Everyday Tools for Usability and User Experience

Working on Usability and User Experience people know how important it is creating a website or an application that is usable and that at the end adds to your success.  There are tons of rules and guidelines available that one needs to follow when creating websites/applications in terms of layout, text, images... almost every element.   It's important to have the right tools at your mercy to ensure you give the right feedback to your customers.

Here are a few tools that I have been using extensively over the few years; some I Googled them up, some I found them on my RSS feeds and some of them recommendations.  All in all a bunch of important tools that makes my life easier.

Techsmith's Jing Project

Jing is a free software that adds visuals to your online conversations.  Allows you to catprue screen, screencasting and instant sharing.

Download Jing Project

Pencil Project

With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package.  Pencil Project has built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping, multi-page document with background page, on-screen text editing with rich text supports, PNG rasterizing, and much more.

Download Pencil Project


Notebook
In your notable world, you need to save your ideas, things you see, and things you like.  Paper & Pencil are your best buddies however you cannot carry them always everywhere...  Scanning them and keeping them would be another pain.  If you have the extra buck use Microsofts OneNote and if not use Evernote.


Download Evernote

Five Second Test
The Five Second Test is designed to help test the effectiveness of your site’s interface by exposing test subjects to it for 5 seconds. The test comes in 3 flavors:

Classic:  The classic five second test asks people to list the things they can recall after viewing your interface for five seconds.

Compare:  The comparison five second test asks people to choose their preferred interface after viewing each for two and a half seconds.

Sentiment: The sentiment five second test asks people to choose their most and least favourite elements after viewing your interface for five seconds.

Try FiveSecondTest.com for free

Click Heat | Clicks heatmap by Labs Media

While analyzing a website its important to know where the user is clicking and how much.  This information is of great help specially while designing retail websites.  ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones. ClickHeat is an OpenSource software, released under GPL licence, and free of charge

Get all the information that you are looking for on Click Heat.


Tools for Card Sorting

If you perform card sorting techniques frequently Optimal Sort is the right tool for you.  OptimalSort interprets and organizes information according to their own perspectives.  Seeing other perspectives can make us more effective.  This tools helps you gain new perspectives so that it becomes easier to find and use information on your website.

Create a free account with OptimalSort.

Mind maps

I find mind maps extremely helpful and useful.  FreeMind is a free software and is a very high productivity tool.  FreeMind helps me in a number of things like creating UX Flows, coming up with a feature list, prioritizing features and a whole lot of things.  The most important thing it gives  me direction.

Download FreeMind

Color Lovers

One of the most important tasks in usability or user experience is the colors and color combination that one uses for the website/application.  ColorLovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends.  It gives people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design or in architectural specification.  A place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes and read color related articles and interviews.

Visit ColorLovers.com