LarryRoth.net

We all know that the Apple brand is ease-of-use. But, usability expert Jakob Nielsen contends that this may very well be why Apple has survived all these years:

During its first decade, the Mac offered clearly superior usability compared to competing personal computer platforms... The Mac's miserable marketplace performance seems to pose a strong argument against usability. Why bother, if it doesn't sell? The counter-argument is that usability is the only reason Mac survived. Compared to the PC, it was much more expensive, had only a fraction of the specialized applications, and was cursed by Apple's business-hostile attitude. So why would anyone pay more for less? Because Macs were easier to use.

Excerpt from Macintosh: 25 Years, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/macintosh.html, viewed February 16, 2009.

It's an inspirational article for usability, with links to many other interesting articles.
Did usability save Apple?

The Digital Experience Group of the New York Public Libraries (NYPL) decided to try a bold experiment. Knowing that they wanted as much user feedback as possible and that they had willing participants—namely their web users, the Group created a trouble free survey tool to gather data. You may be saying, "Ohhhh, online surveys! What's so bold about that?". As usual, it's the chosen implementation that helps to make the difference. The Digital Experience Group created Infomaki, a system that provides a simple, one question survey asking a subject something as easy as "What would you click on to find events?". After the subject answers that question, they are thanked, and simply asked if they would like to answer another question. Here's what is so great about this approach: it's very mindful of the subject's time and very non-intrusive. The concept is that this will lead to more people willingly being repeat subjects. Also, more random questions will be answered. With a traditional survey, you may tend to get the same questions answered at the start of a survey, but have people drop out, thus not getting sufficient answers to the end questions. There are a few bugs in the system, but it appears the team is actively working on fixing them. I gave it a try, and quickly got hooked. While obviously, my subjective opinion and observations do not constitute a usability test, I have observed most test subjects glad to answer a single question. But conversely, I have seen that grimace or shoulder slump when a subject can sense you are settling in for a multi-part questionnaire. My experience would point to Infomaki being a well received data collection methodology. But don't take my word for it, look at the results of the 48 hour pilot:

[a prior] survey received 7,341 individual answers to questions from 520 respondents, 60% of whom completed the whole survey. This totaled 7,341 individual answers over 14 days. Infomaki, on the other hand, garnered over 6,900 answers from 840 respondents in its initial 48-hour maiden voyage.

Seems like the concept works, but the real measure of success will be the continued interest of the subjects and the quality of data. Let's hope we here more about how Infomaki works out.
Improving the New York Public Library Web site one question at a time

Perhaps one of the most crucial parts of UI design is the feedback you provide to users. Like all the information you display, you need to prioritize and provide the proper context for your users. Or said another way: it's important that you make sure what you think is important is also important to your users. Why the emphasis on important? Well, I found a great example in Web Position Pro (version 3) that helps to prove my point. First off, Web Position is a fantastic software application that helps you to track your search engine ranking. This post, by no means, is meant to slam this product. However, I did find one Important Notification in the product challenging to the user. Upon startup—and after a fresh, fully-licensed install I might add—I was greeted with the following error message. [caption id="attachment_107" align="alignnone" width="395" caption="Error message from Web Position Gold 3"][/caption] What's the issue? Well, first of all, the user is presented with a modal window and is being told that a service they never signed up for has expired 4.24 YEARS ago. More pressing, is the use of the word Important. To whom is this message important. Certainly not someone that has let their service expire over 4 years ago! Perhaps it is important to the sales department at WebTrends, but not to the user of the software. It would have been better to present the message in the proper context. One suggestion might be an on-screen prompt, not a modal window, and language that is more honest: "We can help you: sign-up for page critic today!" Lesson to learn: Save UI conventions such as modal windows and strong language such as important for messages that are important to the user, not just you.
Make sure it's important to your users

There is a great post on Web Design Tuts discussing How to Design The Perfect Form. The author does a great job of showing many different examples, but in particular, he breaks down form design as:

• Less is more
• Context & Assistance
• Distractions
• Modals

It's a great read and well worth exploring.
An overview of form design for the Web

The folks at A List Apart have provided an excellent "howto" guide for JavaScript debugging. Not only is this article provide some very practical real world experiences, but it talks about debugging javascript across 4 different browsers (IE8, FireFox, Safari, and Opera) instead of just focusing on FireFox. It's a good start to debugging in general, and the only point I would add to the article is that you can use the debugger to learn about JavaScript by examining existing sites.
A "howto" for JavaScript debugging