My book, Designing Usable Apps, is now available!
- Available in print and Kindle editions at Amazon.com
- Get more information at www.designingusableapps.com
Welcome!
Hi, I'm Kevin Matz. This is my blog about usability and UX design for websites and software products. Let me know what you think!-
Recent Posts
- How to conduct heuristic inspections for evaluating software usability
- Focus groups as a usability evaluation technique
- Analytics as a usability evaluation technique
- Quantifying cognitive load and task efficiency
- The impact of hardware devices on software ergonomics
- Software requirements in a nutshell
- Designing search systems
- Designing an interaction framework for your application’s tasks
- How to build a visual hierarchy to express relationships between page elements
- Interaction design and usability for data persistence and transactions
- Designing navigation and wayfinding in software applications and websites
- Designing your application’s interaction concept
- What characteristics contribute to a negative user experience?
- What characteristics contribute to a positive user experience?
- How to design software to encourage flow states, concentration, focus, and productivity
- Design techniques for reducing cognitive load
- “Don’t make me think!”: Eliminating excise and reducing cognitive load
- Communicating your mental model to the user: Design models and the system image
- Understanding the process of user interface design
- Donald Norman’s design principles for usability
- How do users perform tasks, do work, and learn how to use software applications?
- Understanding the technology framework for building your product’s user interface
- An introduction to data models and UML class diagrams for user interface designers
- Why understanding your application’s domain and data model is a prerequisite for good user interface design
- Requirements gathering techniques for understanding user characteristics
- How to write user personas
- User requirements: Understanding your users’ characteristics
- End users vs. buyers
- User segments and roles
- How to conduct user observation sessions
- How to recruit users for usability testing
- What user interface designers need to know about how human memory works
- How users’ skills and competence improve with practice
- Designing software for different user skill levels
- Security usability: Designing usable software security measures
- Designing error-handling for maximum usability in your application
- How to name things in your application
- Choosing an interaction style for your application
- Don’t make assumptions about your users’ existing skills!
- What is involved in designing user interfaces for an application?
- What is gamification?
- How do users learn and use software applications? An introduction to mental models
- How to use visual attributes to create contrast and attract interest
- Unity: A primary goal in visual design
- Software delivery mechanisms: Comparing desktop applications, web apps, and static websites
- What should you look for in a usability trainer?
- The Gestalt Laws of Perception and how to use them in UI design
- How do people look at and read pages? (Part 3 of 3)
- How do people look at and read pages? (Part 2 of 3)
- How do people look at and read pages? (Part 1 of 3)
- The impact of visual design on usability
- Preview of upcoming topics for this blog
- What is Information Architecture and why is it important in software application design?
- Overcoming objections to involving users in your software project
- What is User Experience (UX)?
- What is User-Centered Design?
- What does “easy-to-use” mean?
- Welcome to Architecting Usability
Categories
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- Interaction Design (10)
- Office Politics (3)
- Product Management (20)
- Product Marketing (2)
- Project Management (5)
- Psychology for UX Design (23)
- Requirements Engineering (12)
- Training (2)
- Uncategorized (4)
- Usability (38)
- Usability Testing (6)
- User Experience Design (37)
- User-Centered Design (15)
- Visual Design (16)
Archives
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- July 2012 (12)
- June 2012 (19)
- May 2012 (5)
- July 2011 (1)
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- May 2011 (12)
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Category Archives: Product Management
Understanding the process of user interface design
Designing a user interface for a non-trivial product is a complex task. One traditional approach to designing and building software products was the waterfall model, where requirements are first gathered and written up in specifications documents. These are then handed … Continue reading
Requirements gathering techniques for understanding user characteristics
To gather requirements and information on your product’s potential users and their characteristics, you might consider using some combination of the following techniques: Interviews with users Interviews with managers and other stakeholders (if applicable) Interviews with subject matter (domain) experts … Continue reading
How to write user personas
For each of your product’s user segments, you will want to write up a brief description of those users in terms of their characteristics, general tasks, and usability requirements. One way to approach this task is to use personas, a modelling … Continue reading
User requirements: Understanding your users’ characteristics
Once you have made an initial list of user segments or roles for your product, your next step is to understand the general characteristics of users in each group. Understanding your users can help you design the product to meet … Continue reading
End users vs. buyers
For most consumer products, the user has purchased the product for their own personal use. But for many products, the end user and the buyer are not always the same. End users are the people who will use the product … Continue reading
How to conduct user observation sessions
Watching real users use your product or prototype is really the only way to truly evaluate whether your design is sufficiently usable and learnable. User observation sessions quickly reveal where users have problems figuring out your product. Let’s take a … Continue reading
