coffee talks
Our "Coffee Talks" are a selection of informal, insightful and sometimes incredible collection of articles that focus on issues related to the world of user-centered design - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
You may not always agree with what we have to say, but hey, at least we'll get you thinking about the issues.
We spend most of our time understanding what makes designs usable. We hope these articles will help you begin to understand it, too.
| Title | Ref # |
|---|---|
| Introduction to Medium-Fidelity Prototypes This Coffee Talk provides insight into the process of building Medium-Fidelity Prototypes and describes the benefits they provide to our clients and to application development teams. |
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| Understanding Web Services This Coffee Talk is intended to provide you with an easy-to-understand introduction to the world of Web Services, describe the basic components of the Web Services model, highlight some evolving issues which will undoubtably impact the future of Web Services, and give you some pointers to other resources where you can further your knowledge. |
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| Communicating With Icons Design and usage guidelines for communicating with icons in software and web design user interfaces. |
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| Design Guidelines for Interactive Voice Response Systems As a means to quickly provide information to users on the go, IVRs, if properly designed, can be just as effective as a graphical, device-based "mobile" solutions for getting information on the go. |
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| Effective Design Research: Analyze Goals First A small difference in the way a goal is phrased can drastically change the tasks that are necessary to accomplish that goal. Many designers of technology-based products spend a lot of time working on developing UIs to support the tasks a user needs to accomplish. However, without first understanding the users' goals, many of these designs often fail. |
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| Go Mobile! Representative Wireless Usability Tests Usability testing in the unwired future requires that our experimental subjects and the tasks they perform be studied "out there" in the mobile environment. To do so requires better planning, decision-making, and acceptance of tradeoffs that in other experimental settings would be deemed unreasonable. |
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| Horrible Wireless User Experiences in 5 Easy Steps For this coffee talk on wireless application design and development, we'd thought we'd take a slightly different, admittedly sarcastic, approach. Follow the recommendations below, and we guarantee that you'll create an absolutely horrible User Experience for your users. |
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| Click Here! The Hazards of Inline Links An argument is made for avoiding in-line links: By doing so, we recklessly posit, you'll help your users maintain their thought processes while reading your valuable content. Suggestions for other locations for link placement are given. |
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| Assessing Usability 4: User Testing Part 4 in our 4-part series (imagine that!) on the tools and techniques you can use to evaluate usability. Current topic: testing with real people. |
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Assessing Usability 3: Inspection Usability inspection can typically be done without the need for outside users; relying, instead, on usability experts to identify and evaluate issues that need to be corrected as a design progresses. |
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| Assessing Usability 2: Discovery Techniques you can employ at the beginning of a project, when you have a general idea of what a product needs to do, but you need clarification on how to best implement your ideas in later design activities. |
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| Assessing Usability 1: Introduction This Coffee Talk is the first in a 4-part series on Assessing Usability. The current article gives a brief introduction to the concept of usability, discusses its importance for successful product development and serves as a gateway to three additional articles that deal with some methods and techniques you can use to evaluate usability as the project progresses. |
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