usability
Articles
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Picture Imperfect: Methods for Testing How Your App Handles Images On a website and in digital files, images present a set of complications and differentiations that you need to keep in mind when your application receives and presents them. Your application might rely on a library, plugin, or service built somewhere else to handle this image management, so you should test the image uploader to ensure it works correctly and handles common points of failure. Here are some things to watch out for. |
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How to Maintain a Compatible User Experience Tara Nicholson explains why it's important to take into account compatibility, which refers to the ability of a software system to function across a variety of client software (browsers), operating systems, and hardware combinations. In this article, Tara shares some helpful strategies for you to consider when maintaining a compatible user experience. |
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Usability: Don’t Listen, Just Watch When projects employ professional testers, their focus is generally “functional” testing, and usability quickly becomes an afterthought—if it's thought about at all. David Greenlees writes that getting participants to a state of mind where they are comfortable to honestly raise whatever issues they come across, including emotional responses, is the ultimate goal. |
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How the Usability Matrix of Emotions Can Benefit Your Software Testing Emotional response is a big deal in usability, but how much do the emotions preceding those responses play a part? David Greenlees explains how the Usability Matrix of Emotions can capture the more common emotions that users may have when they begin to use the software product you oversee and how understanding these emotions can shape your usability testing. |
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5 Reasons to Automate Testing by Recording User Interaction Rich Internet applications with desktop-like functionality can be very beneficial, but they pose special testing challenges. One approach is to start with a closer look at how users interact with the applications. |
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Bare Minimum Internationalization of Software Internationalization isn’t only about dealing with other nationalities and languages. It’s about creating software for a multicultural world. Even if the software you’re testing won’t be translated entirely into another language, it still should meet some basic requirements for international visitors. |
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Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder As a user experience design specialist, clients often ask Jeff Patton to make their software "look better," so it can be successful. But when clients focus primarily on aesthetics, they're often addressing the wrong thing. In this column, Jeff takes a look at common user interface (UI) mistakes and the key concerns software development teams should address to build successful UIs. |
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How Early Interface Analysis Reduces Risk Analyzing a project's interface requirements often starts late and focuses--sometimes exclusively—on creating a snazzy user interface. But failing to conduct interface analysis in a early increases the risk of project delays, overruns, and even failure. In this column, Mary Gorman makes the case for investing in interface analysis by explaining what it is and how it reduces the risk in software projects. |
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Looks Do Matter In a previous article published on this site, "Testing the Bold and the Beautiful" (May 2001), the author received many thoughtful comments and questions about the importance of aesthetics in software. This paper was inspired in part from those questions. It clarifies the difference between aesthetic testing and usability testing. The paper makes the business case for "beauty testing" and argues that an ugly UI can undermine the bottom line. It offers methods and a survey-template for successful aesthetic testing. The paper concludes with a list of "Facts and Myths, Dos and Don'ts." |
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Write a Blockbuster Using User Scenarios Big projects require many little user stories. But if these scenarios don't add up to one good story, then you're probably missing out on the big picture. In this week's column, Jeff Patton describes how his team weaves many small tales into a single strong report by identifying key characters and themes. |
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