GUUUI - The Interaction Designer's Coffee Break

CURRENT ISSUE

Personas and the customer decision-making process
How to capture the nature of online customers

This is a case study showing how the use of personas can help us capture the nature of online customers and design for their needs and concerns, as they progress through the customer decision-making process.

Read the article:

Personas and the customer decision-making process

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PAST ISSUES

ISSUE 07 - April 2003
Supporting customers' decision-making process

ISSUE 05 - January 2003
Business-centred design - Designing web sites that sell

ISSUE 04 - October 2002
InfoRomanticism on the Internet - Romantic sensibility in the design of online content

ISSUE 03 - July 2002
Results from a Survey Of Web Prototyping Usage
Visio - the Interaction Designers Nail Gun

ISSUE 02 - April 2002
The Bottom-line of Prototyping and Usability Testing - How user-centred design techniques can make a cost effective workflow

ISSUE 01 - January 2002
Competitive Usability - How usability will be the key differentiator of tomorrow's Internet

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LATEST POSTINGS

I'm sorry to announce that the ability to add postings and comments on GUUUI has been closed down because of massive spamming of the site - Henrik Olsen


	Tips and Guidelines Jakob Nielsen on information foraging

"…information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online."

"The two main strategies are to make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it's an easy catch. These strategies must be used in combination: users will leave if the content is good but hard to find, or if it's easy to find but offers only empty calories."

Links:
Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster

Henrik Olsen | July 03, 2003


	Cases and Examples Personas and the customer decision-making process

The Q3 2003 issue of GUUUI features a case study showing how the use of personas can help us capture the nature of online customers and design for their needs and concerns, as they progress through the customer decision-making process.

Links:
The GUUUI article Personas and the customer decision-making process

Henrik Olsen | July 01, 2003


	Research and Statistics Breadth vs. depth in menu design

According to Kath Straub and Susan Weinschenk, research shows that users generally find information faster in broad and shallow structured sites than the narrow and deep ones – as long as they are not extremely broad.

"Research comparing navigation efficiency through sites of varying depths and breadths broadly converges on the findings that users find roughly 16 (ungrouped) top-level links leading into 2-3 subsequent menus the most efficient, learnable and least error prone."

But several other factors are also thought to influence ease of navigation, such as clear and distinct labels, and effective sub-grouping of categories.

Links:
The article Breadth vs. Depth

Henrik Olsen | June 27, 2003


	Research and Statistics The myth of 7 +/- 2

Periodically, we hear about the rule of 7 +/- 2 from inexperienced interaction designers: Users can't handle more than 7 bullets on a page, seven items in a form list, or more than seven links in a menu. According to James Kalback, this has no evidence in reality – on the contrary. The psychologist George Miller's conclusions apply to what we can memorize – not what we can perceive.

Current research strongly supports that broad structures perform better than deep structures. Users can more easily cope with broad structures, they have a greater chance of getting lost in deep hierarchical structures, and new visitors are able to get a better overview of sites offerings from a broader structure.

Links:
The Myth of Seven, Plus or Minus 2

Henrik Olsen | June 24, 2003


	Methods and the Design Process Most difficult part of user experience work

What's the most difficult part of UX work? Very simple: changing the organization.

More in the column.

Links:
Read the full column

Mark Hurst | June 20, 2003

More >>

BROWSE SUBJECTS IN GUUUI POSTINGS

Research and Statistics (42)
Research and statistics on user behaviour, trends, demographics, technological issues, etc.

Methods and the Design Process (37)
Design techniques and development workflow.

Resources and Tools (35)
Sites, journals, mailing lists, software, and other useful stuff.

Tips and Guidelines (31)
Recommendations and design guidelines.

Books (22)
Reviews and sample chapters of books of interest to the interactive design community.

Humor (22)
Fun stuff for the interactive design community.

Business and Strategy (17)
Strategy, marketing, merchandising, ROI and the like.

News, Weblogs, and Magazines (14)
News, weblogs, and magazines of interest to the interactive design community.

Cases and Examples (10)
Case studies and examples of good and bad design.

Interviews (9)
Interviews of interest to the interactive design community.

Technology (6)
Browsers, HTML, frames, Flash etc. and their impact on usability.

Communication and Visual Design (4)
Communication, Visual Design, Information Design, Graphic Design, branding and the like.

Organisations (1)
Organisations involved in the interactive design community