Usability

Keith Robinson talks about the challenges of marrying both the business needs of a website (e.g. branding) with the more tangible user needs (e.g. getting a task done):

One thing that came up last week was the challenge of being able to meet all of the users needs. We work with companies who are trying, much of the time, to satisfy business goals that relate to marketing and branding. Sometimes it’s not clear exactly how tangible user needs relate to those goals as they are often more tied to what I’m calling emotional needs.

Read the full post: Meeting a User’s Emotional Needs

Economist.com
The economic costs of IT complexity are hard to quantify but probably exorbitant. The Standish Group, a research outfit that tracks corporate IT purchases, has found that 66% of all IT projects either fail outright or take much longer to install than expected because of their complexity. Among very big IT projects—those costing over $10m apiece—98% fall short. (The Economist)

So what is UCD and why should NZ business start to take serious notice? UCD is both a philosophy and a process that places the end user at the heart of the design process.

Read the rest of the article.
(from the latest designindustry newsletter).

Creating Bulletproof and Easy to Complete Web Forms
A sample chapter from Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points by Jason Fried and Matthew Linderman.