Usable Usability E-Book

Eric Reiss

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 300

Beschreibung

The A-to-Z guide to spotting and fixing usability problems Frustrated by pop-ups? Forms that make you start over if you miss a field? Nonsensical error messages? You're not alone! This book helps you simply get it right the first time (or fix what's broken). Boasting a full-color interior packed with design and layout examples, this book teaches you how to understand a user's needs, divulges techniques for exceeding a user's expectations, and provides a host of hard won advice for improving the overall quality of a user's experience. World-renowned UX guru Eric Reiss shares his knowledge from decades of experience making products useable for everyone...all in an engaging, easy-to-apply manner. * Reveals proven tools that simply make products better, from the users' perspective * Provides simple guidelines and checklists to help you evaluate and improve your own products * Zeroes in on essential elements to consider when planning a product, such as its functionality and responsiveness, whether or not it is ergonomic, making it foolproof, and more * Addresses considerations for product clarity, including its visibility, understandability, logicalness, consistency, and predictability Usable Usability walks you through numerous techniques that will help ensure happy customers and successful products!

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Contents

Part One: Ease of Use

Chapter One: Functional

The three keys to functionality

From click to conversion: making sure the buttons work

Browser wars, hardware headaches

Don’t sweat the home page. Fine-tune your forms.

Four keys to creating functional forms

Required fields

Forms and business rules

Interdependent forms

Instructions and functionality

Navigation: Getting folks where they want to go

My crappy new TV

Understand your goals and keep them in focus

A true story about a fairy tale

Functionality can change over time

A complaint is a gift

Chapter Two: Responsive

The myth of two-way communication

Three traditional keys to responsiveness

A fourth view: “Responsive design”

“Wake up, you stupid machine!”

FUD: Fear, uncertainty, doubt

A closer look at transitional techniques

Transitional techniques and physical objects

Response mechanisms in the online environment

Response mechanisms in physical objects

Chapter Three: Ergonomic

Henry Dreyfuss: Introducing ergonomics to industrial design

Buttons: Why bigger sometimes is better

Milliseconds count

Bring on the scientists

“First word after the bullet”

Tabs and other keyboard shortcuts

Provide clearance

“Go to the back of the line”

Improve work organization

Eric and the IRS

The “silent usher”

Chapter Four: Convenient

Giving inconvenience a positive spin

Eric’s advice for the lovelorn

Multimodal experiences

Switching routines

Why I hate calling my bank

Switching interfaces

Switching from on- to offline

Unfamiliar situations highlight convenience

Personas and other useful tools

Context is the kingdom

Make everything people need available

“Three clicks and you’re dead”

Chapter Five: Foolproof

How the RAF can help win your battle

People forget to do stuff. So help remind them.

Alerts and other warnings

The “boy who cried wolf” syndrome

Forcing the issue

The dangers of personalization

The magic of redundancy

Write helpful error messages

Helping people make better decisions

Not everyone can spll

People don’t read instructions

Don’t make people memorize your messages

Sometimes you do have to state the obvious

People don’t remember things from one time to the next

Physical deterrents

Part Two: Elegance and Clarity

Chapter Six: Visible

Four ways things become invisible

The mysterious “fold”

People do scroll!

Why we can’t pinpoint the fold

When the fold is important

When the fold isn’t important

Creating scroll-friendly pages

Unfriendly scroll-friendly pages

Scrolling, menu length, and mobile phones

Don’t make important stuff look like an ad

USATODAY.com and banner blindness

Blocking out the sum

Eric’s Enlightening Elevator Examination

Sherlock, Edward, Don, and Ch’i

Chapter Seven: Understandable

What is “shared reference”?

A word about words

Eric’s “light bulb” test

Five keys to creating effective “shared references”

Creating a comfort zone

Don’t be afraid to tell your story

Photos and other visual aids

Icons and other troublemakers

“As big as a breadbox”

The sun never sets on the World Wide Web

Audio and video

Chapter Eight: Logical

Three basic types of logical reasoning

The magic word—“why”

Functionality and logic

Responsiveness and logic

Ergonomics and logic

Convenience and logic

Foolproofing and logic

Design dissonance

Use cases

Linear processes

Chapter Nine: Consistent

A caveat

Seduced by synonyms

Keeping things homogeneous

Retroductive inference revisited

Standardization promotes consistency

Don’t take consistency for granted

One button, one function

One icon, one function

One object, one behavior

Chapter Ten: Predictable

Six ways to enhance predictability

Knowing what to expect

Branding, customer satisfaction, and expectations

Helping set expectations

Instructions revisited—but never visited

Telling folks what you expect

Let folks know how many steps are involved

Let people know which process they are actually in

Put things where folks expect to find them

Warn of invisible conditions

Chapter Eleven: Next steps

Guerilla-style usability

Formalized think-aloud tests

Making usability part of the business case

Invention or innovation?

Accidents can never be attributed to a single cause

Don’t draw a conclusion based on an isolated incident

Bibliography

Analytics

Cognition

Content creation

Content strategy

Design research

Industrial design

Information architecture

Interactive design (general)

Interactive design (specific subjects)

Project management

Prototyping and documentation

Service design

Usability

Praise for Usable Usability

Dedication

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Introduction

What is “usability”?

Does it do what I want it to do? And what I expect it to do?

Why does it matter?

Who cares?

Make it useful, too!

Bogo Vatovec’s three-stage usability plan

You don’t need a big budget

A note about the non-English website examples

I’m messing with your brain

Part OneEase of Use

These first five chapters are about physical parameters, which basically ensure that something does what you want it to do. Buttons, controls, and other response mechanisms are there to help you accomplish your task, and they might include functions and features that may even anticipate your needs and habits. In short, these things make stuff easy to use.

You might think that this idea is something of a no-brainer, but it isn’t. Despite all the lip service to “user-friendliness,” a depressing number of programs and products are still pretty UN-friendly. Throughout the next five chapters, I’m going to show you how well-meaning design doesn’t always lead to well-functioning stuff.

What’s in this part?

This part covers the following aspects of “ease of use”:

Functional (it actually works)

Responsive (I know it’s working; it knows where it’s working)

Ergonomic (I can easily see, click, poke, twist, and turn stuff)

Convenient (everything is right where I need it)

Foolproof (the designer helps me to not make mistakes or break stuff)

I have this goofy hope that when you see this list, you will say to yourself, “Yeah. That makes sense. What’s the big deal?” But to illustrate my point, please take a moment to go to your favorite website. Click around for a couple of minutes while thinking about these issues. Can you see something that could be improved based on anything on this list? I bet you can! Welcome to the world of usability.

Chapter One Functional

Flick a light switch and you expect the lights to come on. Turn the key in the ignition and you expect your car to start. You expect your refrigerator to be cold, your oven to be hot. These are all functional interactions. If things don’t work at this very basic level, then it really doesn’t matter much how beautiful a design may be. So what better place to start a discussion of usability than with functionality?