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Handpicked News For Internet Developers - Since 1999 |
Archives For Usability
Raising the perceived value of your website
Strange as it might seem, I have rarely seen content management being accepted as a management discipline. Most people who 'manage' websites have little authority. They are, in reality, website administrators. They put stuff up. Content that is administered rarely delivers value.
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Catching the Customer
For those wary of technology and the entire online shopping process, customer registration is a big impediment, says Nielsen. “Most people still don’t understand the difference between a User ID and a password. Often their name is taken. If they type in Joe27, they may not remember the number later. Or they get confused because they can’t use the same password they use for their email.”
Other concerns for internet-wary purchasers are whether an item is the quality product that the merchant says it is, whether it will actually be sent and whether shipping will be timely.
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Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville
I can understand why an academic with access to vast libraries of books, journals, and licensed databases might sneer at the free Web. But these crown jewels of the ivory tower are unreachable by most people most of the time, and they always have been. Amid cries of "let them eat cake," the Web gave bread and fruit and vegetables to the starving masses.
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Forms vs. Applications
Forms are rarely the best metaphor for complex interactions with computers. Most big companies, however, have a legacy of paper forms. As a result, their intranets are littered with online forms that attempt to meet needs that are often better served by real applications with a real dialogue flow and more of a full-fledged GUI.
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Honey v. Vinegar
I like to imagine error messages are more often than not composed by techie types - folks who are perfectly happy to call a spade a spade and scratch their heads when you suggest the label might not sit well with all spades. Techies code stuff that will process provided you follow the process correctly. A form doesn't submit because you overlooked entering your zip? Well, that's down to you. The error message tells you so. End of story. Wanna go get a cup of coffee?
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Useit.Com: Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents
The common rationale designers have for opening new windows is "to keep users on our site," but that's bogus reasoning. If people want to leave, they'll leave. And if they just want to look at the other site, they’ll return to your site by clicking the Back button -- the second most used feature on the Web (after hypertext links). In fact, one of the usability problems of opening new windows is that they alter the expected behavior for returning to the previous location.
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Usability: Empiricism or Ideology?
Despite these differences, the fundamental approach of usability and harder sciences is the same: conclusions and recommendations are grounded in what is empirically observed in the real world. The job of usability is to be the reality check for a design project and -- given human behavior -- determine what works and what doesn't.
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How to Make Your Blog Accessible to Blind Readers
Blind users find top and left-hand navigation bars annoying because the screen reader starts at the top of the page and reads from left to right. It is very time-consuming to listen to the same list of links every time you visit a page. You can get people right to your latest post by putting your navigation links on the right-hand side.
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Archiving Usability Reports
Whenever you go to the trouble of creating an in-depth formal report with detailed analysis, you need to maximize your return on investment by encouraging future use of the insights. You should also archive informal usability reports. These "quick findings" and emailed summaries are important during usability projects, and while not as useful in the future as more detailed reports, they will have value then as well.
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Practical (and Cheap) Usability Testing
In most cases, I see usability testing being treated as a low priority. This usually happens due to either the high cost of formal usability testing in a lab or the time it takes to conduct the tests. The unfortunate result is that most Web sites are launched without knowing the problems that exist. Conducting usability testing early in the process ensures that you discover the bottlenecks and obstructions in your site. By resolving such issues, you will improve results on your site and offer your site visitors a better experience.
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Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer
(UseIt.Com) Deviating from this expected design almost always causes usability problems. Sites that separate out some search results and place them in boxes risk having these links overlooked because users often assume they're ads. Instead, such "best bets" should be the first items in the linear list. (Typically, users don't care that items are editorial, rather than algorithmic, selections.) Also, scoped search that covers only a current subsite often misleads users who rarely have to consider what's being searched.
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Boxes and Arrows Interview: Steve Krug
"Proving" usability ROI is really hard work. There are good reasons why you don't see very many usability ROI case studies: they're very time-consuming and expensive to create, especially one that legitimately controls for confounding variables. And if a company does go to the trouble of creating one, it's probably going to be proprietary anyway. But more importantly, I think most companies that need ROI-style "proof" to convince them to "do usability" probably aren't going to do great work anyway.
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