Column: Good Questions

Here are my basic best practices for buttons:

1. Make buttons look like buttons.
2. Put buttons where users can find them.
3. Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one.
4. Put buttons in a sensible order.
5. Label buttons with what they do.
6. If users don’t want to do something, don’t have a button for it.
7. Make it harder to find destructive buttons.

Nothing particularly revolutionary there, right? Ever since the <button> tag arrived in HTML4, buttons haven’t been especially difficult to create. Despite this, it’s rather easy to find buttons that don’t comply with these basic best practices, so I’m going to dig into them a little deeper in this column. Read More

What is a confidence interval? I wanted to know that recently and turned to one of my favorite books: Measuring the User Experience, by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert. And here’s what they say:

“Confidence intervals are extremely valuable for any usability professional. A confidence interval is a range that estimates the true population value for a statistic.”

Then they go on to explain how you calculate a confidence interval in Excel. Which is fine, but I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure that once I’d calculated it, I really knew what I’d done or what it meant. So I trawled through various statistics books to gain a better understanding of confidence intervals, and this column is the result. Read More

Does usability testing work for documents? Our answer is a resounding yes.

In this column, we’ll give you three techniques for having people try out documents or any other stand-alone content. These techniques apply whether your document is on paper or online—for example, as a Web page or a PDF. They apply for both in-person and remote usability testing—especially with moderated remote testing.

What Is a Document?

We’re talking about functional documents that provide information to people—not fiction or poetry. Functional documents include informative banners—such as the ones on many Web sites about how an organization is dealing with COVID-19—legal documents, manuals, notices, official letters, press releases, privacy policies, terms and conditions, and more. Read More