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good mov.. DOWNLOAD ALL HOLLYWOOD MOVIES FOR FREE: Clash of the Titans (2010).. Usability Guidelines.. Criteria's to evaluate the Usability of any system:..
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DOWNLOAD ALL HOLLYWOOD MOVIES FOR FREE: Clash of the Titans (2010)
DOWNLOAD ALL HOLLYWOOD MOVIES FOR FREE: Clash of the Titans (2010)
Usability Guidelines
Conception and Planning
1. Identify audiences and their needs: At this initial stage, you have to define clearly the different audiences that your application aspires to serve. You need to understand who you are creating this application for and what aims you wish to fulfill. You should accept that different audiences have different needs, skills and interests. This heterogeneity needs to be understood by all local cultural heritage organizations if they are to provide value to their publics.
2. Include Usability in your Project Plan: All project stakeholders, including senior management of the institution, should endorse from the start a policy of usability as a core quality of technology projects. They should be made aware of the fact that usability is not a freebie, but requires specific effort, time and money.
3. Control Usability of contracted work: For most local cultural institutions, technology projects will require cooperation with or outsourcing of work to external parties, such as creative media companies, software developers or service providers. Depending on your situation, you may select such external partners, and assign work to them, through a formal selection process based on issuing an Request for Proposals and evaluating specific bids, or a less formal process of inviting specific companies and agreeing with them on the scope and terms of work.
4. Educate staff and get advice: Due to the pressure to finish projects on time, or due to financial constraints, staff in local cultural institutions often does not consider usability as a core function in the lifecycle of a project. As a result, they often find out after project completion that the application they developed on time and within budget does not fit with their needs or with users expectations.
5. Define useful functionalities: Before starting to design your application, you need to carefully examine and decide what your application is trying to achieve, and how. In other words, you need to define the functional scope of your project: to conceive the primary goals of the resulting application and then decide on its functionalities and content, according to users needs, interests and preferences.
6. Use appropriate Metaphors: Metaphors are high level conceptualizations of an application and of the way users are asked to interact with it. For instance, you may imagine a web application as a virtual exhibition space, where users are allowed to navigate as they would in physical space, or as a virtual library, organized according to subject.
7. Provide from Accessibility: One of your primary goals while designing and implementing your application, is to promote accessibility to all users; i.e. to find ways to make the information easily accessible to people of different capacities, who operate in totally different contexts. In other terms, local cultural institutions need to take into consideration that not all users have similar abilities to see, hear, or move. There are people who have difficulty reading or comprehending text over a certain length or level of complexity, those not able to use a keyboard or mouse, those not able to differentiate between specific colours, etc. - in general, user unable to process some types of information easily or at all. Those categories of users are not restricted to people with disabilities, but also include non-native speakers of the language of your application, the elderly, and children. In addition, there are contexts or conditions that present specific accessibility problems for all or most users, such as kiosk applications operating in a gallery, in a noisy public space, or under bright daylight, small-screen applications available through PDAs or mobile phones, or virtual reality applications accessible through HMDs, digital gloves and other similar devices. In all these cases,accessibility can be a problem that needs to be addressed as an important factor affecting the usability of the resulting application or system.
8. Satisfy criteria for IA and Design: From the start of your project, it is important to establish and adopt specific usability criteria on which to base your application information architecture and design. You should be concerned about two aspects of a usable application, i.e., effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness refers to the accuracy and completeness with which users find the information that are looking for and achieve the goals that they have predefined. Efficiency can ensure that users can access easily, and make appropriate use of, the information required.
9. Evaluate Usability before Implementation: You will be wise to conduct usability tests on your design before starting full implementation, Changes necessary to improve the ease-of-use of your system or application can be considerably more costly from the moment you authorized a specification and actual development of the software application, writeup of final textual content and full-scale production of visuals or interactives is under way. Since usability is as an extremely important factor of social and practical acceptance of an application, it is necessary to adopt usability testing methods at this stage, in order to have time to fix problems identified before implementation.
