If you are at all like me, you have so many things going on in your work and life it is hard to remember where you are supposed to be and when you are supposed to be there!

For me, the start of the holiday season combines with the start of UW Husky Women's Basketball season and this becomes a real juggling act. I just discovered, however, that I can subscribe to an Internet calendar of U.S. holidays (including postal holidays and federal employee holidays) and the calendar of Husky conference games at icalshare. Beats entering all of those game dates manually!

Of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of calendars available. Your favorite sports team and the holidays for the country you live in are most likely there.

I'm thinking STC ought to have a shared Internet calendar to help everyone keep track of when there are Web seminars, conference proposal deadlines, elections, and so many other things.

Labels: collaboration

You have seen this movie. A new product is coming out and someone finally decides they ought to find out if there are any usability issues. Oh, and the product launches in four weeks.

How do you conduct valid user observation testing on such a short time line? Paul Nuschke offers an approach that he uses in a two-part article on Boxes and Arrows called Quick Turnaround Usability Testing.

Labels: methods

If you create online tutorials or training courses, this article in the ACM e-learning magazine should interest you. eLearn: In Depth Tutorials - Usability and E-learning

Earlier tutorials should also be useful:
eLearn: In Depth Tutorials - What Is "Usable" e-Learning?

eLearn: In Depth Tutorials - Usability, User Experience, and Learner Experience

Labels: methods

It depends. :-) That answer drives clients crazy, doesn't it? But the practice of usability is all about context; there is never just one method that works for every situation.

Christian Rohrer, a Jakob Nielsen associate, lays out a great method for determining with usability methods are most useful for uncovering what kind of information in the latest Alert Box, When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods.

When the "product" you are testing is documentation or another technical communication product, there are several methods available that are not listed in Rohrer's article. I suspect the Norman Nielsen Group is seldom asked to test documentation.

Most of us in UUX, however, are focused on documentation and other communication products. Because of this, David Dick, Assistant UUX Manager and Chauncey Wilson are planning an STC conference progression focused on usability methods for testing documentation.

Webmaster Cheryl St. Charles and I are also working on a usability resource list with a focus on documentation usability. We hope to make that available before the end of 2008.

Labels: methods

What color should the links be? If something is red, what does it mean? Is white good and black bad? Color Matters is all about color (and colour) Color Matters Newsletter [25] - Fall 2008

Color Matter does not focus on color usability, but on the broader color issues, particularly using color in any and all aspects of design.

The newsletter comes out quarterly and is worth signing up for. They have also added a blog to keep you up on color news.

Labels: color, interface