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usability
2007 June 9 • tools, usabilityRobot Replay
tool: Allows you to track the mouse gestures of your visitors and play them back. Imagine tracking individual prospects and see how they are interacting with your site! Not just where they click, but whether they scroll, how they interact with your forms, etc.
[credit: Stephan Spencer's Scatterings]
Breadcrumb Navigation
article: Breadcrumbs won't help a site answer users' questions or fix a hopelessly confused information architecture. All that breadcrumbs do is make it easier for users to move around the site, assuming its content and overall structure make sense.
[credit: elearningpost]
Standards for good intranet & extranet design
article: Sixteen key characteristics for good intranet and extranet design.
[credit: elearningpost]
The Ultimate Webdesign Usability Checklist
checklist: This checklist with 88 questions is a must read for every webdesigner who cares about usability.
[credit: xBlog]
Metrics for Heuristics
article: Web analytics typically provide intelligence for executives and marketers, but the real value comes from evaluating the online experience. Andrea Wiggins shows how designers can use analytics to quantify the user experience.
2006 September 9 • design, usabilityDo links need to be underlined?
article: Jared Spool answers the question about whether links need to be underlined.
[credit: GUUUI]
Screen Resolution and Page Layout
article:
Jakob Nielsen on what screen resolution to target when designing "Optimize Web pages for 1024x768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024."
[credit: elearningpost]
Branding and the Online User Experience
video: Jared Spool on online branding and his research on the intersection between usability, designing for branding, and advertising.
[credit: Web Design Blog]
Prioritizing Web Usability
book excerpt: The biggest web usability No Nos. The book is written by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger of the Nielsen Norman Group. In the online chapter they cover the eight major web usability problems that haven't changed.
2006 July 16 • design, usabilityWhat users hate most about Web sites
article InfoWorld article about the web annoyance users hate most. Based on an interview with Theresa Cunnington a usability consultant from iFocus.
[credit: Monkey Bites]
What users hate most about websites
article: Anyone who develops websites is also a web user, no doubt, so it's surprising how many sites contain things that annoy their users. Perhaps it's just too easy to forget in the midst of development.
[credit: ETC.]
Internationalization Primer
article: Demystify developing for a project that must be done in two or more languages.
[credit: Digital Web Magazine]
Affordance
article: Affordance is one of the more important elements of design; one closely tied to usability. Without proper affordances the rest of the design doesn’t matter - it will simply fail, partially or entirely. An affordance is a property of an object or environment that indicates how it can or should be used.
[credit: xBlog]
Eight Usability Problems
article: Ten years ago Jakob Nielsen found all kinds of problems that prevented website visitors from getting the most from websites. Even now, most of those problems still occur on far too many websites. Webmonkey reports:
Areas that still cause major problems include:The article expands on the eight points, explaining each problem and why it’s a problem. Definitely worth reading.
- Links that don’t change color when visited
- Breaking the back button
- Opening new browser windows
- Pop-up windows
- Design elements that look like advertisements
- Violating Web-wide conventions
- Vaporous content and empty hype
- Dense content and unscannable text
[credit: TiKouka]
2006 May 29 • design, usability
Don't customise the look and feel of form fields
article: Browser form fields may not be the prettiest things in the world, but people are used to and comfortable with them. It's not surprising that sites I with custom-designed forms often have significant usability problems. — credit: 456 Berea Street
What Visitors Find Annoying
article: Hostway's national Pet Peeve survey assembled a list of 15 irritating website practices.
[credit: GrokDotCom]
Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist
article: Usability problems with online forms can be infuriating. Solve the problem with a checklist of form-usability recommendations.
2005 November 20 • blogs, usabilityWeblog Usability
article: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.
[credit: xBlog]
Simplifying Registration Forms
article: Six tips on how to make registration forms as easy as possible.
[credit: GUUUI]
Measuring Your Site's Content Pages
article: How can you be confident your content pages are understandable to users? A simple usability testing technique can help design teams quickly measure how a content page performs with users. We call it the 5-Second Test.