases, the text needed to explain how to fill it out can become overwhelming.

Luke Wroblewski has looked around the web to find ways to design dynamic contextual help. In his article, he shows examples of both user-activated and automatically triggered help.

Links:

• Dynamic Help in Web Forms 

Henrik Olsen - May 24, 2007

See also: Help (3)  Forms (30) 

According to Jakob Nielsen, links and buttons have different uses:

- Links are for navigation. They are used to move between pages in an information space.
- Buttons are for actions that cause some chance (e.g. adding a product to shopping cart).

But there are exceptions to the rules:

- Buttons can be used to move from page to page in a workflow process (e.g. "continue shopping" and "proceed to checkout")
- Links can be used for secondary actions with minor consequences.

The so called "command links" have the benefit that we can write longer command names and thus make them more descriptive. To reduce confusion, the link text should explicitly state that it leads to an action by making the first word of the link an imperative verb.

Another benefit to command links is that we can add explanatory text below the link. The text can be presented in a smaller typeface to emphasize its secondary nature.

Links:

• Command Links 

Henrik Olsen - May 16, 2007

See also: Guidelines and Standards (15)  Links (19)  Forms (30)  Navigation (63) 

1 in 20 votes had to be thrown out in the Scottish local elections in May 2007. Voters didn't read the instructions thoroughly and misunderstood the voting system.

Links:

• Election fiasco shows importance of usability tests 

Henrik Olsen - May 14, 2007 - via Usability In The News

See also: Bad designs (20) 

InfoDesign has published an interview with Jared Spool. As always, Jared has interesting and provoking views to proclaim:

- Customers don't care about usability and design. Instead, they care about things like increased revenue, reducing expenses, bringing in more customers, and getting more business out of customers.

- The techniques usability professionals use are deeply flawed. We ignore the evidence that there has been no discernable relationship between investment in user-centred design practices and the regular production of usable products. The ones who design the best products don't follow the standard processes that we promote.

- Jared doesn't believe in design guidelines. Instead, his philosophy is to use an iterative approach. "Take a design

Links:

• Jared Spool: The InfoDesign interview 

Henrik Olsen - May 12, 2007

See also: Cost-justification and ROI (27)  Usability testing (68) 

ClickTale is an online service that allows you to watch movies of visitors interacting with your website.

The tool records visitors' mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and scrolling actions. From the recordings, it generates movies of individual visitor's use of the site.

The tool can be used to gain insight into how visitors interact with websites, to find flaws and enhance navigation and overall usability. As such, it can serve as a good complement to existing statistics services and usability tests.

ClickTale is currently in closed beta, but you can register for an invitation.

Links:

• ClickTale 

Henrik Olsen - May 08, 2007

See also: Tools (106)  Web traffic analysis (12)  Usability testing (68)