Designing click targets for better usability

Jensen Harris, writer of official Microsoft Office blog Giving You Fitts, explains Fitts law (the time required to move from one position to another is a function of the distance to and the size of the target) and how it affects interface design.

Most importantly, Harris states, is how increasing screen resolution has negatively affected people's ability to quickly "hit" a target with a mouse cursor.

Using text with an icon is more usable because the target is larger. Making toolbars more compact - multiple rows in floating rectangles - makes the distance from cursor to icon shorter and, therefore, faster.

As evidence of how design changes work, Harris provides examples from the redesign of Office 2007.

Great guide to choosing color combinations

Color is always an issue in usable and accessible design. Pabini Gabriel-Petit provides an extremely useful guide to choosing combinations of color and backgrounds in his article Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays for UX Matters.

With numerous examples, he shows clearly the issue of contrast and its affect on readability. Since this is the third in a series, you might want to check on the first two installments, as well.

Nightmares in Usability

An interesting look at the reactions of people in a user forum when someone asks them to review a Flash-based Web site, Nightmares in Usability

Fast, Cheap, and Good

Okay, this is an ad for one of Jakob's workshops - Fast, Cheap, and Good Usability Methods: Yes, You Can Have It All - but his point is worth remembering: "The sooner you complete a usability test, the higher its impact on the design process."

Help writers need to be domain experts, too.

As a former online Help developer, and a current usability specialist, I always argue that most online Help is ignored because it simply does not answer the questions users have. Help developer Mike Hughes had an aha! moment during a usability test of a Help system. He describes it in this article - User Assistance in the Role of Domain Expert at UXMatters.

A List Apart: Articles: How to Grok Web Standards

Craig Cook came to Web design from graphic arts and admits you have to change the way you think about design when working on the Web in a great article - How to Grok Web Standards - at A List Apart.

Locating participants with disabilities

If you need people with disabilities to take part in research or testing projects, you can now access a nation-wide panel through AbilityPanel.com. The panel is a project of Butler New Media, a market research group.

Expert Reviews and Testing Produce Same Results

Rolf Molich has been exploring the reproducibility of usability testing for several years, now. In a profile of Molich in UPA Voice, he discusses the various experiments he has run over the years to compare results when several usability experts test or review the same site.
One conclusion he has reached is that very often, there are so many problems with a site, some of which are non-compliance with well-known standards and conventions, it is not surprising each researcher finds different issues.
Developers appear to have no knowledge of heuristics, Molich concludes. If they did the problems would never appear on the site.
So, is usability testing useless? No, Moclich says.
"“I still think usability testing is a very important method, but not to find usability problems. Its most important role is to make people understand the need for the prevention of usability problems. Usability tests are a very, very important political instrument. It’s an absolutely unique method for convincing product team members that usability problems exist in their product. Your baby is ugly, and something needs to be done about it. But the method is much too expensive to eradicate all usability problems or even just all serious usability problems.”