Experience ThemesHow a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better productsby Cindy Chastain on 2009/10/06 | [14 Comments]There’s an old adage among screenwriters that when a writer can sum up a story in a sentence or less, he has discovered what’s important about the story. He’ll know what the story is about and therefore have a strong sense of theme. And in knowing the theme, he’ll have a compass to use in the process of “designing” the damn thing

via Experience Themes – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design.

Flickr Photo Download: viznotes from today’s EMC UXD call.

Nobody Reads your Dialog Boxes

«My paper’s due tomorrow, but my PC won’t print, what do I do now?»

«What do you mean, it won’t print? What happened?»

«Well, I clicked on print, but nothing came out the printer.»

«Did you get an error message?»

«Yeah, I got an error message.»

«Well, what did it say?»

«How should I know?»

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had this conversation multiple times.

via ignore the code: Nobody Reads your Dialog Boxes.

Jakob Nielsen’s study on the ideal number of test subjects in usability tests found that tests with just five users would reveal about 85% of all problems with your website, whereas 15 users would find pretty much all problems.

Source: Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox

via 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine.

Summary:

Testing how well people understand a links first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items.

via First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.