Most 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” [...]
Archive for the ‘Usability, User-Centered Design’ Category
Advanced Search: Making it Useful
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009This article summarizes research that a group did into Web application design practices. Web application design teams that have a shared understanding of a project’s context and objectives produce better results.
We did not find any correlation with user satisfaction and those teams with the most specialized team members, one way or the other: some teams [...]
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 [...]
Donations to nonprofits hampered by poor usability
Monday, March 30th, 2009I love that Nielsen and his team keep studying the issues that we regularly deal with. This week it’s the mistakes that cost non-profit sites the donations they’re so desperately seeking online. A couple organizations we know well (Bread for the World and Habitat) were included in the study (though the newsletter summary doesn’t indicate [...]
Screen recorder comparison
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009In order to record usability tests, we reviewed a few screen recorders that can capture both on-screen user actions as well as off-screen conversation. Here are some options and their descriptions.
Camtasia Studio – $299
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
Has a built in video editor. Can record audio live or later (even a soundtrack). Can zoom and pan to [...]
How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009People don’t want to “be in a relationship” with an e-commerce site… they just want their stuff.
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/
Designing for action: Obama vs. McCain
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009I was talking to a friend about redesigning her organization’s site and she referred me to this interesting link comparing the ability of the Obama and McCain site designs to move users to action.
It’s a good write-up that makes clear the goals that we are often dealing with, particularly with nonprofits that have multiple ways [...]
Cross-browser testing survey
Friday, January 30th, 2009A recent web survey polled web devs on what browsers they use to test their sites. Results are not too surprising, other than the fact that many versions that have teeny-tiny market share get a disproportionately high percentage of test time.
Top browser used to test Web sites? Firefox 3. This is most likely because of [...]
Deeplinking in Flash interface
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008So I’ve spent a couple days playing and getting the flex application to have deep linking.
First, what is “deep linking”? Normally with Flash apps that you see when you load the flash application it always starts in some state. Then as the state of the application is changed by clicking things, etc. 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
