ConceptCodify

In Usability 101 by the Nielsen Norman group, Jakob Nielsen provides an overview of what usability is. Nielsen breaks usability down into five components: Learnability, Efficiency, Memorability, Errors, and Satisfaction. He also touches on why usability is important and how to improve it. Check out the article at: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/

Nielson Norman Group’s latest blog post, “Selecting an Online Tool for Unmoderated Remote User Testing”, outlines unmoderated remote user testing and a selection of tools that make it available. It covers recording user audio and video, recruiting issues, task writing, and results timing.

Check it out now!

What would happen if we did no user research at all? Let’s consider how it would impact most teams making sites and apps.

1. We’d have to rely on other means of making important decisions.

Without user research data, we have to rely on our analytics reporting (if its setup) and we have to rely on support emails directly from users. Both of these things are valuable, but for many design choices…

User Experience and Interface Design

User experience design is a wide field. There’s interaction design, interface design, information design, graphic design, copywriting, information architecture, usability… the list goes on.

Many people outside of design confuse user experience and interface design to be the same thing. But they are distinct.

The user experience is very broad and can include a variety of things. However, in most…

Often we group user research and user testing into the same general block. But in reality, these are two different things, even though they share methods.

User research focuses on getting information for the sake of getting information, often without a specific agenda in mind. In research mode, you are gathering information without necessarily having a specific object or hypothesis.

User testing …

Book Recommendation: Baymard Studies

Not every published user research study produces practical suggestions and tools. Many don’t even go into depth about why they end up at particular findings. Some publish study data without doing much interpretation of results.

With the Baymard Institute, you’ll get a practical, hands on, and well explained heuristic of the study results. While the method they use is often a bit limited and lacks…

What’s your company’s design process?

Maybe a stakeholder says, I want this, or we need that. Maybe there’s some market research or looking at analytics; probably not. The designers then jump into Photoshop, making what the stakeholder asks for page by page, comping each page in full each time. The stakeholders have a few random comments, but generally approve it since its exactly what they asked…

One of the most common questions we get at ConceptCodify is, “how many cards should I put in a study?” We see studies of all types and sizes, and we can make some recommendations based on what we’ve seen so far.

The biggest mistake many researcher make is having studies with way too many cards. We’ve seen studies with over 300 cards before. Statistically, these studies get very few responses.…

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter)

One of the best books written about the user experience design process, Jesse James Garrett’s manifest provides a solid, simple structure to thinking about systematizing design. In this book, the author lays down the system in five large stages, Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, and…

Sometimes all you need is to know how to layout a navigation. Other times though, you have thousands and thousands of concepts and ideas for very large sites and projects that need to be organized coherently and efficiently. This is when we evolve from conversation about information architecture and we add strategyto the element. No longer do we just think about how to arrive at the best…

Here at ConceptCodify we focus our efforts and tool set for web designers, developers, project managers, user researchers, and others who are primarily building websites and desktop and mobile applications. We come from this background so it’s a good fit…

We’ve covered our process for launching projects and getting them out the door in our article series, the Lean Launch. Today we’re going to cover a more generic architecture, similar to a top down approach, that could cover nearly any project from a very…

The hardest part of the user experience process: Getting stakeholders on board

Some user experience designers and research have the luck of working in an organization that already knows their value and have fully integrated user experience and research into their process. Most of us aren’t so lucky.

Some of us are designers, some of…

The hardest part of the user experience process: Getting stakeholders on board

Some user experience designers and research have the luck of working in an organization that already knows their value and have fully integrated user experience and research into their process. Most of us aren’t so lucky.

Some of us are designers, some of…

Nielson Norman Group:

When it comes to basic web behaviors, there is no "us" and "them"

Behavior (Photo credit: Rickydavid)

Often when you read a book, article, or heuristic guidelines,…

Why you should keep your project cycle short

small toad (Photo credit: Scott*)

We often hear about why waterfall processes, or trying to complet…