Usability Resources
One of our goals is to help you to help yourself. The more educated you are in usability, the better we've done our job. Below are General Links, Tools and Downloads that we find helpful.
General Links
- The Write Group Friends of ours who are passionate about plain English and who can help ensure that your web content is user-focused and easy to use.
- Usable Web - Guide to Web Usability Resources Online collection of resources related to website design, implementation, and testing.
- Usable Information Technology Jakob Nielsen's site, including many of his articles and papers on web usability and user testing.
View All General Links ( 4 in total )
NZ Usability Consultants
If you'd like to look around, then here are some of our local competitors. We list our competitors for two reasons: 1) if your goal is to purchase usability services, then chances are that you will evaluate more than one option. We're just making it easier to do what you would have done anyway, and 2) if we don't win your business we'd prefer that another NZ company did. We strongly believe in growing the NZ usability industry.
- Bindu Design
- Intergen
- Shift Doing a lot of work in Wellington and Auckland. We know the people here and would recommend them.
View All NZ Usability Consultants ( 9 in total )
If you know of someone missing from this list, please e-mail us. Are you a usability professional out on your own? We are involved in a couple of groups that meet regularly to discuss usability issues. Let us know if you'd like to get in touch with other usability people.
Tools
The following sites provide ways to help you test the usability and accessibility of your site. We use them regularly. A lot of them are free, or provide trial versions, so they will get you off to a good start in uncovering usability issues.
Assessment Tools
- Web Accessibility Toolbar This free toolbar from the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at Vision Australia is simply brilliant. It allows you to perform a large number of accessibility checks with the click of a button. Highly recommended.
- Bobby Probably the most popular automated testing tool, to check your site for potential problems with accessibility. Bobby is free, but does limit you to the number of URLs you can check in a day.
- A-Prompt "A-Prompt (Accessibility Prompt) is a software tool designed to improve the usability of HTML documents by evaluating Web pages for accessibility barriers and then providing developers with a fast and easy way to make the necessary repairs."
View All Assessment Tools ( 8 in total )
Other Tools
- IBM's Homepage Reader Tool for visually-impaired people that reads web pages aloud. If you don't want to download the full reader, you can hear a screenreader simulation instead.
- Gunning Fog Measurement Tool A tool that allows you to measure the readability of a site. It proves that techniques invented in the 60s can still have real relevance to today's web.
View All Other Tools ( 9 in total )
Checklists
- Usability.gov This site has a very useful list of research-based design and usability guidelines.
- Ten Usability Heuristics Probably the most well-known list of web guidelines, from Jakob Nielsen.
View All Checklists ( 3 in total )
Downloads
- Glossary
of Usability Terms (PDF, 110K)
Handy glossary of usability terms from Human Factors International.
