Useful Links

Usability in general

• IBM Ease of Use - User Engineering including Roles by Phase Matrix
• Interactive Methods Table from Usability.Net
• UsabilityNet
• Society for Technical Communication Usability SIG site - excellent source of lots of practical info
• Spin Group - good collection of articles on usability topics and methods
• UsabilityFirst.com -- This website provides information and resources for key issues related to usability in website and software design. UsabilityFirst.com believes that helping people do their work in an effective and enjoyable way should be the top priority in design because if a product is not usable, people will not use it.
• Usability Professionals' Association - Resources -- A forum to promote usability concepts and techniques worldwide.
• Usability SIG (Society for Technical Communication) -- Lots of useful references
• The HCI Bibliograhy -- The most comprehensive source on human-computer interaction.
• Usability.gov -- Really excellent site -- National Cancer Institute resource for designing usable web sites and user interfaces.
• Usability Experience Magazinel from the Usability Professional's Association

Sample Usability Reports

• Comparative Usability Evaluation - CUE
• BASELINE Report Format - This archive consists mainly of BASELINE reports and material, as well as the ELPUB 105 report.
• Usability Report of "Good Documents" website

Usability testing

• Usability Testing Materials

Heuristics

• Sample checklist from InfoDesign
  
• 
  Sample test materials from STC usability SIG: scroll down to Usability Checklists and Heuristic Reviews; include process for heuristics review and sample checklists 1 & 2
• Heuristic Evaluation - A System Checklist By Deniese Pierotti, Xerox Corporation
• Research-based guidelines from usability.gov (128 pp.). Doesn't print well and takes a very long time load - try thisversion instead.
• Instone's Web usability heuristics

Surveys

• Excellent collection of web survey resources collected by Rashmi Sinha
• good Q&A on user surveys in usability
• Survey resources from usabilitynet.org

Sample Surveys

• http://www.web-surveys.net/onlineresearch/wsn_ws/sample_surveys.html
• http://www.nooro.com/n/ss01/sample01.asp
• http://www.perseusdevelopment.com/surveytips/samplesurveys.html
• http://www.hostedsurvey.com/Samples.asp
• http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=1246999657 (a web survey -- worth *answering*, given that we've just been talking about these things -- you may or may not want to submit your survey, but try it out to get a user's perspective on the questions. Normally, you would hear about this survey either because you were on their mailing list or because you were visiting their site.)
• http://surveymonkey.com/ (a site that is running the utne survey; follow their "types of questions" link for examples of ways of formatting questions)

Columnists

• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox -- One-stop shopping for Nielsen's view of the world. Increasingly dedicated to advertising for their (expensive) reports, but still has useful info.
• AskTog.com -- Bruce Tognazzini's columns on design.
• User Interface engineering - Jared Spool's organization. They hype their own trainings but have good short articles, too

Web Survey Tools

• Questionnaires in Usability Engineering -- A reasonably good site, however, the link they provide to their own web usability survey is currently broken.
• http://www.inquisite.com/
• http://www.aviva-pages.com/survey/

Accessibility/Universal Usability

• http://www.w3.org/WAI
• http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12
• http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/chapter3.pdf

Testing

• Bobby -- A web site originally produced by the Center for Applied Special Technology that will analyze any web page for conformity with the W3C web content accessibility guidelines. Try it out!
• http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/index.html
• http://www.smc.edu/disabledstudent/WebAccess/webaccess_eval.htm
• http://webxact.watchfire.com/

Statistical Tools

• http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/~stark/SticiGui/index.htm

Organizations

• Marcus, A. (2003). When is a user not a user?: Who are we? What do we do? interactions, 10, 28-34. Useful for his list of conferences and organizations.
• • ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
  • AIA: American Institute of Architects
  • AIGA: American Institute of Graphic Arts
  • HFES: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
  • ICOGRADA: International Council of Graphic Design Associations
  • ICSID: International Council of Societies of Industrial Design
  • IEEE: Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers
  • IDSA: Industrial Designers Society of America
  • IIID: International Institute for Information Design
  • SIGCHI: Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, a unit of ACM
  • SIGGRAPH: Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interaction, a unit of ACM
  • STC: Society for Technical Communication
  • UPA: Usability Professionals Association

Journals

• ACM Interactions (Available free through campus)
• Journal of Usability Studies from the Usability Professionals Association