Day 80 - Return on Usability Investment

Why should the business care about ux research, usability and design?
Research at IBM shows that as a rule of thumb for every $1 dollar spent solving a problem in design, you save $10 dollars in development, and you save $100 dollars in post-release maintenance.

$1 : $10 : $100

Day 79 - Five Mobile Conditions for Social Apps

It's a cliche at this point but astounding mobile growth continues.  What's different about building social apps on mobile than it was on the desktop.

1. Smartphone apps can access your address book, bypassing the need to build your social graph on a new service.
2. They can access your local photo library, uploading your photos to different websites is a nusance.
3. They can use push notifications rather than emails. The millennial generation generally don't use email.
4. Smartphones provide geo-location.
5. Crucially, they get an icon on the home screen.

Day 78 - Value FOR Your Customers

Five ways for creating value for your customers:

1. Focus on value.  What pain point are you solving for your customer.
2. Compete on value not price.
3. Be empathetic. Walk in your customer's shoes and see the world through their eyes.
4. Satisfy your customers by making them successful.  In other words, satisfy their needs.
5. Delight them by giving them something extra.

Day 77 - Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

Jakob Nielsen's 10 most general principles (or heuristic rules of thumb) for interaction design:

1. Visibility of system status.
2. Match between system and the real world.
3. User control and freedom.
4. Consistency and standards.
5. Error prevention.
6. Recognition rather than recall.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
10. Help and documentation.

Day 76 - System Usability System (SUS)

SUS is a series of ten questions. It's a quick and dirty usability scale to give your users once they've completed testing your service.  Users are asked to rate statements from 1-5 depending on how much they agree with them.

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought the system was easy to use.
4. I think I would need the support of a technical person to use this system.
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use.
9. I feel very confident using the system.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.

Day 75 - Value from Your Customers

Value comes from customers in four different ways.

1. They can pay you money.
2. They can create content for you.
3. They can give you their eyeballs.
4. They can give you other users.