Mind on Marketing

In her all-day day session at EDUI2009, “Usability Testing Without the Scary,” Dana Chisnell laid out the entire process for usability testing. Breaking the process down into small parts that are easy to understand, Dana showed us how to be comfortable with the process, rather than intimidated. Here’s what she shared about creation of the [...]

Dana Chisnell presented an all-day session at the EDUI Conference held in Charlottesville  September 21 & 22, 2009. She founded Usability Works and does usability research, user interface design, and technical communication consulting and development. She is co-author of the Handbook of Usability Testing.  The focus of the workshop was to show how eminently doable [...]

Tricks and techniques work better for improving website usability than do structured methodologies, Jared Spool (CEO, User Interface Engineering) said at the EDUI conference last week. Spool says that there is no evidence that methodologies result in quality designs, and that design can’t be institutionalized to conform to usability templates. He equates methodology with dogma, [...]

The University of Virginia hosted an outstanding usability-focused conference yesterday and today, EDUI 2009. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia, in partnership with User Interface Engineering, produced the conference, featuring a star-studded roster of presenters (forgive the hyperbole, but this conference was an amazing value for the cost of attendance). Today [...]

This week I conducted user testing for the University of Virginia’s Arts and Sciences web site. I’ve been working with the web team for nearly two years. When we began working together, we were looking at what changes were needed to make the site easier to use. The site had recently been overhauled by the [...]