Uselog.com | the product usability weblog

While working on my PhD I started a weblog on www.uselog.com entitled ‘the product usability weblog’. Twice a week I wrote a post about the usability of electronic consumer products. The goal was to attract an audience of product managers, interaction designers and usability specialists by generating constant flow of news, research (by other authors as well as by me), and opinions and examples relating to consumer product usability. Having this audience provided the opportunity to disseminate my research to the product development and human-product interaction community.

Secondly, it turned out that a weblog can be a two-way street: apart from being a way to disseminate my publications, uselog.com also became a platform for a dialogue with practitioners, who started commenting on the posts I wrote or contacted me via email. Having established a dialogue with practitioners through the weblog provided a possibility to ‘user test’ the recommendations for industry by publishing them on my weblog.

Finally, writing about consumer product on a regular basis meant that I was continuously confronted with the phenomenon I was studying, was continuously testing my ideas against empirical evidence, and collected a great collection of examples and anecdotes about the benefits of usability, how usability is used in marketing, what simplicity is, and usability problems in consumer electronics.

By the time I finished my thesis uselog.com had almost 10.000 hits per month.