A User Centered Resource Site

Glossary

User Centered Design "User Centered Design is the practice of creating engaging, efficient user experiences."
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
User Experience "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.
-Nielsen Norman Group
Usability The characteristic of being easy to use, usually applied to software, but relevant to almost any human artifact. What makes an artifact easy to use? Broadly, something is easy to use to the extent that it effectively performs the task for which it is being used. Ease of use can be measured by how quickly a task is performed, how many mistakes are made, how quickly the system is learned and how satisfied people are who perform the task. Usability may also include factors such as safety, usefulness, and cost-effectiveness.
-Usability first. "Your online guide to usability resources."
Usability Testing same as user testing, but emhasizes that it is the property of being usable, not the user, that is being tested.

Usability testing encompasses a range of methods that examine how users in the target audience actually interact with a system, in contrast to analytic techniques such as usability inspection. In a typical approach, a user performs a variety of tasks with the application while an observer records notes on how successful the user is in performing each task: how fast users go, what mistakes they make, where they're confused, what solution paths they take, how many learning trials are involved, and so forth.
-Usability first. "Your online guide to usability resources."
User Testing a family of methods for evaluating a user interface by collecting data from people actually using the system.

A simple user test would be to bring in a small number of potential users of the software (4-5 minimum, 8-10 to be thorough, more if the problem space or audience is diverse) and have each person sit down and use the software to perform a series of tasks while an observer takes notes about what difficulties each user encounters. Typically, users are asked to think out loud while they work with the software to help the observers understand how the users think about their problems and how the interface could be improved.

More involved user testing may test more users, get as representative a selection of users as possible, try out a variety of tasks, control the testing environment in various ways (or test a more naturalistic work environment), use more careful or thorough measurement instruments (videotaping, recording keystrokes, etc.), or combine the testing with other methods of data collection, such as interviews of users.
-Usability first. "Your online guide to usability resources."
Website Design The process of designing the content, the look and feel, the structure, the navigation, and the implementation of a website.

Website designers are user interface designers who design for a specific domain which is challenging for the wide variety of users, platforms, and browsers, and the common problems (among many others) of network performance, first-time and one-time users, and the powerful conflict between establishing brand identity and following predictable conventions.

Webste design is a young and very rapidly changing field. Good website designers need to have a very solid background in the fundamentals of user interface design and need to focus on usability processes, such as user testing, rather than relying strictly on usability guidelines which quickly become obsolete due to the changing technology and user population on the web.
User Interface Design the overall process of designing how a user will be able to interact with a software application.

User interface design is involved in many stages of product development, including: requirements analysis, information architecture, interaction design, screen design, user testing, documentation, and help system design. User interface designers may require skills in many areas, including: graphic design, information design, software engineering, cognitive modeling, technical writing, and a wide variety of data collection and testing techniques.
Cognitive Modeling producing a computational model for how people perform tasks and solve problems, based on psychological principles. These models may be outlines of tasks written on paper or computer programs which enable us to predict the time it takes for people to perform tasks, the kinds of errors they make, the decisions they make, or what buttons and menu items they choose.


Such models can be used in several ways: to determine ways of improving the user interface so that a person's task has fewer errors or takes less time, to build into the user interface to make software that reacts more effectively to help people use the system by anticipating their behavior or inferring their mental state (an artificial intelligence approach that may be used, for instance, in educational software, to provided the best customized instruction), or as a means of testing current psychological theory.

Major modeling approaches include GOMS, ACT-R, Epic, and Soar.
-Usability first. "Your online guide to usability resources."
Web Development the term may includes Web design (or semantics), programming, server administration, content management, marketing, testing and deployment. It can also specifically be used to refer to the "back end", that is, programming and server administration.

-www.edlinkservices.com/support/glossary.php
Brand Identity the aspect of a design that establishes a unique look and feel distinct from competing products but consistent within the product and its product line. The identity has these advantages:
  • it maintains a consistency that helps a user orient and remember the structure of the software.
  • it informs the user about the context and the values espoused by the application and its developers.
  • it helps a user remember and identify a specific product and vendor.
  • it establishes a creative aspect to the design that cannot be imitated by competitors without violating intellectual property rights.
  • it establishes an aesthetic approach to which the user responds subjectively.
-Usability first. "Your online guide to usability resources."
Success Metrics indicators we can track after the site has been deployed to see whether it is meeting our own objective and our users' needs (43).
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
ROI Businesses with an eye on the bottom line want to know about the return on investment, or ROI. ROI is usually measured in terms of money: For every dollar you spend, how many dollars of value are you getting back (14)?
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
The Surface Plane on the surface you see a series of Web pages, made up of images and text (22).
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
The Skeleton Plane Beneath that surface is the skeleton [plane] of the site: the placement of buttons, tabs, photos, and blocks of text (22).
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
The Structure Plane The skeleton [plane] might define the placement of the interface elements on our checkout page; the structure would define how users got to that page and where they could go when they were finished there (22).
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
The scope plane The structure [plane] defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together. Just what those features and functions are constitutes the scope of the site (23).
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
The strategy plane This strategy incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out of it but what the users want to get out of the site as well (23).
- Jesse James Garrett from "The Elements of User Experience"
Sushi Fresh ingredients combined to make perfection
References