In the design world, there’s always been an assumption that some users demonstrate “search-dominant” tendencies by going right to the search engine when they first visit a web site looking for content. But back in 2000, UIE made a groundbreaking claim that blew away the web design world. From our research, we concluded that users aren’t Search dominant. How does this effect your design choices?

In usability tests where we incorporate interview-based tasks, the participants interests are discovered, not assigned. Unlike traditional task design methods, the test facilitator and participant negotiate the tasks during the tests, instead of proceeding down a list of predefined tasks. There are many situations where this is the appropriate way to test a product.

This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about User Interface Engineering’s groundbreaking study on download time. In this study, we found the actual download time of a page didn’t impact a site’s usability.

This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about one of UIE's most valuable usability testing techniques, Inherent Value Tests. Inherent Value Testing gives the team important information about how well a web site communicates the inherent value the designers are putting into the site.

This week, Christine and Jared discuss the genesis and value of five-second usability tests.

In last week's podcast, we talked about Gallery Pages, which are pages with links to the site’s content pages. This week, Christine asked me about two other types of pages: Department pages and Store pages. These pages become crucial when an information-rich site has thousands (and sometimes millions) of pages.

In this week’s episode, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about UIE’s research on Gallery Pages. Gallery Pages, the list of links to content, are a web site’s hardest working page. They are the final page that determine whether users will successfully find their content.

In this Usability Tools podcast, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about UIE's latest thinking on home page design.