Usability

Agillic Product Manager Ian Wistler Poulsen has written an excellent new book on usability, the release party is today at Arnold Busk.

We've all been there - trying to fight our way through a poorly designed website absolutely and utterly unable to find what we're looking for and finally starting to look elsewhere for what we wanted. Most people wouldn't visit a website like that twice unless they had to. This is a fact that hasn't escaped most companies today, which is why usability is a hot topic these days.  

Usability defines the ease (or lack thereof) of using a given UI (user interface). A usability test exmines such things as

• How easy is it to use a given UI without any prior experience
• How fast is the average user able to perform certain tasks
• How easy is it to remember all this after a while
• And rather subjectively: is it pleasant to use

Ians book ”Usability, Testmetoder til mere brugervenlige websites på Internettet” (for now it's only available in Danish) mainly targets 2 audiences: IT professionals looking for inspiration and methods to work with improving usability – and students, who need a practical hands-on guide to usability and user-centered design.

The book is generally described as an easy read with a hands-on approach. It takes the reader through 6 general methods of evaluating the usability of a  website. Apart from a description of how the tests can be planned and executed, the book provides a definition of usability as a concept, and takes you through the steps of an evaluation process. The book would be well suited as an introduction to usability for students of IT, as it provides both the theory behind it all, and very practical examples of best practise for testing and execution.

Ian's book was kindly received by among others Peter Keller-Larsen, Senior Product Manager, Nokia and Denise Kutlu, Entertainment Editor, MSN, Microsoft. Peter says, the book will hit the spot for (..) ”Anyone who aims for the best possible userfriendliness in their web designs. This book presents you with the best tools for getting it right the first time !”.

Besides working as a Product Manager with dialogue-marketing expert Agillic, Ian also finds the time to work as a tutor at 2 Danish universities: ITU and RUC. And he's written a number of books about better ways to design a student paper, the company logo and of course his latest about usability.

If you'd like to know more about the book and meet the author, you'll be welcome to join the Releasy-party Saturday 07 February between 12 and 2 PM at the bookseller Arnold Busk, nearby Rundetårn, Copenhagen.

_{By Victoria Hvidbjerg (MA)}