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Archive for August 6th, 2008

Usability

Masters Of The Obvious: Poor Application Performance Contributes To Poor User Experience

From a press release, or actually a study:

The recent publication of a new benchmark report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company Application Performance Management: The Lifecycle Approach Brings IT and Business Together, further signals the increasing need for real end user experience solutions. Aberdeen’s latest findings show that 50 percent of revenue loss is a result of poor Application Performance. In addition, the enterprises surveyed by Aberdeen clearly ranked the ability to identify end user problems as the top priority for any Application Performance Management initiative.

“Best-in-Class organizations are taking an additional critical step and are measuring application performance not only from the perspective of their data center components, but also from the end user perspective. These organizations are ensuring that improvements in application availability, response times and usability translate into improved employee satisfaction and productivity, and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction, mitigation of lost revenue opportunities, and avoid damages to brand image,” said Bojan Simic, research analyst at Aberdeen.

This goes under — duh.

Of course poor user experience can result from a website, web application, or software application that’s slow, has incoherent error messages or just plain breaks. Users don’t know the difference between what’s a bug and what’s not, or why the application is performing slowly.

So, repeat after me:

The first rule of user experience is that the application should actually work.

I wonder how much they are charging for that report. I need to start writing white papers.

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Usability

The Washing Machine vs. Waterfall Requirements Gathering

I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve done the “hey, lets do the requirements gathering in a waterfall process,” by the time we get to the bottom of the waterfall, we’re nowhere close to where we started. That’s one of the reasons why I’m a huge fan of agile requirements gathering and software development.

Horse Pig Cow has a great post on the waterfall vs. the washing machine. It’s done in a presentation (I’m going to include it below).

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About Usability Counts

Patrick NeemanPatrick Neeman is a User Experience Strategist in San Francisco, CA. He has worked with MySpace, Realtor.com, Orbitz, eBay, and Stamps.com, but is most proud that the first site he designed professionally was a top 100 site: the Oliver North Home Page. He is a featured speaker about User Experience and Social Media, and is an instructor for the Online Marketing Institute. More about the site...