Tammie Egloff's Usability Blog

St. Louis Innovation Camp

tegloff — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:58:56 +0000

For those of you in St. Louis working for a small business and wanting to know more about design, drop by the upcoming St. Louis Innovation Camp. While you’re there, drop by and say hi!

Want to learn more? Check out the list of design speakers or learn more about the event.

Tagged: conference, design, innovation, startup, Usability

EHR Usability

tegloff — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:30:22 +0000

As I’ve mentioned in past blogs, usability is even more important in the development of EHR systems. Dr. Halamka gives an insider view of why usability is so important for the development of EHRs. Its a good read for anyone interested in healthcare and the implementation of EHR systems.

Tagged: EHR, EMR, medical, Usability, user needs

The Fable of the User Centered Designer

tegloff — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:18:11 +0000

I heard about this on Twitter the other day (sorry, I forgot who posted it!). It’s a wonderful little story to help explain some key usability points to teams who have a little time and want to learn more about what we do.

http://www.userfocus.co.uk/fable/index.html

Enjoy!

Tagged: design, educate teams, Usability, user needs

Issues with Skype’s Firefox add-on, slows down Firefox (and, thus, Protoshare)

tegloff — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:19:26 +0000

Just as a quick heads up to all of you out there, I was working in Protoshare and it was running painfully slow. It turns out that Skype’s Firefox add-on can slow down Firefox tremendously. By uninstalling the add-on, everything came back up to regular speed and Protoshare was working beautifully again!

So, if any of you are having Protoshare speed issues ( or Firefox browser issues) and also have Skype installed, check out your versions and try uninstalling (or, at least, disabling) the add-on.

Some other people were having the same issue:

http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=390751

The versions I’m using…

Firefox: 3.5.3

Skype: 4.1.0.141

Good luck and happy prototyping!

Tagged: Firefox, Protoshare, Prototype, Skype, slow, Usability

World Usability Day – St. Louis, Activities

tegloff — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:52:59 +0000

For those of you in the St. Louis area, come to the Science Center on November 7th to see our World Usability Day (WUD) exhibits. This year’s topic is Sustainability. Our confirmed activities include:

Interacting with the Metrolink Touchscreen System

Toilet Designs – Comparison of dual flush and other, more complex functionality

Thermostats – How easy are they to program?

Sustainability Websites – User Testing

Recycle Rally – How fast can a pile of recycling be sorted? What would make it easier to sort?

Mobile Devices – How do websites look on different mobile devices?

Animal Rescue/Recycling/Reuse – “Recycling” dogs into new homes

I hope to see you there!!

Tagged: 2009, St. Louis, Usability, WUD

Dilbert’s company needs some user research!

tegloff — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:03:21 +0000

I wanted to share today’s Dilbert comic. It cracked me up. The first thing I thought was, “They need a UCD person to get the user’s requirements right!”

Tagged: Dilbert, Humor, user needs

Helping Remote Teams Visualize User Data

tegloff — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:00:10 +0000

How do you communicate user data with teams that are not co-located? This can be a common problem with larger companies. If you’re able to, you can travel to their location and run usability interviews with them as guests. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a team that will actually read your notes from individual interviews (yes, I have actually had teams read notes from EVERY participant – amazing! While this can mean a lot of time typing, it works well with some people. Just make sure they read more than one participant, so they do focus too much on one person’s needs/issues.).

I attended a UPA conference a few years ago. One of the more memorable presentations (Usability Analysis Visualization to Improve Communication and Build Trust by Rally Pagulayan, Oracle) included a method of sharing data with teams: affinity diagrams. The method was labor intensive, but effective. Each piece of data was put on an individual post it note. Then, the notes were organized hierarchically on a wall in their lab. Any duplicate data grew into larger stacks. When other team members would come into the lab to see how the sessions were going, they could immediately see all of the important points. Also, for those team members that normally ignored feedback from the usability team (yes, you know they’re out there!), they were able to see all the data and had less inclination to argue.

