Conference in Malmö, Sweden, on designing websites

From Business to Buttons is the name of a conference in Malmö held in June 14-15 and arranged by InUse and Malmö University. The focus is on usability and interaction design. Ben Jacobsen will hold a seminar with title “The impact of the Internet on everyday US life”. Ben let 13 households in USA give up internet usage for two weeks and their life was self-documented in different ways. Ben made an in-depth ethnographic study with the participants. Many studies of internet behaviour are conducted with quantitative methods such as surveys. Qualitative methods such as participant observation or naturalistic inquiry are more rare.

There are also a lot of other interesting seminars and workshops like a case study of a New York Times Redesign by Karen McGrane and Kevin Kearney and Practicing Design at the Yahoo! Media Group by Jens Jonason.

Jakob Nielsen means you can have it both fast, cheap and good

Even if you not have to agree with all puritanic ideas of usability guru Jakob Nielsen in his postings at his website Useit.com it’s great reading all the time. Read his last finding: “Fast, Cheap, and Good: Yes, You Can Have It All“.

Nielsen means the maxim: “…if you want something done quickly and inexpensively, it’ll be of poor quality; if you want it quickly and done well, it’ll be expensive” is not applicable “for one important aspect of usability: methodology”. The fastest and cheapest methods are the best in usability. He suggests paper prototypes and testing of each design with 5 users and to run many rounds of user testing.