Usability News & Articles

For more than seven years, I’ve been teaching and coaching design teams on how to conduct usability tests and gather user feedback early on in the development process. One of the questions that comes up time and time again from clients is, "How can we get buy-in for usability tests from management and other team members?"

The public website or intranet that keeps screaming for attention with useless images and vain content will get little from the impatient and sceptical customer.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) is back at work, this time developing best practices for the development and delivery of web applications on mobile devices.

Developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group as part of the Mobile Web Initiative, each best practice is intended to be a possible measure towards "the goal of providing as rich and dynamic an experience as possible on a mobile Web browser."

On the whole, the best practices relate to the appropriate technologies and techniques to use for managing a Web application's data. Here's a glimpse into some of the recommendations made by the working group.

Recently, in a set of interviews UIE conducted with avid users of Netflix.com, the online DVD rental web site, we asked "What are the things you like best about the site?" Lots, apparently.

Jakob Nielsen says that "websites are definitely easier to use now than they used to be." That's because in his recent survey of 24 websites, which analyzed users' task outcomes and compared it to data collected from the same sites five years earlier, results showed that web usability has improved.

The biggest challenge a website manager has is to understand how humans work, not how content management software or search engines work.

The Drupal (news, site) team has a lofty goal, one shared by many content management system projects and vendors: to make their CMS the simplest to use. To that end, Leisa Reichelt and Mark Boulton of Mark Boulton Design have been tasked by Dries Buytaert to repeat their successful Drupal.org redesign for Drupal itself.

Funded by Acquia, Reichelt and Boulton are heavily engaging the community for this process. And that's where you come in.

When it comes to website copywriting, design and development, simple is always better.

While Luke Wroblewski was writing his well-received book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, he asked if I could think of an example where a change in a form's design made a noticeable difference in business. "You mean like $300 million of new revenue?" I responded. "Yes, like that." said Luke. So I wrote this article, which he published in his book.

Of all the things that make the Web different from print, linking is the most important.

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.

Listening to customers is not enough. You must listen to the right ones.

While it’s still two weeks away, here’s a Webinar that you don’t want to miss. Especially, if you’ve been working to utilize visual design to not just be user-friendly but design-friendly as well.

The folks at User Interface Engineering — a research, training and consulting firm specializing in Web site and product usability — are hosting Essentials of Effective Visual Design on Thursday, November 20, at 1:30 p.m. EDT. This Webinar aims to help you take advantage of a visual hierarchy, so the most important info jumps out of the design first, as well as to give you the tools to make your graphics work hard for your design.

A self-service website can only be effective when people can complete the tasks they came to complete.

A while back we reported about a Nielsen Online study that revealed that people are spending more time, as in actual time, reading the news online. We speculated of course as to what this indicated. Did it mean people are slow readers, or do they get preoccupied and prone to leave browser windows open? Well, according to new research, it could just mean that we’re old.

It’s not pretty, but it may be true. As we get older, online users tend to lose their savvy and what once took us seconds to process, now takes us longer. Before you despair, there are two different ways to look at this.