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Usability is not an add-on

Usability is not an add-on. Steven Pemberton CWI, Amsterdam. A thought experiment. What are the features of websites that you go back to regularly that differentiates them from other websites with the same purpose?. Differentiating features. Forrester did some research in this

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Usability is not an add-on

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  1. Usability is not an add-on Steven PembertonCWI, Amsterdam

  2. A thought experiment • What are the features of websites that you go back to regularly that differentiates them from other websites with the same purpose?

  3. Differentiating features • Forrester did some research in this • Good content (75%) • Usability (66%) • Speed (58%) • Frequency of updating (54%) • (The rest is noise: 14% and lower)

  4. This is surprising • User testing is the first item to go when looking for reduced costs • Many web-building companies have no usability experts on their staff • Many web-building companies build sites that are measurably unusable

  5. What is usability? • It can be summarised by three factors: • Efficiency:how quickly you achieve what you want • Effectiveness: how correctly you achieve it • Satisfaction: how much you enjoy doing it

  6. Compromises • Sometimes these factors have to be balanced out: • An experiment with 3 chess-playing interfaces (command-line, mouse, and real manipulation of chess pieces) showed that the mouse was the fastest • But with real manipulation, the user won more often (was more effective)

  7. Surprises • The psychology of human beings can cause some surprising results: • In a test with three methods of writing (pen on paper, a text editor, a word processor) users wrote less with a pen but of a higher quality, more with a text editor but of a lower quality, and more with a word processor but with a higher quality.

  8. Transparency • A fourth aim of user interfaces is transparency: you don’t notice a good user interface, you spend all your time solving the problem.

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