IS 214 : Needs and Usability Assessment Spring 2005, TuTh 2-3:30, 110 South Hall
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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.

 

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 - try this version 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

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 RESOURCES

The following are resources for 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/guidelines/accessibility.html#one
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/facsocsi/acess/tips.htm

Color Pallet:
http://www.iboost.com/build/reference/1045.htm

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!

 

Statistical Tools:

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

Survey Question Design:

 

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)