Usability 101: Satisfaction
June 26, 2003
Today, we continue the Usability 101 series by exploring the concept of satisfaction. I can’t get no… satisfaction As much as we’d like it to, users are not using our software because of love for developers. They are using it to accomplish a task. How satisfied they are with usability of the software package they use […]
Usability 101: Errors
June 23, 2003
The usability 101 series continues. Over the past few days, we’ve covered learnability, efficiency, and memorability. Today, we will cover errors, how well the system should prevent them and how it should allow recovery from them. Things break You may design the perfect system but eventually, your system will fail. How it does so, however, can […]
Usability 101: Memorability
June 19, 2003
Having covered learnability and efficiency as the first two elements of usability, it is now time to turn to memorability. What is memorability? The concept of memorability, within the usability context, is that a user can leave a program and, when he or she returns to it, remember how to do things in it. How many times […]
Usability 101: Efficiency
June 18, 2003
On Monday, I highlighted the five basic points of usability. Yesterday, I delved further into the concept of learnability. Today, we are focusing on the concept of efficiency. What is efficiency? Efficiency relates to how fast a user accomplish tasks once he or she has learned to use a system. The basic idea behind it is that, as you […]
Usability 101: Learnability
June 17, 2003
The concept of learnability is a key one to usability design. Basically, it boils down to how easy a system is to learn. This, in turn, can be broken down into five components: familiarity consistency generalizability predictability simplicity Let’s delve further into each of those in more details. Familiarity The concept of familiarity is almost self explanatory. […]
Usability 101: Introduction
June 16, 2003
As I mentioned earlier, I am starting to take a look at the usability issues related to open source project. As a kick-off for this, I’d like to go over some usability basics, which could help just about any OSS projects. In Usability Engineering, Jakob Nielsen mentions five concepts to remember when it comes to usability: Learnability: How easy […]
Usability Bazaar: Goals
June 13, 2003
In yesterday’s entry, I announced the launch of a new mailing list dedicated to usability in Open Source software. However, I had not clearly stated goals. Here are some of my thoughts on what we could accomplish. Good/Bad Practice In this first step, we would highlight good and bad usability issues with major open source products. However, part […]
Usability Bazaar
June 12, 2003
Over the past few days, I’ve been doing some research for an easy-to-use web-based open-sourced content management system. The basic system needs to be usable by several people and needs to be simple. In the process, though, I have learned that simplicity is hard to do. The main challenge comes from the fact that most software developers […]
SuperSync
June 11, 2003
Everyday, we manage large numbers of contacts across a variety of devices. For example, I have a PDA, a phone (which happen to both be the same device so that synchronization is instant), a work PC, a home desktop, and a laptop. In order to properly keep all my data in sync, I need to hook up each of those devices on a one […]
The Net as Critical Infrastructure
June 9, 2003
There has been considerable discussion over the last few days about Wired Magazine’s decision to publish a story detailing the inner workings of the Slammer worm. As more and more traffic moves over the Internet, the network is increasingly becoming a key element of the overall global telecommunication infrastructure, especially now that companies are starting to move […]
