Below are my slides I’ll be using for the Tuesday night Information Session. See you there!
Monthly Archive for August, 2008
I’ll be speaking about the state of the web industry and my usability class at the NYU SCPS Career Night and Information Session on Tuesday, August 19th. I’ll be sharing some unique research about the growth of the web industry in early-stage companies, using data pulled from my day job at Angelsoft.net. This event is targeted towards prospective students.
Last semester, I wanted to test the level of usefullness for one of the textbooks I assign. Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines is a solid book that I have kept as part of my class for the last couple of years, but I haven’t been completely sure as to how helpful it was to my students because of the broad range of experience levels in the classroom. So in a typical usability-teacher fashion, I ran a test in the guise of a homework assignment to assess the book’s true usefullness.
The Assignment
The assignment was for students to hand in a list of the five most “surprising” guidelines from the book. The aspect of “surprising” was open ended- it could mean that a student learned something new and helpful, that they found something that they vehemently disagreed with, or something else all together.
I took all of the answers, and put them in a spreadsheet to see what patterns could be observed in the answers. Ultimately I found that students gravitated towards guidelines that had practical implications to their current positions. I also found that there was very little overlap between what guidelines students found useful. There were two huge spikes in guideline citation, however…
The Hardest Working Guidelines in Class
These two guidelines were each cited by more than a third of the classroom in the assignment. No other guidelines came close to their popularity.
Guideline 6:9 — Avoid Scroll Stoppers
“Ensure that the location of headings and other page elements does not create the illusion that users have reached the top or bottom of a page when they have not.”
Guideline 1:10 — Use Parallel Design
“Have several developers independently propose designs and use the best elements from each design.”
Many of the students who listed the Parallel Design guideline expressed that they didn’t know how to practically implement it due to resource constraints. So, here are a couple of ways that we do this at my company that are both time and resource efficient:
- With my designer hat on, I’ll sit down with another team member (project manager, programmer, etc) at a table for an hour. We then independently sketch our own solutions to the problem, while looking over each others shoulders for inspiration.
- We will sometimes break out of a product meeting and hand everyone a whiteboard marker. Everyone then sketches out their own solution to the problem at the same time for 10 minutes. We’ll then review everyone’s solution, and then draft a composite of the best elements from everyone’s solutions. The designer can then flesh out the details from there.