Implementation
10. Ensure Content Usability: Sourcing and development of textual content, and its arrangement and indexing depending on subject-matter, is an important aspect of the implementation stage of any content-based technology project, be it a web portal, a multimedia edition or a gallery interpretation application. During this stage of your project, you need to establishguidelines to help the members of your staff responsible for creating or uploading the content of your application. These guidelines concern , in general, how all information provided by your application will be structured and presented.
11. Provide for Orientation, Help and Feedback: Technology-based applications present users with two types of additional challenges to those they face when they interact in the physical world: the first concerns conceptual disorientation, and is related to the difficulty of finding ones way in the virtual conceptual space of information and actions enabled by technology, while the second concerns the cognitive overhead imposed by the mediation of a potentially unfamiliar hardware and software interface between users and the information and actions they engage in.
12. Test Usability before Launch: The time your application goes public, it becomes open to public scrutiny; there is no better way to discourage your audiences from accessing your application than launch it without making sure of its usability. Before launching your application, therefore, you should always perform a thorough evaluation of its usability, based on actual tests where representative users examine and evaluate its efficiency and effectiveness, and the degree to which it meets user requirements.
13. Require usability for project sign-off: For all contracted work, local cultural heritage institutions are advised to provide for a formal signoff mechanism, by which they will approve the final outcome of the project and proceed to final payments to contractors. For technology-based applications, usability should be one of the key overall criteria for project acceptance. In designing user acceptance tests (UATs) the process by which typically finished applications are approved you are, therefore, advised to include usability-related indicators as a formal criterion for signoff. If your application aims to help users perform specific well-defined tasks (such as retrieving information from a digital library) then you should seek to measure performance indicators, such as rate of success in performing such typical tasks, through empirical testing. If you had established formal criteria for usability as suggested by several guidelines above then, before project signoff, you need to make sure that the above guidelines, which in effect define your conceptual framework on usability, are respected. You should set a formal threshold level for acceptance criteria, and make it a precondition that this threshold is met before considering the work done.
Operation and Use
14. Keep usability policies upto date: Usability engineering has already a few decades of history, and it is true that general directions so far as guidelines and good practice are concerned especially those directed at the perceptual level of interaction remain relatively stable. However, usability is also greatly determined by considerations relevant to the domain, functional scope and audiences of applications, as well as on the evolution of genres and technological environment broadband and mobile access being two particularly significant emerging developments. This fact, as well as the accumulating user experience in the information society, leads to significant changes in the theory, methods and practice of usability engineering.
15. Plan for regular evaluation: Technology-based applications are living organisms, exercised through interaction with actual users; users needs change, and so also does the competitive environment that shapes their perceptions of what is usable and useful, and what not. At the time when an application is launched, even if you make an effort to evaluate usability through adoption of criteria and pre-launch testing, it is impossible to have a full understanding of all potential problems and issues that might arise in actual use.
Content source: http://www.calimera.org/
Criteria's to evaluate the Usability of any system:
- Learnability, i.e. how easy it is for users to learn how to use the application
- Efficiency of use, i.e. how easy it is for users to complete their tasks within the application
- Memorability, i.e. how easy it is for users to use the system after a long period of non-use
- Correctness, i.e., lack of errors, or at least existence of only a few, relatively unimportant errors
- User satisfaction, i.e. how pleasant is the user experience
- Accessibility, i.e. how easy it is for different kinds of users to use the application (users with special needs, children, etc.) in diverse environments and through diverse channels.
- Usefulness, i.e. the ability of the application to provide value to its users through appropriate functionalities, content, structure and form.
- Appropriateness, i.e, the match between what an application provides, the situation it is intended for and the audience it wishes to address.
- Quality, i.e,, the conformance of the application to context-specific excellence criteria, such as high quality usual design, authenticity of visual resources, and authority of content.
Usability - What is it?
What Usability Is?
