Brent Sordyl’s blog

“Product Development is an Art that involves many people & suffers from The Malkovich Bias”
(Link: Meetup.com’s Lean Usability Testing)

Uncategorized testing, usability

A couple of years ago, a grizzled UX professional taught me one invaluable fact.

Drunk people are a pretty accurate mimic of distracted, indifferent people

This insight has lead to a wonderful technique I’ve been refining over the years that I call “The $5 Guerrilla User Test”.
(Link: The $5 Guerrilla User Test « Bumblebee Labs Blog)

Uncategorized usability

As companies look to their peers and audiences to help define product features, there’s a greater need for scalable testing platforms. Here’s a summary of eight useful services that will help put you on the path to product greatness.
(Link: Always Be Testing: 8 Services For Usability Feedback)

Uncategorized crowdsourcing, testing, usability

20 Guiding Principles for Experience Design
1. Stay out of people’s way
2. Present few choices
3. Limit distractions
4. Group related objects near each other
5. Create a visual hierarchy that matches the user’s needs
6. Provide strong information scent
7. Provide signposts and cues
8. Provide context
9. Avoid jargon
10. Make things efficient
11. Use appropriate defaults
12. Use constraints appropriately
13. Make actions reversible
14. Reduce latency
15. Provide feedback
16. Use emotion
17. Less is more
18. Be consistent
19. Make a good first impression
20. Be credible and trustworthy
(Link: So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 2: Guiding Principles)

Uncategorized usability, ux, webdesign

Flows are made out of individual interactions. A screen offers some possibilities and the user chooses one. Then something happens, and the screen changes. It’s an ongoing conversation. Each moment in a flow is like a coin with two sides. The screen is showing something on one side, and the user is reacting on the other side. My flow diagrams illustrate this two-sided nature with a bar. Above the bar is what the user sees. Below the bar is what they do. An arrow connects the user’s action to a new screen with yet another action.

Here’s a simple and concrete example. To add a to-do item in Basecamp, first you go to a list. Then you click to “Add an item.” The form appears. You fill in the item content and submit the form, and if your submission is valid, the item appears and flashes yellow. Here’s a shorthand version of this flow:
(Link: A shorthand for designing UI flows – (37signals))

Uncategorized design, ui, usability, webdesign

# Home page usability: 20 guidelines to evaluate the usability of home pages.
# Task orientation: 44 guidelines to evaluate how well a web site supports the users tasks.
# Navigation and IA: 29 guidelines to evaluate navigation and information architecture.
# Forms and data entry: 23 guidelines to evaluate forms and data entry.
# Trust and credibility: 13 guidelines to evaluate trust and credibility.
# Writing and content quality: 23 guidelines to evaluate writing and content quality.
# Page layout and visual design: 38 guidelines to evaluate page layout and visual design.
# Search usability: 20 guidelines to evaluate search.
# Help, feedback and error tolerance: 37 guidelines to evaluate help, feedback and error tolerance.
(Link: 247 web usability guidelines)

Uncategorized checklist, usability, webdesign

Wireframing brings the following key benefits:
* It gives the client an early, close-up view of the site design (or re-design).
* It can inspire the designer, resulting in a more fluid creative process.
* It gives the developer a clear picture of the elements that they will need to code.
* It makes the call to action on each page clear.
* It is easy to adapt and can show the layout of many sections of the website.
(Link: Using Wireframes to Streamline Your Development Process)

Uncategorized usability, webdesign, wireframe

The mobiReady testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.
The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device.
(Link: ready.mobi – dotMobi compliance & mobileOK checker)

Uncategorized mobile, testing, usability

(Link: 100 Outstanding Login Forms | Design Reviver)

Uncategorized login, usability, webdesign

Do people know where to click? Quickly run a test on your UI prototypes to answer any nagging questions about usability.

One task, one image and one click reveals powerful insights to help you tweak navigation and layout. For each task you get a heatmap to show the concentration of clicks. Very handy as evidence or for opening a can of worms!
(Link: Chalkmark)

Uncategorized testing, usability

ClickTale delivers innovative In-Page Web Analytics that reveal the mystery of what visitors actually do inside website pages, allowing you to analyze and optimize website performance and usability. Our unique solution provides movies of your visitors’ actual browsing sessions, heatmaps of aggregate behavior inside the web page, and advanced behavioral analytics. ClickTale fills a gap left by traditional web analytics that only measures activity between pages.
(Link: ClickTale | Web Analytics by ClickTale | Visitor Movies, Heatmaps & Form Analytics)

Uncategorized testing, tracking, usability

UserTesting.com provides the fastest and cheapest usability testing on the market. We give website owners access to a network of pre-screened users who are articulate and observant and who meet specified demographics. With UserTesting.com, website owners can request that one or more users attempt to complete a task on their website. Users, speaking their thoughts as they browse, will have their screens and voices recorded. The resulting videos will immediately be made available online for the website owners to watch. Thus, the website owner gets to see their site with “fresh eyes.”
(Link: UserTesting.com – Low cost usability testing)

Uncategorized testing, usability

A simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.
(Link: fivesecondtest)

Uncategorized testing, usability

userfly.com provides instantaneous web user studies by recording user visits and letting you play them back to see every mouse movement, click, and form interaction. Conducting a user study doesn’t have to be expensive or a logistic nightmare. With userfly.com you can perform simple and cheap user testing with your real users. And it only takes one minute to set up!
(Link: userfly — Web usability testing made easy.)

Uncategorized testing, usability

When you make it hard for users to enter passwords you create two problems — one of which actually lowers security:
* Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing while filling in a form. They therefore feel less confident. This double degradation of the user experience means that people are more likely to give up and never log in to your site at all, leading to lost business. (Or, in the case of intranets, increased support calls.)
* The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.
(Link: Jakob Nielsen – Stop Password Masking)

Uncategorized password, tweet, usability