Welcome, to all my usability students for the Summer ‘09 semester. Here are some essential links for you:
You can find future classes listed in the top navigation if you would like a preview of what is to come.
As of this morning, the service I have been using to post my class slides to this site has been acting wonky, so you may not see the slides. If its not working within the next day or two I will post PDFs of my slides.
At the end of Monday’s class, we talked about trust in the online world, and how it acts as the bedrock for transactions such as creating accounts, purchases, and entering personal information. After all, we can’t have much of a usable site if people can’t trust the site enough to actually use it.
Here is the list of qualities we created that help us to identify trustworthy sites and transactions:
- There is discussion about the site in the blogosphere
- We can find other people discussing the site with Google
- The site provides exceeding value (example: mint.com)
- Spelling and grammar is correct
- Content is relevant and meets our expectations
- The mechanics of the interface work as expected (e.g. drop downs work properly, works on all browsers, etc.)
- We can find articles about the site from reputable media outlets
- The site represents a known brand
- There is design consistency throughout the site (fonts, colors, language)
- The site has transparency in its operations and content (examples: getsatisfaction.com provides transparency in customer relations, and visicog.com provides transparency into what happens in our class)
- Privacy statements are clear and prominent (example: “we won’t use your email address for marketing purposes or share it with anyone else”)
- The site displays trust symbols such as VeriSign’s logo or industry badges such as the Better Business Bureau
- Someone we know has recommended the site
- Prominent contact information, including phone number is displayed
- The domain name appears valid (no misspellings or odd characters)
