Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Jakob Nielson's Usability Site

Because one of my colleagues in Uni is working on software development efficiency, I recently got my hands on some publications of Jakob Nielson, my colleague was reading. Nielson is an computer user interface usability expert - not to say one of the authorities in this area.

I got a link to his website http://www.useit.com and browsed a bit through it. In this usability wonderland, you can discover different posts - (tada) mostly about usability. Throughout his texts, he strongly advocates the "anything is better than nothing" approach when it comes to usability(http://www.useit.com/papers/guerrilla_hci.html).

Two of the main problems "with usability" is that a lot of people think of it as being too expensive to address explicitely during software development and it being just a nice add-on to user interface. In his articles, he addresses these two issues. Some of the works on the page include:

I can recommend reading these and - if interested - to browse his site for more articles. He also has some articles on website usability (as websites take the biggest damage if not created usable): http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/.

For entertainment, check out the Top 10 Bloopers when it comes to usability in the movies: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/film-ui-bloopers.html.