WebProNews

What Makes a Design Seem 'Intuitive'?

In a recent usability test, I once again witnessed something I've seen a hundred times before: a frustrated user claiming he knows exactly what is wrong with the interface he was fighting with. What was his suggestion? "These guys need to make this thing a lot more intuitive. The problem is that this program isn't intuitive enough. It needs to be more intuitive!"

Preventing Usability Problems from the Get-go

The other day, Jeff Johnson, author of Web Bloopers, showed me something very interesting about Travelocity.com:

The Cost of Frustration

It's difficult to find someone who doesn't believe it's beneficial to make a more usable design. However, in today's design environment, it's often difficult to justify the expense of usability work against other business priorities.

The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities

Back in the late 1970's, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy's troop movements.

The Top 3 Priorities of the Talking Horse

A guy walks into a bar and tells the bartender he is all excited. Apparently, he just met a talking horse. He goes on and on about how impressed he was that the horse could talk. After a few minutes of listening, the bartender asks, "What did the horse say?"

Conducting Inherent Value Testing

In my last article, I summarized the benefits of Inherent Value Testing, a simple usability testing technique that can help you measure how your site communicates your product's value.

Inherent Value Testing

Is your web site chartered with encouraging people to buy or use your product or service? Is it succeeding? It turns out there is a simple usability testing technique that can help you measure how your site communicates your product's inherent value.

The CAA: A Wicked Good Design Technique

Here, in the nether-regions of the Greater Boston area, we have a linguistic habit of leaving the letter 'R' out of words like 'car' (pronounced caa) or 'Harvard' (pronounced haavaad). It's what makes us special.

Strategies for Categorizing Categories

How does a site containing thousands of pages of content get users to the content they seek quickly? There are many different strategies for organizing content on sites and we recently took a hard look at five of them.

Triggerwords That Create Click Confidence

A few years back, we conducted one of the most painful usability studies in the history of our research. We learned some really important things, but I'm not sure the users in that study will ever forgive us.