Consider this scenario: you’ve just opened up your browser and you hope to send some flowers to you mom for Mother’s Day. Where do you begin? You might just guess and type in flowers.com, hoping to find a flower site. Maybe you already known a popular flower service, and type in its URL. Perhaps you [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Website usability'
Human-error-tolerant design
No Comments · Website usability
Designing systems that are tolerant of human error becomes crucial when any task has potentially dangerous and costly consequences, or when the outcome is not easily reversible. Financial and medical web applications are prime examples of sites where reducing human error is especially important. A central theme in designing for human error is to build [...]
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Performance improvements
No Comments · Website usability
The goal of a task analysis is to improve the user’s performance, productivity, and, ultimately, his or her experience. Used in conjunction with other design techniques, task analysis can be a very powerful tool that can improve procedure consistency and clarity, reduce task execution and learning time, and reduce the number and types of errors [...]
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A hybrid approach to task analysis
No Comments · Website usability
We favor a hybrid approach to task analysis that analysis that combines both the high-level interactions of users other actors with depth and psychological grounding of hierarchical procedure decomposition. The general steps are (1) start with use cases, (2) decompose tasks hierarchically, and (3) determine appropriate technologies. Start with Use Cases Determine the actors by [...]
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Hierarchical Task Analysis for Web Site Design
No Comments · Website usability
Applying hierarchical task analysis to web site design is a direct and systematic approach to characterizing the knowledge required by a typical person to use your site. As the name implies, it involves organizing the tasks in a hierarchy and decomposing the procedures to an adequate level. The process of decomposing the user’s tasks is [...]
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Hierarchical task analysis
No Comments · Website usability
Hierarchical task analysis is a means of systematically defining a task from the user’s perspective. We can look at task procedures on three levels: user level, platform level, and application level. User-Level Goals and Procedures At the top level, task procedures are generic descriptions of the goals users will accomplish, like buying a book. These [...]
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Task analysis for web site design
No Comments · Website usability
If we only look at a single web page, the procedures for using it are typically trivial. So why go to the extra of conducting a task analysis? The answer, of course, is that web sites are not made up of just one page, and the interactions between users and web pages is not necessarily [...]
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What is task analysis?
No Comments · Website usability
Task analysis refers to a family of techniques for describing various aspects of how people work. This can include procedural analysis, job analysis, workflow analysis, and error analysis. Procedural analysis is a set of techniques to analyze the procedures people perform for an individual task. Job analysis is the set of all tasks a person [...]
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People shouldn’t be an afterthought in website design
No Comments · Website usability
Users need to be considered early and often. Usability needs to be a part of every step of the design process. Our approach is pervasive usability – integrating usability into everything we do. Our philosophy is that usability should not be and add-on, but that everyday processes should be modified to be user-centered. Make usability [...]
Tags: design·pervasive usability