Brazilian E-commerce Product Pages - A Study by Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade (Brazil)

E-commerce in Brazil is developing quickly as the public increasingly seeks to purchase products and services through the Internet.

In 2008 online sales grew 30% and reached $4.2 billion. Specialists at Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade feel the growth could be even higher if Brazilian e-commerce websites adhered to usability rules on their product pages.

Three specialists at Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade visited 15 major Brazilian e-commerce websites and analyzed pages of similar and typical website specifi­c products. All 15 websites violated basic usability principles and as a result are losing sales. Specialists from Mercedes Sanchez Usabilidade have compiled results and recommendations based on this study.

Go the UXalliance website or view the full report.

10th IA Summit Gets a Shakeup by User Intelligence (Netherlands)

Time to let go and move on…

“Information architecture does not exist as a profession. As an area of interest and inquiry? Sure. As your favorite part of your job? Absolutely. But it's not a profession. […]

There's no such thing as an interaction designer either. There are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers.” Jesse James Garrett – Closing Keynote at the IA Summit 2009.
The theme of this year’s seminal IA Summit was ‘Expanding our Horizons’ and it lived up to this motif in some unexpected ways.

Read the full paper or visit the UXalliance website.

What Microsoft Blend is Missing by UIDesign Group (Russia)

XAML/Blend technology promises interaction designers an improved level of control over the results of their work. It enables interaction designers to develop interfaces for the end product that are very close to the initial concept. However, this technology changes the habitual way of designers’ work and requires additional skills. UXalliance partner, UIDesign Group (Russia) explores the in's and out's of Microsoft Blend © - what is missing and does it really allow for developing complex interfaces?

Read the full paper (PDF 3 MB) or visit the UXalliance website.

The International Parking Meters Study by the UXalliance

Partners and associates from the UXalliance conducted the international usability study of parking meters to coincide with the theme of "transportation" for World Usability Day 2008. The International Parking Meters Study explored interface and interaction design of parking meters around the world and examined different parking meter interfaces and the common problem of designing an interface to accommodate a broad range of users trying to achieve multiple tasks.


Using parking meters is an everyday activity for many, and one that should be intuitive enough not require much thought from the user. The International Parking Meters Study provides valuable insight into how and where interface and interaction design can be applied to avoid potential annoyance and unnecessary costs. The International Parking Meters Study is a good opportunity to learn what's designed well and how to detect and fix existing shortcomings of the parking meter.


Read the full Int'l Parking Meters Study or visit the UXa website.

Using the SUS Questionnaire to Evaluate Subjective Satisfaction with Handsets in Out-of-the-box Testing by Sven Koerber, SirValUse, GmbH (Germany)

Based on the results of 27 quantified usability tests of mobile phones, usability professionals from UXalliance partner SirValUse GmbH (Germany) are able to provide data points based on this research. The data points provide an understanding of what to expect from SUS (System Usability Scale) questionnaires in walk-up-and-use testing.

Created in December 1986 for the evaluation of office systems, SUS continues to be valuable. This one-page, ten-item questionnaire written by Sven Körber, Director Customer Experience, SirValUse GmbH has proven a useful and consistent tool to capture subjective satisfaction with mobile phones, even with small samples and when time is short in sessions. As a rule of thumb, scoring higher than 70 on a scale from 0-100 can be interpreted as providing relatively high perceived usability for mobile phones.

Read the full article visit the UXalliance website.