With the online tool Vischeck you can test how a site or an image will look for colour-blind viewers. Vischeck even offer a free service, which will optimize images for viewing by colour-blind people. You'll also find a lot of interesting and educational background information there. The site is worth a visit.

Links:

• The site Vischeck 

Henrik Olsen - January 19, 2003

See also: Accessibility (13) 

This collection of pithy quotations related to usability, communication and design were collected by colleagues on *a* usability discussion list and are loosely grouped by topics.

This is akin to the growing IAwiki IA commonplace book (linked to on guuui previously).

Links:

• the wall of pith 
• IA commonplace book 

ben hyde - January 15, 2003

The International Standards Organisation publishes standards related to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Usability.

These standards are categorised as primarily concerned with:

1. The use of the product (effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a context of use)

2. The user interface and interaction

3. The process used to develop the product

4. The capability of an organisation to apply user centred design

Links:

• The HCI-related ISO list (and summaries) provided by Serco (TRUMP project) 
• Search and buy the reports (Paper or PDF) at the ISO site 

Pieter-Jan Pruuost - January 07, 2003

See also: Guidelines and Standards (15) 

Here are links to some very interesting articles and streamable lectures.

Lectures at Gresham College where Harold is Professor of Geometry

Popular writing

Available papers

Notable:
The Computer Science of Everyday Things

Justice and Design

User Interface Design as Systems Design

A Future for Usability Engineering

Links:

• Harold Thimbleby's homepage 

ben hyde - December 24, 2002

The company SAP is a provider of business software, which has moved into the internet age. On their subsidiary site, "The SAP Design Guild", they give full access to a rich source of interface design information primary target at their partners developing products in the SAP environment. The site represents some of the most comprehensive resources about user-centred design of complex web-based applications. On the site SAP offer their design resources, such as style guides, methods and insight on how a user-centred development should be carried out from initial analysis to usability testing. It provides lots of inspiration for interaction designers facing the challenge of creating web applications.

Links:

• The SAP Design Guild 

Henrik Olsen - December 16, 2002

See also: Websites (11) 

ACIA ran a survey in 2001 to learn about which information resources and events information architects use to keep up with field. The research included magazines, journals and newsletters, discussion lists, web sites, books, conferences, meetings, and a rating of which of these resources are considered most useful. Though the survey is more than a year old, there are lots of references to useful stuff.

Links:

• Results from the survey 

Henrik Olsen - December 10, 2002

See also: Online magazines (3)  Discussion lists (4)  Websites (11)  Blogs (12) 

Through a study of web site design practice, the Group for User Interface Research at Berkeley University observed that web site designers design sites at different levels of refinement (site map, storyboard, and individual page) and that designers sketch at all levels during the early stages of design. However, existing web design tools do not support these tasks very well.

Informed by these observations, they created DENIM, a tool that helps web site designers in the early stages of design.

DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming.

Supported platforms:
- Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, or XP
- Mac OS X 10.1 (10.0 is not supported)
- Solaris, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems

Links:

• The DENIM Web Site 
• Try an exported DENIM Web Site Prototype 

Pieter-Jan Pruuost - December 06, 2002

See also: Prototyping and wireframing (119) 

Greek text can be helpful when designing initial design comps and prototypes, where the actual content isn't important. 4guysfromrolla.com has developed a neat little thing, which can generate a specified number of fake latin paragraphs for you.

Jakob Nielsen has an article about how greeked text can come in handy, when you want to test how easy users can identify the location of different content areas in different layout templates.

Links:

• The fake latin text generator 
• The article Testing Whether Web Page Templates are Helpful 

Henrik Olsen - November 27, 2002

See also: Prototyping and wireframing (119) 

If you want to know the market efficiency of a web site, web log analysis can be very effective. But most web analytic software doesn't provide you with easy-to-understand metrics and doesn't take business goals and outcomes such as conversion rates and return on investments into consideration.

At Future Now, an e-business consultancy, you can download a suite of calculators included in an Excel file. The calculators can help you measure the success of a site in terms of a few critical metrics on market efficiency and business effects.

Links:

• Download the website conversion calculators 

Henrik Olsen - November 07, 2002

See also: Cost-justification and ROI (27)  Web traffic analysis (12) 

At the Danish usability consultancy DialogDesign, managed and owned by Rolf Molich, you can download an example of how to put together a usability report. The sample report is based on a usability test of the E-commerce website www.TowerRecords.com.

Links:

• Download a sample usability report 

Henrik Olsen - October 23, 2002

See also: Usability testing (68)