Creating a Web with Better Usability, Piece by Piece
I stumbled across this great presentation by Amy Jo Kim titled “Putting the Fun in Functional” where she describes five game mechanics that can be used when build social community sites:
I’ve had some thoughts along these lines myself, being the game addict that I am, but she makes a very structured and accessible presentation of a really interesting subject. If you are interested in this subject at all, this is a must read!
Caring about usability, huh?
Here is a couple of resources I’ve found useful to get you started on “the good path”:
Usability.gov has great guidelines for usability on the web presented in pdf:s, I’m just amazed by the quality of these.
Recommending usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com is probably not necessary as he is one of the most well-known usability voices out there. However, Jakob mainly focuses on efficiency, effectiveness and task satisfaction as measurements of good user interfaces, being the true usability engineer he is. So keep in mind while reading, that there are plenty of other important factors to the whole user experience, like branding strength, pleasureability and interface expression to name a few. Look to useit.com for the numbers (and the bold, often self-promoting statements) but look elsewhere for the less quantitative aspects of usability design.