Het succes van een informatiesysteem zoals een website of intranetportal is afhankelijk van de mate waarin gebruikers in staat zijn hun doelen te bereiken. Dit gegeven is niet nieuw. Maar hoewel we steeds meer de gebruikersdoelen mee laten wegen bij het ontwikkelen van sites, baseren we ons nog vaak op een te beperkt inzicht in het gebruikersperspectief. We missen belangrijke data.

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The second UI11 Conference day featured five rounds of 90 minute talks. Here is my impression of the day. (more…)

Tomorrow, the User Interface 11 Conference kicks off. I have already checked in and strolled through Boston, where I enjoyed my lunch in the one and only Cheers pub.

During the next days, I’ll do my best to share my experiences from the conference. I had already put together my personal conference program and I’m still planning to stick to it.

Continued:

• UI11 day 1: A dive into Rich Internet Applications (9 October)
• UI11 day 2: Featured talks (10 October)
• UI11 day 3: Advanced Methods for Usability Testing (11 October)
• UI11 day 4 - part 1: Why Less Is More (12 October)
• UI11 day 4 - part 2: Social Design (12 October)

Next October, I will be attending the User Interface 11 Conference (UI11) in Cambridge MA. Yesterday I received the request to sign up for the sessions I plan to attend.

So this will be my personal conference program: (more…)

Discovered on GUUUI.com: a Dutch research reveils that 50% of all returned electronic devices claimed to be malfunctioning, is not due to a malfunction, but to bad usability. According to Den Ouden most of the flaws found their origin in the first phase of the design process: product definition.

“To truly become a user-centered organization, companies almost always progress through the same sequence of steps, gradually increasing their levels of commitment to usability.”

Jakob Nielsen, UseIt

In short, these are the 8 stages of Corporate Usability Maturity*: (more…)

It has been a week since I published my Visio template for designing SharePoint sites for everyone to use freely. Judging on the many positive referrals to the article, the many Google search queries for ‘visio + template + sharepoint’ and the massive increase of traffic to my weblog, people seem to appreciate this design aid. And I’m glad for that.

But of course there are enough SharePoint architects who don’t have the need for modeling tools (or at least mine), and that’s fine. But today I stumbled upon an article by Lois & Clark called “Should we model?”, questioning the need for modeling SharePoint sites in detail. (more…)