Welcome to this months edition of USEworthy. We have had a busy month testing how easy it is to purchase insurance online, meeting and speaking at the New Media Age show, and generally researching things that we think will interest you.

Catriona Campbell, our CEO and an increasingly popular speaker, has been busy presenting to packed audiences at The New Media Age Show on both usability and accessibility. Those of you that attended would have heard the interesting case studies and offerings that usability and industry experts had to offer.

Catriona was thrown in at the deep end, discussing the importance of usability to 'creatives.' Catriona stood out amongst the 'creative teams' sighing and groaning at her insistence of designs, which are usable. After explaining that a usable site does not necessarily stunt all creativity the crowd began to relax. As Joe Noburn of The Royal Bank of Scotland pointed out, designers should still: ' push the boundaries. You can still use rotating banners, Pop-Ups, Pop-Unders' DHTML, and Flash but only if it has a purpose.'

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Recent media coverage in Metro highlighted the problem of the small print when buying travel insurance. A boy's family were lumbered with a £4,000 rescue bill after the boy fell into difficulty in India whilst paragliding. Although the family had taken comprehensive insurance, which included 'dangerous sports' such as Hand gliding, Paragliding was not covered; in this case the small print was very small.

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"Don't Make Me Think" is probably the best book anyone new to usability could read on the subject. Krug's subtitle for the book is 'A common sense approach to usability' and it is exactly that.

Easy to read in a day, this book offers practical guidance on usability and design. It's frequently amusing illustrations along with its witty anecdotes make it very enjoyable to read.

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The practical application of usability research is described in a case study that illustrates the use of a Usability Evaluation immediately prior to the launch of a new transactional website by Smile-On, a company part owned by Boots the Chemist. A summary is provided below.

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Part IV - The Role of Usability In Benchmarking Performance

Following last months introduction to usability techniques we look forward to how these can be applied to benchmark the performance of digital interfaces.

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