At the risk of oversimplifying, most marketing professionals would probably say there is no difference between a vertical market and what usability professionals call a specific user profile or persona. Marketing’s traditional focus is on demographic information supported by large sample sizes. User research, on the other hand, traditionally focuses more on the specific user’s…
This issue of User Experience introduces 2008 with a rich set of articles from a wide range of real-world perspectives. Rick Starbuck, Washington Mutual Bank, USA, shows us how user-centered design achieves bottom-line business success. Jerrod Larson, University of Washington, USA, analyzes why some companies make poor decisions about software usability. Anu Kankainen, Idean, Finland,…
This issue of User Experience seeks to drive home the importance of usability, usefulness, and
appeal—the full range of user-experience development—for medical systems and for healthcare delivery in general.
This issue’s theme focuses on usability and user-experience issues of interactive and mobile video, informing us about many new technology developments that make headlines in our daily news media. We all have our childhood experiences of viewing television and of using the phone. What happens when these two media are combined, and the experience becomes…
Interactive Television (iTV) is slowly replacing the traditional “passive” TV platform due to better audio/video quality and interactive services such as electronic program guides (EPG) and communication services, made possible by a set-top box with a return channel. These new interactive services allow viewers to actively participate, and substantially influence, their experience with television and…
I'm excited and grateful for the opportunity to share the work of UPA's Usability in the Enterprise project with the broader usability community.
This issue of UX is the culmination of nearly three years of work by more than 100 members of the UPA family. The objective of our research is also the objective of this…
We know that our profession is concerned with making products and services more usable, useful, and appealing so that end-users have a better user experience.
The same can be said about what we ourselves need to accomplish within our own business environment. We need to learn how to make sure that our clients have a good…
Could the founders of the United States of America have envisioned what the Internet, telecommunications, and the PC enable in terms of government organization, publications, and the electoral process? Were they alive today, visionaries like Thomas Jefferson might have been keenly interested in technology that influences education and the electoral process, and Benjamin Franklin might…