Transcript Usability Design Slides

Usability Design
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Designing for Usability
• What are the things users will want to do with
your site
– This is not what you want users to do with your
site
– This is not necessarily what looks cool
• How do you make the most common things
users want to do easier?
– And how do you still support more advanced
users?
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Usability
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Remember:
Speed
Efficiency
Learnability
Memorability
User Preference
Example
• Task: Find the calorie content of a small
serving of Mushroom Stroganoff at
Noodles & Co.
• http://noodles.com/
• May look cool, but becomes really
annoying when you are trying to find
information
• Poor in terms of 5 usability measures
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Example
• Google
• http://google.com
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Example
• Yahoo
• http://yahoo.com
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General guidelines
• Make the most important task the most
obvious thing on the page
• Make other features easy to find for users
who want them and easy to ignore for those
who don’t
• Limit distractions that could confuse users
• Make navigation extremely clear
• Rely on memes for where to place links (e.g.
Advertising, Privacy Policy on the bottom)
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General Guidelines
• Long text is bad
• Cryptic text is bad (e.g. Error 325.15)
• Do not interrupt the user’s flow (e.g.
Vista)
• Provide clear and meaningful choices
with obvious outcomes (e.g. buttons
that say “Save” and “Don’t Save” rather
than “Ok” and “Cancel”)
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Inane Dialog Boxes
What happens when you
cancel a cancelled operation?
Uhhh… I give up on this one
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Inane Dialog Boxes
Umm, thanks for the warning, but what should I do?
Do I have any choice in this?
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Inane Dialog Boxes
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Some of these interfaces were posted on Interface Hall of Shame
Inane Dialog Boxes
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Inane Dialog Boxes
Midwest Microwave's online catalog
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Some of these interfaces were posted on Interface Hall of Shame
Inane Dialog Boxes
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Inane Dialog Boxes
ClearCase, source-code control Rational Software
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