The Usability SIG Newsletter
Usability Interface

Usability Interface is the quarterly publication of the Usability SIG. The purpose of the newsletter is to provide technical communicators with up-to-date and in-depth information on how they can apply usability design and testing techniques to their products.

April 2002

What I Learned as a Writer from Doing Usability and Interface Testing
by Anne F. Jackson

Usability testing was an important success factor in a recent project on designing an online interactive help system. As a group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University, we had widely ranging backgrounds, but none of us had experience with usability testing or user observations. Involvement with our users provided a great deal of expected and unexpected feedback to the group, and helped us tremendously to learn more about our users, and ourselves as writers and information designers. More...

The Politics of Usability
by Thomas McCoy

Usability is political. The travel agent battling with an online booking system. The pensioner struggling to use an ATM. The telephone caller lost in the voice-prompt-maze of a computerised answering system. These people exemplify an underclass of end-users forced to interact with technology during their working and private lives. More...

Hart's Law: The Magical Number Three, Plus or Minus Zero
by Geoff Hart

George Miller, infamous for his "magical number seven, plus or minus two," somehow missed an even more important principle of how the world works: no matter how clever we think we are, it still takes us three tries to get anything approximately right. Although most of us have proven beyond a shadow of doubt our ability to blunder around and take many more than three tries, the overwhelming majority of us get it nearly right on the third try. More...

How Usable Software Can Liberate Users
by Mike Mullins

Administrative requirements of a Boy Scout troop are daunting. The Boy Scouts have a form for practically everything—over 100 in all. A tool that consolidates forms and data, and serves as a central repository, would increase productivity and provide more time for other scouting activities. There is such a tool and it is called TroopMaster2000. Mike Mullins, a parent leader with Boy Scout Troop 457 in Brussels, Belgium, explains how TroopMaster2000 has helped. More...

I Bought a PC! Lessons in Usability
by David Dick

Tales from the family living room. Is usability of the out-of-box experience improving? More...

Pulse of the Usability SIG: Signs of Spring?
by Whitney Quesenbery

Musings on the state of usability today. More...