Userfocus Usability Newsletter, May 2012

Welcome to the May edition of the Userfocus usability newsletter.

• Message from the Editor
• Feature article: The Wizard of Oz guide to usability testing mobile prototypes
• What we're reading
• Resources for your next site visit
• Upcoming training courses
• User experience quotation of the month

Message from the Editor

You ask, we deliver.

No, we’re not about to move into home delivery. This is about delivering the kind of articles you’re interested in reading. We periodically send out surveys to a random sample of our newsletter subscribers to find out what kinds of articles and resources you’d like to read. In a recent survey, you asked for ‘how to’ articles on Axure. So we turned to our resident Axure guru, Ritch Macefield, and asked him to write a few for us. We’ll be issuing these over the coming months, alongside other more general articles about UX written by myself and regular contributor Philip Hodgson.

This month’s article is about prototyping mobile applications. Although Ritch addresses specific questions on using Axure to prototype mobile interfaces, like iPhones, Android handsets and tablet devices, the article will also be of interest to anyone who wants to create realistic prototypes of any gesture-based interface. I hope you find it useful.

— David Travis

Feature article: The Wizard of Oz guide to usability testing mobile prototypes

It's easy to create a mobile prototype on a desktop computer. What's not quite so easy is to usability test the prototype and still allow the participant to use mobile interaction gestures like long presses and two finger pinches. We can overcome this obstacle by combining Axure's mutually exclusive non-conditional cases with Wizard of Oz usability testing. Read the article in full: The Wizard of Oz guide to usability testing mobile prototypes.

What we're reading

Some interesting usability-related articles that got our attention over the last month:

• 6 disasters caused by poorly designed user interfaces
• "Despite Nielsen's great contributions to web usability, his advice for mobile is just 180-deg backward."
• Expert review heuristics for interaction designers.
• In-home user research: Building rapport before and after stepping through the door
• Outstanding chapter (and commentaries) on visual aesthetics in the Encyclopedia of HCI.
• How to take notes in user research sessions.

Like these? Want more? Follow us on Twitter.

Resources for your next site visit

If you've been tasked with carrying out a site visit, you might want to try one of these articles from our archives.

• The 5 habits of highly effective field researchers
• Site visit interviews: from good to great
• How to create personas your design team will believe in
• Writing the perfect participant screener
• Log usability tests like a pro

Like these? Want more? See all 86 of our previous articles on user experience.

Usability Training: Now Booking

Web Usability: An Introduction to user experience, May 21-22, London.

A hands-on 2-day immersion seminar that shows how the various user experience tools and techniques fit into real-world design and development processes. More information about this training course: Web Usability: Designing the user experience.

Design Thinking: How to Sketch User Experiences, June 18, London.

Learn how to generate many different design solutions to a user experience problem — even if you're a klutz with a pencil. More information about this training course: Design Thinking: How to Sketch User Experiences.

How to carry out a usability expert review, July 16, London.

A fast-paced, 1-day seminar that teaches you cost-effective methods to evaluate designs. Unlike courses in usability testing, this seminar teaches you how to find and fix usability problems without involving end users. More information about this training course: How to carry out a usability expert review.

User Experience quotation of the month

“I made up my mind that I would never try to reform man — that's much too difficult. What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.” — R. Buckminster Fuller.

Hungry for more?

Read previous newsletters.