Userfocus Usability Newsletter, November 2011

Welcome to the November edition of the Userfocus usability newsletter.

• Message from the Editor
• Feature article: How to manage design projects with user experience metrics
• What we're reading
• Resources for carrying out an expert review
• Upcoming training courses
• User experience quotation of the month

Message from the Editor

You'll kick yourself when I tell you, but did you know you missed World Standards Day on 14th October? Fortunately, you've another chance to toast usability standards because this Thursday (10th November) is World Usability Day. Now in its 7th year, World Usability Day is about making life easy, and this year's theme is "Education". The World Usability day web site lists scores of events that are taking place all over the world from Argentina to Rwanda, plus many events online.

What's that, you say? You're in meetings all day Wednesday? Don't worry, there's always the first ever World Information Architecture Day on Feb 11th next year!

Talking of education, we're running a workshop this month on usability testing. For the equivalent cost of renting a usability lab for half a day, you'll learn how to run your own usability test and leave the course with a video recording of a usability test of your web site. There's more information at the end of the newsletter. Come and join us.

This month I've written an article on usability metrics. I hope you enjoy it.

— David Travis

Feature article: How to manage design projects with user experience metrics

User experience metrics are measures that help you assess how your design stacks up against the needs of your customers and the needs of your business. Lab-based methods of collecting UX metrics are too slow and expensive to be part of most design projects, especially those using agile methodologies. But with online usability testing tools, regular user experience benchmarking is now cheap and quick to carry out. Read the article in full: How to manage design projects with user experience metrics.

What we're reading

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

• Walking through a door creates a new memory and makes it harder to recall an experience in the room that's been left.
• A form design style guide in Omnigraffle, PDF and Photoshop formats.
• How to prioritise your feature set.
• Your users' first click predicts task success (87% success rate if 1st click correct, 46% if incorrect).
• By banning default opt-ins, this new EU trading law should prevent some 'black hat' usability techniques.
• Sketches don't need to be perfect. Here's the original UI sketch for Twitter (or 'twttr' as it then was).
• It takes a while to load, but the design crimes of this restaurant web site makes the wait worth it.

Like these? Want more? Follow us on Twitter.

Resources for carrying out an expert review

If you carry out usability expert reviews, you might find these articles from our archive interesting.

• Do you make these 4 mistakes when carrying out a usability review?
• 247 web usability guidelines
• The 4 questions to ask in a cognitive walkthrough
• How to prioritise usability problems
• Heuristic Evaluation with Morae
• Games Usability Trainers Play

Like these? Want more? See all 10 of our articles on expert reviews.

Usability Training: Now Booking

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, November 21, London.

Learn how to obtain customer feedback on prototypes and finished products. More information about this training course: A Practical Guide to Usability Testing.

Design Thinking, December 19, London.

In this new course, you'll learn ways of generating many different design solutions to user experience problems. More information about this training course: Design Thinking.

Web Usability: Designing the user experience, January 23-24, London.

A fast-paced, 2-day immersion seminar that shows delegates how to boost sales and conversion rates, increase usage and improve customer satisfaction. More information about this training course: Web Usability: Designing the user experience.

User Experience quotation of the month

“Maybe the reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven't given them anything else to care about.” — Seth Godin.

Hungry for more?

Read previous newsletters.