David Chisnall ponders the safety features of two common appliances....   Read Article.

David Chisnall compares single vs. multi-button mouse design....   Read Article.

Find out the importance of having solid user design techniques in place when designing an interface....   Read Article.

Balancing usability and security isn't an easy task, as evidenced by the number of systems with "security features" that are easy for users to turn off. David Chisnall discusses the issues on both sides of the fence....   Read Article.

Although previous articles have advocated using personas and scenarios, eventually your web site or electronic product needs to interact with real users, a.k.a. human beings. Robert Hoekman, Jr. discusses possibilities for testing the usability of your site or product with guinea pigs in your own company and outside your doors....   Read Article.

Before you launch right into building your application, Robert Hoekman, Jr. recommends building a prototype and showing it to clients or users. This article explores the benefits of prototyping, various approaches and styles, and some of the better tools for use in building your prototypes....   Read Article.

Daniel Dern relies on the Web enough to get pretty irked about sites that make it unnecessarily difficult to find information, because of bad design, missing content, or bad browsers. Rant along with Daniel through 10 behaviors that make you want to put some web designers - and the people who approved their efforts - on the Mikado's "little list."...   Read Article.

Okay, you know who wants the application and what they want it to do. Ready to start coding, right? Perhaps, but Robert Hoekman, Jr. has some suggestions about how to find problems in the design before it gets too expensive to fix....   Read Article.

The concern on everyone's mind, at the recent Wiki Symposium, is making wiki work mdash; while keeping its essential nature as a community-driven means for building a site....   Read Article.

This article explores the first steps involved in building a Web business that brings in revenue?with very little work on your part....   Read Article.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the study and the practice of usability. In this introduction to his book, "Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millenium," John Carroll looks at history and future of HCI....   Read Article.

Learn how well-formed, good quality use cases can drive and facilitate the other, downstream software development activities....   Read Article.

Too many project teams dive into the details of the use-case model before they have established a stakeholder community, a shared vision, the real need for the product, or the constraints under which it is to be built. Learn strategies that will help you avoid these problems and help you produce a high-quality use-case model....   Read Article.

See how similar performance issues are between your web site and traditional 'brick and mortar' stores, and use this analogy to learn the basics about fundamental measurement concepts, the relationships between these measurements, how they impact each other, and some basic optimization terminology....   Read Article.

Computers are an integral part of daily life, which is why it's critical to design applications and Web sites that are accessible to all usersmdash;including those with disabilities. Often, making an application accessible is as easy as providing a text alternative to a graphic image. Sue Hildreth discusses a few key guidelines....   Read Article.

This chapter outlines the tools you need, the templates that are helpful, and usability testing facilities that will help your staff be most efficient and effective in creating usability and testing plans....   Read Article.

There are many many issues in designing a good test, and a huge literature on this topic. In this section we only discuss one consideration: how "difficult" should a test be? We imagine an average class, although I don't think I have ever seen such a group of students. According to the University of Toronto marking standards, we want the mark distribution...   Read Article.

This article presents a summary of the techniques available to use the cumulative binomial distribution to assist in the design of effective reliability demonstration tests and also to determine the reliability that has been demonstrated in a test with few or no failures....   Read Article.

Testers often encounter many windows or Web pages in an application. Each of these windows or Web pages may have many objects within them, and each object could have unique characteristics. (Typical objects are radio buttons, push buttons, drop down lists, edit fields, check boxes, etc.) While designing test cases, one ascertains each and every state...   Read Article.

All code is not created equal. Learn from a master of the craft how to spot bad code and mold it into good. This month, Mike Clark explains how writing automated tests can give you confidence to change code fearlessly....   Read Article.