Top Usability Tips You Don’t Know About - SIUC 2011

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Best practice in web usability. Presented by Tanya Lang from Peak Usability at the Squiz International User Conference 2011 in Sydney.

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Usability - Our top 5s

Presented by Tania Lang Principal at Peak Usability 31st August 2011

Outline

Top 5 user experience methods

Top 5 user experience tools

Top 5 usability tips you may not know about

Top 5 user experience methods

1st method

Affinity diagramming – How to

Brainstorm Sort and group Label & prioritise

Affinity diagramming - Benefits

#2: Card sorting

See Peak Usability Articles

#3: Leading practice review

#4: Collaborative design workshop

Source Flickr AlphachimpStudio

#5: User observation

Don’t listen to your users

Top 5 user experience tools

#1: Wordle – word cloud generator www.wordle.net

#2: Gomockingbird – wireframing tool https://gomockingbird.com/

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#3: Chalkmark – Online testing tool http://www.optimalworkshop.com/chalkmark

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Results

#3: Chalkmark – Online testing tool

Look at the following website for 5 seconds then I will ask you a question

#4: Fivesecondtest – Testing tool www.fivesecondtest.com

#4: Fivesecondtest Results

#5: Naview - IA testing www.naviewapp.com/

#5: Naview - IA testing - Results www.naviewapp.com/

Results

Top 5 usability tips you may not know about

Which way to the ladies toilet?

The human brain tends to create groupings.

Gestalt theory

Proximity users group objects appearing

near one another

Similarity users group objects with

similar visual characteristics Source: http://www.uie.com/articles/visible_narratives

Gestalt Principle of Proximity Users ignore instructions, text, buttons and ‘Help’ links if they are too far away from relevant page fields and functionality

e.g. important password instructions by most users

Use similar visual treatment or colour or close proximity to communicate items are related or belong together

Continuity and Similarity

Similarity

…back to the loo

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3 Search

2 2 In-page links

1 1 Menu bar / tabs

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4 Site map

How users find stuff

Cater for different navigation behaviours or some of your users will not find stuff and get lost.

Imagine you are an Australian Super member and you want to find out what fees you are currently being charged. Where would you go?

Congratulations. You are the 1000th visitor to this site and just won a $1000 deposit for your account.

Think about WHERE to promote ‘things’ (maybe not the home page?) …and try NOT to make important messages look like banner ads

Where to now?

No dead ends!

Think about where your users would like to go next for every page on your site and provide crosslinks.

Provide crosslinks for users who may have navigated to an incorrect but related page

…or who have completed their tasks and may be interested or open to related content

Cross linking – Our training page

Don’t show all users all content or options. Show users basic or important stuff that will be frequently used by most users and hide content, fields or features used infrequently or by only a small number of users.

Mental models Internal representations of a person’s current understanding of something derived from experience with the world

Need to ensure you understand your You need to ensure you understand

your users’ mental model to develop easy to use and intuitive systems

Contact details and additional resources

Tania Lang Peak Usability

www.peakusability.com.au

tania@peakusability.com.au

07 3839 9593

Brisbane, Australia

Twitter: @peakusability

http://www.peakusability.com.au/resources/