I thought this method was interesting, but I tended to work with remote teams at the time. So, I came up with a similar method. Instead of using post it notes, I created PowerPoint and Visio presentations. Each page contained a grouping of data. The first page would contain information about the user group (age, computer experience, occupation, location, etc.). Other pages would cover a theme of user data (e.g. a specific portion of the website or task completed). Then, I would organize the data hierarchically. I wanted to convey the large amount of user data for certain points and make sure interesting, if not regularly brought up, data was easily found. I also wanted to put down some thoughts I had while looking at the data and watching sessions. A piece of sample data can be seen here:

I used a few visual differentiators:

Thick borders are used to point out repetitive data.
Dotted lines are used for comments from the UX tester.
Red borders are used for issues on the site, again using the thickness to illustrate highly repetitive issues. Other methods of differentiation may be needed if you work with someone who is color blind.
Participant numbers for each comment is listed to follow specific user needs. If one of the users was a manager and all other users are worker-bees, their approach to the website can be very different. Being able to track comments from both user types can be useful.

While I know this method requires a lot of work, it can be really useful for a couple situations. First of all, if you are new to a team and the team is unsure where you get your suggestions/designs from, creating these documents will help them see the huge quantity of data obtained via user sessions. They can also easily see where the repetitive data is. The data can be used for talking points to explain the design. After a while, hopefully you can earn the trust of the team and will no longer need to use these diagrams. Another time the diagrams can be handy is when you have an issue that is a “hot topic” for various members of the team. You can create a mini diagram for the area of interest. Seeing user data that is specific to the issue can help with discussions, although there are always people who will not change their minds, even with the data!

Tagged: data, Teamwork, Usability, visualization

Colors and Emotions

tegloff — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:15:10 +0000

Colors can play a large roll in website design. I recently read an interesting blog about colors and a dentist’s website that illustrates how the wrong colors can affect a user: http://tpgblog.com/2009/08/31/quickux-desirability-color-fair-dental/

Eye Tracking

tegloff — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:00:05 +0000

Harry Brignull, a classmate from my days at the University of Sussex had a fun little blog on eye tracking I thought I’d share with you all. Its about a demo put together by Bunnyfoot at UX Brighton. Bunnyfoot is a great company that does a lot of work with eye tracking technology. I had the pleasure of meeting Jon and Maggie at a UPA conference a few years ago.

Some Fun Eye-Tracking Heatmaps

Tagged: bunnyfoot, eye tracking, harry brignull, testing, Usability

Protoshare – How to use states sitewide

tegloff — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:56:14 +0000

For those of you thinking about or using Protoshare, I just learned a little more about states. You can implement them across the entire site. How do you do that? Use them in a template that you use throughout the site. Any change in the state will also be remembered.

Why is this useful?

Now, I can quickly mock up what screens look like based on the user’s login status. I can hide/show sections of the screen easily and hide/show login prompts. I’m hoping this will save me a lot of work. Rather than mocking up 2 different screens for each state, I can now mock up just 1: less to create and less to update as changes are made.

A note about defaults….

The first value in the state box is the default. So, if you want to default to show a certain tab open, make sure you set that state accordingly in the state setting. But, if you already have your defaults set up and then you change the order, remember that you will have to change the order for all actions that interact with that state, otherwise, they will be set to the wrong choice. This is a little cumbersome but not awful. Setting the default correctly the first time will make it easier in the future!

Debugging

One way to test your states is via the interactive mode. You can also quickly test using the “States” tab, where you can hide/show states. The “States” tab + the Widgets panel (click the “<<” button the left to open the list) really make debugging easier. Note that you can also hide/show individual Widgets from the list, without using the ”States” tab. Both areas are useful both for debugging and to access any Widgets that are not available based on the status a state.

Tagged: Protoshare, states, Usability