Ux News & Articles

The assumption that users must be able to access all content with a maximum of 3 clicks is simply false, and we have the data to prove it.

Conventional wisdom says web content should be concise. However, blind application of this rule is a mistake -- there are good cases for lengthy, dense web content.

The most important decisions in web management are what you don't do, what you take away from your website rather than put up on it.

Online visitors form a first impression of a website quicker than the blink of an eye -- literally. It typically takes humans 300 to 400 milliseconds to blink. Meanwhile, scientific research led by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University in Ontario reveals websites have as little as 50 milliseconds to establish a first impression -- a mere 1/20th of a second. That’s it!

You might not have time or budget for full user testing. Here are three practical ways to get the info you need, quickly and on the cheap.

Links are signposts. They are promises to the customer. They must tell customers where they are going and what they will get when they get there.

No other single factor causes greater customer frustration and dissatisfaction than confusing menus and links.

Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for the first thing they do. They'll likely do the exact same thing everyone else does: find themselves on the map.

It doesn't matter what kind of map it is, whether it's of their neighborhood or an amusement park. They'll open the map and find something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or their favorite roller coaster.

Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space.

While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.

Never make management decisions for a website based on opinions. There is often a Jekyll and Hyde difference between what people say and what they do.

Last week O’Reilly Media hosted an online webinar about effective user interfaces. The online seminar featured John McRee, User Experience Architect and author of the book, Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software.

The organization is a tribe and the customer is a stranger. That's why it's so hard to be customer-centric.

One of the final sessions from last week's Gilbane conference (see our coverage here) in San Francisco focused on Personas, Market Segmentation and User Experience design. Strong assertions were made (e.g., "data without segmentation is crap") and key lessons shared. Here are the highlights and take-aways.

Customers crave speed on the Web, and they reward organizations that make things fast and simple.

The history of social interface design can be divided into two periods: Before Flickr and after Flickr. In the first period, any social interface functionality was added as an afterthought to the design—something to layer on top of the core functionality. In the after Flickr period, teams were now considering social components as core to their design's value.

Recently, we did some extensive task testing with a technical audience. 70 percent started the task by clicking on a link, 30 percent used search.