10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. Read the full article here.

Jakob Nielsen’s study on the ideal number of test subjects in usability tests found that tests with just five users would reveal about 85% of all problems with your website, whereas 15 users would find pretty much all problems.

Source: Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox

The biggest issues are usually discovered by the first one or two users, and the following testers confirm these issues and discover the remaining minor issues. Only two test users would likely find half the problems on your website. This means that testing doesn’t have to be extensive or expensive to yield good results. The biggest gains are achieved when going from 0 test users to 1, so don’t be afraid of doing too little: any testing is better than none.

Use Cases - Top 10 Reason for Using Them to Document Product Requirements

Good article about the value of use cases in product management and requirements documentation.

Use cases fit any development methodology well. If your team follows extreme Agile methodologies, you can just write use cases in the form of brief user stories or usage narratives. If your team follows more structured development, you can write more detailed use cases.

Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process

A great article by Fred Beecher on Boxes and Arrows about effective use of prototyping in the product development process. Read full article here.

“Appropriate fidelity” refers to a level of prototype fidelity that allows you to achieve the goals you’ve set for doing a prototype in the first place. By varying the fidelity of your prototype along the dimensions of visual design and functionality, you make your prototype more effective at achieving some goals and less effective for others.

The Awesomeness Manifesto

Read an article by Umair Haque this morning. Good stuff.

Let's summarize. What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That's a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

Read the complete article here.