daily del.icio.us links

links for 2 February 2006

a bit of a mixed bunch today… reflects my day in the office I suppose.

  • adaptive path » get out of your lab, and into their lives unsurprisingly states that usability testing should not rely on usability labs, but that we need to test users in their real environment/context. Particularly true for mobile applications. Nothing really new here but its worth being regularly reminded. (tags: usability testing)
  • Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times Part of the reason that you need to test applications in context is that people don’t get to spend an hour or so uninteruptted with your application, as they might in a one on one session in a usability lab. This article discusses research recently completed in which each employee studied spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading etc. (tags: design usability informationoverload, attentionscarcity HCI)