Task success, failure - confidence?

Jeff Sauro talks about the one thing worse than the user failing to complete the task. Failing to complete the task, and thinking they'd been successful. So an important aspect to your usability testing - asking the participant to rate their confidence.

Search landing pages - marketing budget wasted?

A great article about paid advertising on search engine results pages by Jared Spool. Pretty obvious points I would have thought, but from the examples listed it appears not. In the quest to spend the marketing budget, consideration of the user experience seems to go out of the window sometimes...

Writing content - less is more

A nice little piece reminding us that we're producing too much content and often obscuring the key messages we set out to communicate.

Web accessibility myths

An excellent article by Jonathan Hassell which tackles some fundamental challenges presented to people trying to steer their organisations to more accessible websites and services. The accessibility agenda seems to be moving from focusing on the developer to focusing on the business which is encouraging.

Eyetracking Facebook social media

Summaries of a couple of eyetracking studies conducted mainly on Facebook - one for brand pages and one for personal pages. The personal page study also compared behaviour with other social media sites.

$300 million usability fix revisited

A few years ago Jared Spool told the story of a project he worked on in which a relatively simple alteration had an incredibly profitable pay off. He's recently written a new article telling the back story.

Staff productivity affected by website usability - McGovern

Gerry McGovern rails against organisational apathy in website design and the impact it can have on staff productivity and morale.

Persona guide & how to use them

Another introductory article on personas; this time from usability company Bunnyfoot. I particularly like this one for the little illustrations that run through their discussion of what personas are and what they're not.

Quick tips podcast by Paul Boag

Boagworld boos sounds like a discount off licence, but it's not. Paul Boag delivers short podcast pearls of wisdom and other things that just seem to be on his mind at a particular point in time.

User testing metrics

So you're conducting a usability study; you've recruited users and organised your tasks. Jeff Sauro suggests the measures (metrics) you might use when putting numerical values on their experiences.

Quantifying the user experience

As soon as I admire a user experience map and feel that it's beyond me, almost the next thing I read is a great article on how to create something very similar. And this seems totally do-able. Consider mapping the user experience to better understand what's going on and see where you can improve things.

Experience map examples

The idea of an experience map is an interesting one and well worth a look. Much more complex and detailed than other diagrams of customer experience I've come across, they're really inspiring even if I think they're a bit beyond me right now. Something to aspire to.