Kicking Nielsen!

Celebrating the 100th post at technophobic via some skepticism!

I always thought Jakob Nielsen was the unchallengable guru of usability but here are a list of few articles which challenge his invincibility and mock the king of usability! Check them out..

1. Jakob Nielsen Drinking Game

2. How usable is Jakob Nielsen?

3. Spanking Jakob Nielsen



Cheers!

How UI design has to incorporate the good and the bad..

An interesting article by Mike Padilla tells us that how designing the UI is fundamentally an exercise in compromise—not compromise between designers and other project stakeholders —but compromise between the drawbacks and benefits of design decisions.

Click here to read the article.

Cheers!

Card Sorting Technique

How to discover the user’s model of information space?
How to start with the information architecture process?
How to validate the information architecture?

Though these questions don't have a straight forward answer, but Card Sorting Technique eases out most of the complexity from these questions.

Card Sorting is a technique for exploring how people group items, so that you can develop structures that maximize the probability of users being able to find items. It is a quick, inexpensive, and reliable method, which serves as input into your information design process. Card sorting generates an overall structure for your information, as well as suggestions for navigation, menus, and possible taxonomies.

How it is done?

[via useit]

Card sorting is done by giving users a bunch of index cards with concepts from the server written on them. The users were then asked to sort the cards into piles such that cards representing similar concepts were in the same pile. The users were also allowed to group piles to indicate looser levels of similarity, and we finally asked the users to name their piles. These names provided us with additional insights into the users' mental model of the information space and served as inspiration for the names we finally chose.

For more information, you can visit this link.

Cheers!