If I knew the bus to choose, I wouldn't have to consult the map.

Focusing on the wrong problem, well, focusing on just one of the solution of the problem will make this situation happens. I just wanted another way of visualizing the same information, exactly an standard way like the map.

Anyway, it was a long time without writing, at least, I did the first step.

Via Designing Web Interfaces

Simple question, right? How can we know when there's something in our software application or website that looks unusable? It's easy:

1. Check your user profiles and find out if there's too many unanswered questions.
2. Figure out whether it's something that you, as a designer/developer, can solve by your own or not. If so, then you got it!

Seriously, if you cannot wait to a thinking-aloud user test, try to "listen" what your personas would ask when they're in front of the desktop.
It works for me when I cannot see, in a first sight, from where the smells is comming.

Reading this "Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes" we can make good construstive self-criticism.

So, I'm writting down some of the main ideas taken from Nielsen for not forget:

• Base the decisions on user research.
• Don't just implement feature requests from "user representatives" or "business analysts."...Requirement specifications are always wrong.

Basically, as he says: applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand.

Via Olga Carreras' Blog.

Hi All,

does anybody know if the Cadius Cocktail is taking place in Málaga?

I'd really like to go and if no I think it's a good time to initiate it. Please, move this post to "recruit" interested people.

I'll tell news comming soon...

Persuability is the art of turning your visitors into customers. The theory says that the more persuasive is your product the more easily it will be sold (with notes, but enough for now).

From the usability approach we can think in persuability as a way of creating passionate and highly interested users. Being persuasive, we can enhance better user experiences in a positive and happy context or more convincing, at least. But, what if we don't want to persuade? What if the main goal is to dissuade users?

I have been looking for an answer in literature without success, so I'm going to ramble to see what happens (obviously, any resource or idea is welcome). To dissuade users from doing something (can we call it dissuadibility?) could be useful in a service application.

Hope this is good example: we have an e-commerce and we want to provide three options of buying a product, e.g. buying online with registration, buying online without registration and ordering it and pick it up on the physical shop.

Here we have different purposes; one is to offer to the user many choices to look like the perfect and suitable service. Other one could be to increase online sales because it has lower costs; but if we have a commerce we really want to sell the more, we need to know who our customers are, so we will need they have been registered in our online store.

For the second purpose we will want to persuade them to buy online with registration as we want to dissuade them to buy online without registration. Though this last way is rather than just ordering.

How can we get it? Well, first we need to make use of visual aid to support our favourite message: get registered, please. Besides, we need to communicate and increase user expectative using arguments: he only will register if he gets a benefit.

Secondly, we do not want users think that buy without registration is the best choice, but reducing the font-size is not a option, is it? One solution could be hide that option behind a beautiful link labelled "Other buying ways" next to/under the registration box.

I guess it has pros and cons, but it is not just a matter of getting things done, but a question of we want to communicate/suggest/persuade/dissuade users our preferences.

A good blog to know more about persuability: http://persuabilidad.com