Designing for Usability - Nour Diab Yunes

Frog’s Research Learning Spiral (How the Why of data wins over the What)

As clients are becoming increasingly aware of ethnographic-ish research being an essential and integral part of the design process for a high quality user experience offer, it is important for us (designers) to learn an appropriate format for approaching and customizing research on a project basis.

“A Human-Centered Technology.” – Don Norman

While innovation has a historical contribution in terms of providing appropriate and efficient tools for society that help enrich human knowledge and enhance mental capabilities (memory, thought, reflection), it has however created modes of entertainment that increasingly promote a consuming rather than a productive people and is accountable for the apparent social divider between the haves and havenots of technology.

How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests – Jeffrey Rubin & Dana Chisnell

Testing has two main objectives: on the marketing level, it aims at improving sales; on a user-centered level, it aims at minimizing user frustrations and maximizing a product's usability. As the authors point out, testing goals inform the design of a product; those work in terms of the usefulness or relevance, learnability, efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction factors.

“Recruiting Participants” – Dumas & Redish

Dumas & Redish lay-out the steps and tactics for recruiting participants; those include: Finding Appropriate Participants, Reaching and Screening Potential Participants, Deciding Who Should Recruit Participants, Knowing What to Say When You are Recruiting, Arranging for Payment or Other Incentives, and Having a Back-up -- But Not Double Booking

The Simplicity Shift – Scott Jenson

Scott Jenson defines 'feature blindness' as users being blinded by a feature list. He identifies the bottom-up approach of creating a user persona and a task scenario as more efficient than the top-down approach, in terms of organizing a commonsensical hierarchy of a product's features. The ideal visualization would be to 'tame' the feature list and prioritize features in accordance to a set of usage requirements and subsequent usage frequency.

“Defining Goals and Concerns” and “Deciding Who Should Be Participants” – Joseph Dumas & Janice Redish

Before you begin testing it is important to set your primary evaluation goals and concerns. Once those have been defined, it will be possible to plan a usability test accordingly. Dumas & Redish raise the following processes: making choices among goals and concerns; moving from general concerns to specific ones; and understanding sources of goals and concerns.

“Conducting a Usability Evaluation” – Patrick Jordan

After having listed various evaluation methods, Jordan provides a guideline for choosing the most appropriate method(s) depending on the level at which a prototype is developed and shows an example of how such testing might be conducted.

“Evaluating Usability Throughout Design and Development” – Joseph Dumas & Janice Redish

Joseph Dumas & Janice Redish analyze the potential benefits of combining various evaluation methods as complementary tools for usability testing in the context of usability engineering.

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces – Carolyn Snyder

Carolyn Snyder proposes a definition of paper prototyping as 'a variation of usability testing where representative users [...] [interact] with a paper version of the interface that is manipulated by a person "playing computer" ' (italicized in original, p.4).

The aim of her book is to extend the practice of paper prototyping to a variety of HCI platforms for non-expert users to adopt as a practical tool for creating and testing their products during the development process.