Personal Thoughts On Learning Usability And Usability Resources

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
Bevan's picture

Recently, a GHOP student asked me for some help in dealing with usability issues in drupal contrib and wanted to know about resources for learning usability. Here I've published my response for others' benefit too:

===============================
Hi,

I consider myself a usability student. I'm definitely not a usability expert -- although I have a strong interest in it and I pursue that interest aside from my paid work, mostly through drupal. Anyway, here are my thoughts;

Like many things in life, I think usability is one of those things many people just 'get' naturally. I call this 'usability sense'. It's also possible to 'learn' usability and improve usability sense, knowledge and understanding through practice, literature and other resources.

In this way 'learning usability' is a lot like learning to play music. Many people 'get' music straight away. They learn the tools (their musical instruments) and then they're away.

Others want to be musical but aren't naturally musical. They take lessons and learn their tools (their musical instruments). These people can also be good at music, but they had a harder time getting there.

You will probably recognize in yourself if have natural usability sense. If you look at an interface that doesn't work and can straight away pick out not only what's wrong with it, but also tell how to fix it, then you are off on a great start! You 'get' usability naturally.

If you can tell that one UI is better than another but aren't sure why, or if you can't easily identify what the problems are in a bad UI, then 'getting usability' might be harder for you. In my humble opinion, code-heavy programmers tend to be more like this.

When programmers use a UI, they strive to build a mental map of the objects, data and software they are manipulating. This is what makes them good at writing complex algorithms and doing crazy things like building APIs to abstract complex but frequent processes, compressing JS & CSS and other data, writing efficient optimized SQL that gets the right data for the task, rewriting an existing API from the ground up to work more efficiently.

Because of this, most programmers see right through a UI and don't notice if it's good or bad. As long as they can maintain their mental map in order, then the UI is transparent and doesn't matter much. IMHO proponents of CLIs stereotypify these folk.

If this is you, but you still want to be good at usability, take time to share ideas suggestions and thoughts with others, use resources and follow usability working groups. There is some great literature on usability too. Or, if usability is really a drag, try finding some one else to take over the UI of your projects, and focus on the backend. Even if you 'get' usability naturally, these learning suggestions are still important to gain motivation, ideas and keep up with the game.

As for specific resources, I subscribe to feeds from UXmatters and A List Apart. They sometimes have great usability-oriented articles that are also often highly relevant to web UIs.  Note that UXmatters is often specific to corporate professional UX designers and isn't very relevant.  The Usability group on g.d.o is another wealth of information. If you have time I'd recommend filtering through archived threads and articles for articles that interest you.

Here are some UXmatters articles I particularly enjoyed:

And discussions on g.d.o:

And ALA articles:

As for books, I don't have any and can't recommend any. Try searching for usability and UI book reviews for one that you think is relevant to you.

Oh, I do have one called "Getting Real" by 37signals of BaseCamp fame. It's more about agile and user-centered design and development but has a lot of interesting ideas on how to approach usability from a larger POV, and also has some excellent UI hints and tips.

Comments

I cross posted this on

Bevan's picture

I cross posted this on Planet Drupal via CivicActions.com: http://www.civicactions.com/blog/personal_thoughts_on_learning_usability...
Bevan/

Nice roundup Bevan!

morphir's picture

Thanks for compiling together this list of links.

I'm adding this to the list:

UI Design Patterns - http://www.squidoo.com/uidesignpatterns

Test your site with different browsers/versions - http://browsershots.org/

Here's a few more

SteveBayerIN's picture

Edit: Introduction To Good Usability is a great read.

Here's a few more resources:
http://usabilityprofessionals.org/
http://usability.gov (Its been linked to on g.d.o/usability before)

Suns Usability Group
http://blogs.sun.com/wxd/

Cisco's Usability Group
http://blogs.cisco.com/webexperience/

General Usability Blogs
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/

Books recommended by http://usabilityprofessionals.org/:
http://www.stcsig.org/usability/resources/bookshelf/

Usability

Group organizers

Group categories

UX topics

Group notifications

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds: