Welcome. Our aim is to give an overview of the main events and debates in the Usability world. This time we've included a couple of press releases describing recent developments at our company.

On Friday 25th January the RNIB hosted their quarterly conference raising the profile of web accessibility. This quarter, Macromedia joined RNIB on the platform. Macromedia are proactively trying to help web designers and producers to make not only fun and cool but also USABLE and ACCESSIBLE websites for the 21st century. They demonstrated a range of offerings that represent a real commitment to increased accessibility.

These include plugins for Dreamweaver that will automatically check the accessibility of the given pages against WAI guidelines and settings in Flash that will dump the plain text within a movie into the HTML that embeds it. They are also working on functionality in Flash that will allow the "Back" button to work in a more traditional fashion within movies rather than replaying them from the beginning. All these developments should help accessibility for the visually impaired and the overall usability of new sites.

This is warmly received.

The Usability Company and Usability Sciences Corporation (USC) announced in March the UK launch of WebIQ, the only online, client-side technology that can be easily and cost-effectively deployed to gather intelligence on ALL the key qualitative metrics of web site effectiveness. This announcement follows the release by the two companies about their recently agreed transatlantic partnership.

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London-based "The Usability Company" and Dallas-based Usability Sciences Corp. (USC) announced in early March a transatlantic partnership designed to provide global clients with a consistent approach to web site usability testing and research. The Usability Company will become the exclusive UK agent for USC's European clients. USC will reciprocate for North American units of The Usability Company's European clients.

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Usability, an introduction.

Part III - A variety of usability research techniques

Usability research comes in many forms and varieties. It can be as simple as "peer review" a technique where the designer may ask a colleague, preferably from another team or someone not associated with the project, to comment on a design or section of a design with a fresh attitude, right up to complex integrated testing of  for example, air traffic control systems with real flight controllers.

As mentioned the simplest form of evaluation is that of peer review. This could be very informal or could result in a more formalised change management procedure. The next level of testing might be that of a Usability Audit. In this type of research a Usability Specialist would assess a product against standard heuristics (or design rules of thumb) some of these have been published by Jakob Neilson and can be found on his site at www.useit.com. Usually a formal report would then be written with recommendations so improvements could be made to the product.

The most valuable form of research is user observation. This is also the most common type and is also referred to as usability testing or evaluation. Neilson has determined, through research, that between 5 and 8 participants is the most cost effective number of participants and our own research suggests 8 is the optimum number. This is due to the law of diminishing returns. Users should come from appropriate and previously outlined demographics. They would then be placed in front of the product and asked to complete given tasks that are representative of those they would want to complete with the product in the real world. The findings from the user observation would then be complied into a report again with recommendations to improve the product.

Next month we will consider the role of usability in benchmarking performance...

Usability is a term new to many, but it is a science rooted in the cold war era of military research. From the earliest days of the jet fighter, scientists employed usability techniques to optimise the ability of a machine's user. Today these techniques are practiced across the full spectrum of digital platforms. For example by making an Intranet easier to use, businesses are finding that the productivity of their personnel can grow, support costs are lessened and staff morale is bolstered.

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