Shiny Happy Users

Shiny Happy Users is a collection of short essays that explore issues surrounding the design, development, and testing of user interfaces. These essays were produced by the participants in the graduate course entitled Scientific Methods of Human Computer Interaction offered in the spring 2007 as part of the Human Computer Interaction Program at Iowa State University. The assigned text for the course was Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research written by Mike Kuniavsky and published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, an imprint of Elsevier, in 2003.

Contents

    1. Frontispiece
    2. Copyright page
    3. Preface
    4. Acknowledgments
    5. Acronyms
  1. Typhoon: A Fable
    1. Another Pets.com
  2. Do a Usability Test Now
    1. Usability Testing: It Can Be a Bear
    2. Usability and Fun!
    3. Mis-usability
    4. Do Not Do a Usability Test Now
    5. In Defense of Friends and Family Usability Testing
    6. Plain Language
  3. Iterative Development
    1. On Development
    2. The Seven Habits of Effective Iterative Development
    3. User Experience Teams and Information Architects
    4. In an Imperfect World
    5. Why Iterative Design Is (Sometimes) Pointless
  4. The User Experience
    1. On the User Experience
    2. Words and the Brain
    3. Maximizing Human Performance
    4. Brand Magic: The Importance of Communicating Brand Identity
    5. Designing From Both Sides of the Screen
    6. Standardization Is For Insects
    7. How to Spoil Your Relationship with the User, or Please insert the correct CD-ROM, select OK and restart the application
  5. The Research Plan
    1. Planning Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle
    2. On User Experience Research Budgets
    3. Silencing the User Research Naysayers
    4. Who Is That “You” Person?
    5. Production Basics
    6. Brainstorming
  6. Recruiting and Interviewing
    1. Random Sampling: Adding External Validity to Research
    2. Uncovering Users In Your Own Organization
    3. Letting Users Take the Lead
    4. Interviews Are Lead (Pb) Not Gold (Au)
    5. Active Listening
    6. Assumptions: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them
  7. User Profiles
    1. Using Personas to Design a Website
    2. Microsoft’s Persona Machine
    3. Designing For Multiple User Groups
    4. Can a Community Have a Persona?
    5. One Is the Loneliest Number
    6. Caution: Stereotypes Under Construction
  8. Task Analysis and Card Sorting
    1. Usability Meets Anthropology
    2. Invisible Observation
    3. Contextual and Task Analysis for Project Managers
    4. Drop-down Menus Are Like Tennis
    5. Card Sort on a Large Scale
    6. Card Sorting in Information Design
  9. Focus Groups
    1. Nonverbal Decoder Rings for Focus Group Moderators
    2. Focus Group Sessions with Theatre Techniques
    3. Shoot the Focus Group
    4. Are Focus Groups Killing Democracy?
    5. Focus Groups in Mass Media Research
  10. Usability Tests
    1. There Are More Ways Than One To Skin A Cat
    2. Home-Brewed Usability Testing
    3. There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Cat
    4. Instant Messaging While Testing
    5. Morae: User Study on a Budget
    6. Paper Prototyping
    7. Who the Bleep Are You?
    8. Usability Testing of Mobile Products
    9. Probing the User Experience
    10. Usability Smackdown
  11. Surveys
    1. Increasing Survey Completion Rates
    2. All Hail Cosmo!
    3. Survey Software
    4. How to Ask Children: Survey Methods for Children–Computer Interaction
    5. Survey Pet Peeves
  12. Ongoing Relationship
    1. Diaries: Windows into the User’s World
    2. Diary Studies Are Silly
    3. Ongoing Relationships in Technical Communication
    4. Relationships via the Internet
  13. Appendices
    1. Contributors
    2. License