Usability = "User Ability" or "Ability to Use"

Designed some posters & wallpapers to explain about USABILITY.

UPA 2010 - Munich, Germany & UX Camp 2010 - Berlin, Germany Overview

UPA 2010 - Munich, Germany & UX Camp 2010 - Berlin, Germany Overview and my learnings!!!
As you all know i have attended UPA 2010 & UX Camp Conference at Germany in 2010. These both are my best UX conferences i have attended till date.I have taken some notes / captures and made a presentation out of it to get a glimpse of UPA2010.

To know more details about my UPA2010 in details you can check my earlier blog post. http://thinkusable.blogspot.com/2010/06/attended-upa-2010-munich-germany.html

Usability vs User Experience

I have noticed there is lot of confusion to many people between the "User Experience Design" & "Usability". Let me try to explain in few words..!
"Usability refers to the ease with which a user can accomplish his or her goals using any tool. (...) Somewhat in contrast, user experience refers to the way a user perceives his or her interaction with a system. User experience design encompasses both interaction design and visual design and seeks to promote an interface that is pleasing to the user." 

Usability in Movies...

watch this movie and this may give a clear picture what Usability mean..!

Eyetracking: Is It Worth It?

"It is easy to get excited about eyetracking. Seeing where people look while using your Web site, Web application, or software product sounds like an opportunity to get amazing insights into their user experience. But eyetracking is expensive and requires extra effort and specialized knowledge. The heat maps and other visualizations certainly look impressive, but what can you really learn from them? After using eyetracking for the first time, many find that it is not easy to know how to analyze the visualizations and make conclusions from them. Does eyetracking really provide any additional insights you would not have discovered anyway through traditional usability testing? Does the value of eyetracking outweigh its limitations? This article will discuss and answer these questions." (Jim Ross - UXmatters) ...more

Feel proud to be a UX'er...

Usability Experience Specialist is considered as Top30 careers for 2009
Overview: This profession has a hard time agreeing on a name for itself. It's called, for example, user experience specialist, interface designer, information architect, usability practitioner, user-centered design specialist, and usability manager.

Whatever you call them, their job is to help ensure that products, especially technical ones, are easy and pleasurable to use. How? First, they observe and interview potential users to identify their needs and preferences. They may conduct a task analysis to break down the user experience of a product to its component parts and make suggestions for each. After a prototype is developed, they may watch and interview potential users again and suggest revisions. Usability specialists may work, for example, on voting machines, the next generation iPhone, a medical imaging machine, an athletic shoe production line, a shopping website, or a bricks-and-mortar store.

A potential downside of this career is that shortsighted companies believe they can make products without a specifically trained usability expert, so you may have to spend considerable time justifying your service's value. Another drawback is that you may need to make efforts to avoid being typecast as someone who can help design only one kind of product.
Those concerns are usually dwarfed by the ongoing creativity and the good feeling of continually creating products that are a pleasure to use.

A Day in the Life. Because you're the only usability specialist in your company, you're involved in all stages of the product development process. You might actually never get to participate in all aspects in one day, but here, we'll suspend that bit of reality so you can get a better idea of what the career is like.

Is this intresting and want to read more... http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/best-careers/2008/12/11/best-careers-2009-usability-experience-specialist.html

Brand vs. Usability

The importance of brand vs. usability ..."Which is more important: brand or usability? Does there have to be a conflict between the two? Today, we'll tackle the subject and try to find a middle ground between form and function. On one hand, best practices enable better usability.

But adhering to them too much stymies innovation and possibly brand differentiation.Does your site represent a strong brand? If not, you've probably built one that looks like every other site on the Web. If your brand doesn't have a strong voice, your site's voice is generic. If you don't have a strong visual brand, users probably can't tell your site from anyone else's. You don't want your company's services and products to become a commonality, but you don't provide enough brand experience to generate any real loyalty.On the other hand, maybe your brand is carefully guarded and has very clear style guides and rules about its look, voice, and feel. In this case, your site has probably eschewed accepted standards of common sites in an effort to make it stand out. If you have a strong offline brand (e.g., luxury brands, highly differentiated retail brands), you may have striven to adapt that offline brand to online. While it may make complete sense to your current customers (who get your brand, voice, and nomenclature), how does this experience work for new customers who aren't brand loyalists?A Strong Brand Equals Loyal CustomersFirst things first: if you want to have loyal customers, you need a strong brand.

Customers are attracted to the things that differentiate you. I spoke at a corporate conference a couple years ago, and Gary Hoover (of Hoover's) was on the panel with me. In a discussion about brand, he mentioned the supermarket test. It's simple: if you're knocked out and wake up in the frozen food section of a supermarket, can you immediately tell which supermarket you're in? In general, the answer is no: all supermarkets look the same.But if you're in a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's, the answer is yes. Their brands aren't just the signage they use. They're embodied by everything in the store. Mind you, those two companies follow best practices for grocery store layout. But they do it with their own flair and attention to detail; every shelf and aisle reflect their brands."

Bad Usability Calendar - 2009

NetLife Research has released 2009 version of the bad usability calendar and it’s now available online. Learning by bad examples is often a good way in discussing usability with people that are not hardcore usability people. I’m currently taking few A3 digital prints and want to put on my desk.

I really like the concept of "BAD USABILITY CALENDER". I am collecting all these calendars from past 3-4 years, I think from 2005. You can also see yearly calendar in my desk too... :)
Most of my friends / colleagues ask me "Ranjeeth .. what's this- bad usability?" Why do you like bad usability concepts...? Blaw..Blaw..Blaw..!

Hmmmm.... I realized that people points only different things much.. Also trust me they feel interesting..! and they will also start thinking.. Why are these called "BAD" and "NOT USABLE"
GET YOUR COPY TOO- Download from: Badusability.com