Userfocus Usability Newsletter, November 2015

Welcome to the November edition of the Userfocus usability and user experience newsletter!

Message from the Editor
Usability maturity, 13 years on
From our archives: Tips for writing user manuals
What we're reading
Online training in user experience
User experience quotation of the month

Message from the Editor

I spent most of this month updating and re-recording the videos for my online course on user experience. As well as freshening up the content, I wanted to expand the material to cover the syllabus for the BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience. BCS will be launching this vendor-independent certification scheme on November 5th and I believe it will help define the competencies of the field. You can find out more about the scheme at the BCS web site and I wrote about the certification scheme a few months ago.

By the way, we know that a number of companies get to this point of the year and find themselves with a bit of leftover budget to spend. If that applies to you, I'd love you to spend it with us. You can buy training credits from us in units of £500 and if you buy 20 credits or more we top it up with an extra 10%. Drop me an email for more information.

This month I've written about usability maturity. I hope you find it useful.

— David Travis

Usability maturity, 13 years on

13 years ago this month I sent my book, 'E-Commerce Usability', to the publishers. I found myself flicking through a copy this week and re-discovered a 'Usability Maturity' quiz that I created for the book. These questions are just as relevant today as they were 13 years ago. Read the article in full: Usability maturity, 13 years on.

From our archives: Tips for writing user manuals

User manuals have a bad reputation. In a recent USA Today poll that asked readers "Which technological things have the ability to confuse you?" user manuals came out top! Increasingly companies are rethinking the way they approach user manuals. Here are some suggestions for improving the usability of user manuals based on our experience writing them. Read the article in full: Tips for writing user manuals.

What we’re reading

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

Large companies spend about 8-16 staff days creating personas.
Object-Oriented UX.
You could adapt these "six reasons we do anything" to the reasons why we use an app or a technology.
'User interface designers need to know everything there is to know about BOTH users and interfaces.'
5 varieties of qualitative research methods for user researchers.
Material Design is design science.
LinkedIn will be fined for its Dark UX pattern where it spams users in your address book.

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Online training in user experience

We have three online training courses in user experience. As a newsletter subscriber, you can save money by using these links:

User Experience quotation of the month

'When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.' Clifton Fadiman.