Getting on the Same Page:
The Importance of Stakeholder Interviews
By cholcombe | June 3, 2010
Why Stakeholder Interviews? At the beginning of each new project we undertake at Design For Use, members of our team conduct a series of interviews to establish the scope of a project and ensure that all of our client stakeholders have a shared vision. Interviewing each member of the client team helps the consultant (us) [...]
Topics: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
High-Fidelity: From Wireframes to Comps
By mpandit | May 27, 2010
In this post, we discuss some of the basic steps we typically use to create compelling visual design compositions or mockups from the wireframes developed by our IAs. Ideally, a visual designer should be involved with a project from the onset. However, the reality for a service firm like ours where we are usually running [...]
Topics: Uncategorized, Wireframe, visual design | 5 Comments »
10 Steps to Great Client Relationships
By njain | May 6, 2010
As Design For Use celebrates our 5th birthday, we have decided to share our hard-earned wisdom by distilling what we feel are the 10 most important lessons to help build a lasting client relationship. Though we are a user experience consulting company, these should apply to anybody who is in the service business. Enjoy!
Topics: Client Deliverables, Client Management, Project Management | 1 Comment »
Reaching Retirees: Web Design for Senior Users
By cholcombe | April 21, 2010
With the aging population and increased reliance on internet resources, improving the online experience of senior and retired users can facilitate greater success and knowledge about the web. While the common practices of increased text size, button size, and simplified layout contribute to online retiree success, the real key is developing confidence in senior users by improving their mental models of websites. By requiring self-identification, providing a shallow page structure, and limiting the use of PDFs, senior and retired users can grow more adept at completing online tasks quickly and successfully.
Topics: User Research, accessibility | 6 Comments »
Better Site Maps: Some Different Perspectives
By cholcombe | April 5, 2010
Conveying the findings of a heuristic evaluation can be tedious if they rely too heavily on textual explanations and screenshots. A compelling way to improve conversations with clients and executives is to create a visual representation of their existing website. Seeing the physical structure of the website provides an innovative look at its structure, accessibility, and potential improvement.
Topics: Client Deliverables, Heuristic Evaluations | 2 Comments »
Creating Compelling UX Deliverables
By rkhanna | March 24, 2010
Project deliverable often carry a lot of quantitative information and combined with the text tend to run into a number of pages. The meaning of this data is very useful for the clients to help them take decisions and thus, the statistics need to be comprehensible at a glance. In this post Design For Use discusses some of its efforts to make the project documentation more interesting and easily readable using some common visualization principles.
Topics: Client Deliverables | 1 Comment »
Mapping Mental Models with Treejack
By cholcombe | March 16, 2010
Determining the best labels and information architecture for a website are both fundamental tasks that need to be established early in the design (or redesign) process. Unfortunately, these two areas are so closely related its sometimes hard to tell if your usability problem is due to poor naming conventions or a problematic site structure. Testing users’ models for these problems has become easier thanks to Treejack, an IA tool developed by OptimalWorkshop that can also be used to test the taxonomy of a websit
Topics: Usability Studies | No Comments »
Visio Data Graphics: Easy text and data entry for custom shapes
By njain | March 8, 2010
Like it or not, Visio has for some time been the de facto wireframing tool in Windows. At Design For Use, we have been steadily dialing-up the sophistication of our wireframes using some of the powerful yet difficult to discover features of this tool. In this tutorial, we describe the steps to create custom, reusable [...]
Topics: Visio Tips | 4 Comments »
Card Sorting with OptimalSort – A Case Study (Abridged)
By drichard | March 1, 2010
Businesses commonly use internal language to construct web sites, which may not align to the language of the user. Card sorting provides an effective way of generating user feedback by revealing information about the user’s mental model. Process In a typical card sort, users are given cards containing different site content and asked to organize [...]
Topics: User Research | 1 Comment »
Backpack Hack (Firefox): Single-column layout for “All Pages”
By drichard | February 22, 2010
Last week, we posted instructions for how to override the default (two-column) view of the “All Pages” page for your Backpack account using the Chrome browser. Today we are adding details for achieving the same view in Firefox. Single-column Layout Firefox Step 1: From the Firefox browser, find the “Stylish” extension here and “Add to [...]
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »