The Contact Us page plays a critical role in most websites. For many organizations, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the entire website exists to support the Contact Us page. But how usable is your contact page? Despite its central role, Contact Us often fails to get the attention it deserves [...]
Archive for the ‘Information Architecture’ Category
Making Better Use of Your “Contact Us” Page
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009A Website Redesign: 5 Months Later
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009It’s been just about 5 months since we re-launched the Dayspring website with a fresh design and a custom content management system. We’ve gotten quite a few positive comments on the site’s clean, precise look.
But how has the site performed? Sure it’s a laudable goal to make the Web more beautiful, but, [...]
Advanced Search: Making it Useful
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009Most people know that designing effective and intuitive web applications is challenging. Recently I’ve been busy working on the software design and information architecture for a large web project which includes a blend of social networking, articles, discussions, and other information. As the design phase progressed, one question that came up is how to “do” [...]
How Users Read on the Web: Nanocontent and Golden Triangles
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009Jakob Nielsen’s recent Alertbox article has some interesting things to say about how users read on the Web.
Our newest usability study…tests how well users understand the first 11 characters of a website’s links and headlines.
Why test text that’s so severely truncated? Because online reading is often dominated by the F-pattern. That is, people read the [...]
Forget pull-downs, go ribbon?
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008So ribbons are hot, they say. Have you used one?
Lightboxes are the technique of the year, and there may be a trend toward emotional, playful designs (truly the developer design is dead).
See the Nielsen’s latest usability newsletter: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-design.html
Where do you turn for usability guidelines?
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008I am increasingly impressed with the info coming out of Jakob Nielsen’s usability studies. We are constantly tasked with making things easy to use; it’s alarming to see how often something I’ve taken for granted is still not generally recognized by the average web user.
Do link colors really matter? What is the BEST way to drive [...]
