What car park payment machines can teach us about usability
Car park payment machines provide an every-day example of poor usability. They teach us that technology should not drive design, that less important tasks should not dominate the user interface and that usability is more than visual design. They also teach us that usability doesn't always matter in design, the best user interface is no interface and that usability is a differentiator only when customers have a choice.
Credit-Crunch Usability: 10 ways to maximise your usability budget
Being frugal during economic hard times is good business practice. So how can you squeeze your usability budget and still deliver great insights? These 10 suggestions for streamlining your usability efforts explode the myth that usability is expensive and time-consuming.
A Business Case for Usability
Until usability gets embedded in the processes of your company, you'll probably find you need to justify the investment. Fortunately, usability initiatives deliver a major return on investment: it's not unusual for usability projects to return benefits of 5-10 times their cost in the first year alone.
Web Accessibility: No More Mr Nice Guy
Last week the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) published a significant report on web accessibility. This report marks the DRC’s intention to get tough with organisations whose web sites cannot be used by disabled people. Over the next twelve months, we predict that the report will influence redesigns of virtually every major web site in the UK as organisations jockey with each other to avoid getting sued.
Selling usability to your manager
Before you can implement a usability initiative in your organisation, you'll need to convince your manager it's worthwhile. The obvious approach is to use a cost-benefit argument, but experience shows that this approach often fails because many managers find the data unconvincing. An alternative approach is to tailor your argument based on your manager's MBTI personality type. This approach generates many different ideas for selling usability within your organisation and is much more persuasive.
Filter articles by keyword
- accessibility •
- axure •
- benefits •
- careers •
- case study •
- css •
- discount usability •
- ecommerce •
- ethnography •
- expert review •
- fitts law •
- focus groups •
- forms •
- guidelines •
- heuristic evaluation •
- ia •
- iso 9241 •
- iterative design •
- layout •
- legal •
- metrics •
- mobile •
- moderating •
- morae •
- navigation •
- personas •
- prototyping •
- questionnaires •
- quotations •
- roi •
- selling usability •
- standards •
- strategy •
- style guide •
- survey design •
- task scenarios •
- templates •
- tools •
- usability testing •
- user manual
User Experience Articles & Videos
Our most recent videos
Our most recent articles
- Dec 2: Usability task scenarios: The beating heart of a usability test
- Nov 4: Common traps in user needs research and how to avoid them
- Oct 7: Transitioning from academic research to UX research
- Sep 2: The minimalist field researcher: What's in my bag?
- Aug 5: The future of UX research is automated, and that's a problem