Have you ever: - Bought something that was so complicated to use that you gave up on it and bought something else to replace it?
- Tried to find something online and gotten hopelessly lost and confused?
- Found a site or product so easy to learn, easy and fun to use, and effective that you told all your friends about it?
These are all faces of usability. Usability,is a measure of the quality of a user's experience interacting with a product or web site. It is about users' ability to do what they want and need with the product or site. It evolved from the psychology of human factors and its focus on users and "user-friendly" products. Human Factors Engineering,is a crossover discipline that combines psychology, engineering, computer science, and software engineering to explain how people behave in the real world. Based on research, human factors engineers try to design systems and products to fit people, rather than the other way around, because it is easier to design systems than it is to change people. The User Centered Approach to Design and Assessment focuses on the mindset of target users. This means measuring: - users' prerequisite knowledge and skills
- users' goals and objectives (which are often different from, and in some cases in opposition to, that of authors, designers, and/or programmers of a product or site).
- users' reactions to being lost, frustrated, or unable to accomplish their goals.
What Usability Testing can Reveal? Usability testing methods can yield information about: - How users carry out tasks.
- The errors users make and the criticality of those errors.
- When, where, and why users get frustrated or confused.
- How quickly and successfully users accomplish their goals.
- How satisfied users are with their experience.
- Possible solutions to problems users encounter.
Why Usability Testing is worth doing? Usability testing can reduce design and development costs and increase user satisfaction and sales. Done early in the design and development process it can: - Save money by exposing design flaws before expensive models have been created.
- Yield valuable information and lessons about one aspect of a product or site that can be applied to other parts of the product or site. For example, the navigation and organization of a web sites Home page can be tested before all the content and navigation for the rest of the site is developed.
- Make it easier and less costly to make any necessary changes. Make it more likely that needed changes will actually be made.
- Reduce the frustration of designers and developers caused by the need for rework.
Card Sorting
Card Sorting is a technique for exploring how people group items, so that you can develop structures that maximize the probability of users being able to find items. Card Sorting:
- Is easy and cheap to conduct
- Enables you to understand how 'real people' are likely to group items
- Identifies items that are likely to be difficult to categorize and find
- Identifies terminology that is likely to be misunderstood.
How is Card Sorting conducted?
Card Sorting can be conducted in a variety of circumstances using various means - one-on-one, during workshops, by mail, or electronically. The following is the basic process. Names of items to be categorized are printed on individual cards. Cards should be large enough to accommodate the names in a font that participants can read easily when spread out on a desk or table-at least 14 point.
Participants are asked to group items in a way that makes sense to them.
Participants may also be asked to name the resulting groups.
Once all participants have completed the exercise, enter the data in a spreadsheet, and examine the groupings. There will be general agreement about many items, and these groupings will be fairly apparent. For example, all participants may group 'Technical Support' with 'Complaints' and 'Product Assistance'.
You can use cluster analysis to get a pictorial representation of the resultant groupings.
Pay special attention to items about which a consensus does not exist. Would re-naming the item improve the situation, or does it need to be included in more than one category?
Who Should Participate?
Make sure that all participants are representative of the eventual users of the structure you are designing. Try to get as many participants as convenient, and at least six. However, be aware that the more participants you have, the more data you will need to analyze. People vary widely in the amount of time they take to sort cards. As a rule of thumb, allow half-an-hour for a participant to sort 50 items.
Preparing for a Card Slot
- Ensure that each term is as clear and unambiguous as possible
- Ensure that you have included all the items you need to categorize
- Shuffle or randomize cards prior to each participant session
- Script a set of instructions so that all participants have the same understanding of the process
- Leave participants alone while they are sorting the cards to avoid placing them under unnecessary time pressure, but make sure they can contact you easily to ask questions or when they have finished
- Provide additional blank cards for people to write group names
- Provide rubber bands so that people can gather groups of cards together.
Design Principles
See list to find Design Principles used by major companies like:
1. Microsoft (http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?796)
2. Google (
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