It sounds like I’m selling usability when I talk about the return on investment that applied usability can bring to a project. But it’s a fact that research has shown again and again. An article on the Bentley University Website says that a user-centred design approach will benefit an organization in at least three ways:  

• Reducing product development costs;
• Increasing sales (transactions or purchases);
• Improving the product’s effectiveness and efficiency.

Read our slideshow, Why Usability Matters. And yes, I guess I am selling usability.

Do you have any other points you’d add to this chart? Let me know and I’ll credit your ideas on this blog if you want.

Download PDF (72 Kb): Usability Differences Between Web and Print Media

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Somehow this feature still functions effectively when children are adults, and regardless of their expanded height or girth.

2. Visual acuity and sightlines

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Most subjects seemed to have 360-degree vision (“eyes in the back of their heads”), could spot micro stains on shirts from 12 yards away, and had the ability to discern the difference between lying eyes and eyes that were telling the truth.

3. Heart responds to physical, emotional needs of children.

Rating 10/10  Notes: Tests have found that mother’s heart was fully scalable as it expanded easily to accommodate needs of higher number of children or children with exceptional physical and emotional needs.

4. Ability to process information and carry out tasks efficiently.

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Stress tests such as combining one wailing infant with a second child who needed his lunch packed for school resulted in high efficiency ratings. The ability to assist in math homework calculations while sorting laundry or talking to a client on the phone also impressed our analysts.

5. Recovery and reset capability.

Rating 9/10  Notes: Our observers noted an extremely high resiliency under long durations and task overload. However, many mothers lacked the ability to conduct effective self-care and general self-maintenance. We recommend that children enable mothers to have at least one annual 24-hour period where mothers can reboot or at least undergo defragmentation at a salon or spa.

6. Fully integrates with second and third generation systems.

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Over-the-shoulder tests found that mothers functioned perfectly with grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, although analysts noted that purchases of chocolates, toys and savings bonds seemed to be markedly increased from that of the first generation. We recommend that those with grandchildren and great-grandchildren be titled “Mother 2.0.”

OVERALL RATING: 100%

Comments: Happy Mother’s Day to my Mum and to mothers everywhere!

(We welcome additional data from other usability tests conducted on mothers, too!)

I’ve tweeted this before on my Twitter pages @usabilitydesign and @socialmediamash, but I have to expand on this issue here because I think it’s going to be something that is going to become an issue for Twitter micro-bloggers.

In case you’re new to Twitter, or not familiar with how it works, when you post a 140-character-or-less micro-blog on Twitter that includes a link to something you’ve referenced, Twitter will either handle that link one of two ways. If the link is not too long, Twitter will convert it to a clickable link and leave the URL as it was when you entered it.

The usability issue

If your combined text and URL is greater than 140 characters, Twitter won’t convert the URL to a TinyUrl then count your characters based on the length of the shortened URL. You have to either provide a shorter URL yourself OR shorten the text part of your tweet, which is a usability issue. Why should a URL count in the 140 characters you’re allowed?  

However, your post is less than 140 characters long, but the URL itself is quite long, Twitter will automatically convert it to a “TinyUrl,” (see http://TinyUrl.com), which is a shorter format link that redirects to the link you had specified. Nice of Twitter to do that for you, but here’s the problem. 

The security issue

Anyone can set up a Twitter account if they have a valid email address, and unscrupulous people who are phishing for your personal data or trying to install a virus or worm on your computer can use TinyURLs to mask what URL they are sending you to. You don’t know what the URL is until you click on the TinyURL version and open the site. By then it could be too late for you,

The TinyUrl.com site actually offers a more secure way to share a link that is being rediercted by a TinyUrl. It’s called “Preview,” and if you use the Preview version when you are manually creating your TinyUrl, then people who click on your TinyUrl link are first redirected to the TinyUrl.com site where they can see the actual URL and decide whether they feel it’s safe to click through and go to the site or not.

When Twitter automatically shortens URLs to TinyUrls, however, we don’t have a way to let people review the link before they visit the site.

A reasonable solution for both issues: embedded URLs

 Here’s a solution that Twitter could implement, if they really care about this issue.

If Twitter gave their users the ability to embed a URL in the text of their tweet… e.g. instead of entering a long link such as http://digitalpractices.org/2009/04/15/twitter-links-are-a-major-phishing-risk that Twitter will shorten into a TinyUrl, the message could simply refer to this blog post that I wrote, and thus Twitter users wouldn’t have to use up so many of their allotted 140 characters to include an URL. This would solve a usability issue on Twitter.

As for security, Twitter followers and browsers could simply hover their cursor over the link to see what it is. That way, they can at least have a fighting chance at finding out whether the link looks like it point to a legitimate Website rather than a creepy phishing site or some shady IP address spreading malware.

What do you think? Are you concerned about phishing or malware attempts when you click on TinyUrl links in Twitter posts?

   What does “Contentology” mean?

In this Manifesto, Contentology is a coined word that, in its strictest etymology, could mean “the science of content” or “the study of content”. The word “Contentology” is supposed to make people stop and think for a moment, and if it sounds absurd, then we have to ask ourselves why it sounds absurd.

Most people presume that the word content means ‘something that is within something else.’ Yet this popular definition creates a tautology: “Content is content that’s inside something that seems to be content.”

Before the Internet became a tool for the masses, “content” or “contents” were simply vague terms for printed copy in a book or a magazine, or the food products inside a can of soup. The popular meaning usually referred to something that was being packaged for consumers, or something that was simply being stored or moved within containers.

Visit the Contentology site

Dlownload Contentology Manifesto