Archive for the 'Usability' Category
Dont’ think that what you are seeing is what everyone else is seeing
One of the most difficult things about building websites is getting it to look the same on all browsers. This task can be very challenging and frustrating. Before trying to achieve the impossible and making your website look great on every browser, you may want to look at your audience and your stats. Looking at stats is a great way to narrow down your list of browsers that you should support. If you haven’t done it already take a look at Google Analytics or Mint and start collecting statistics.
Blog posts at The VIFF website are hard to come by
Every year I attend the Vancouver Film Festival for the full two weeks and try to see as many small movies that may not get distribution anywhere else. I’ve seen incredible movies and other than mentioning them to friends, I never wrote reviews or blogged about them. I thougth that I would do a bit more this year and decided to write something about each film. I was really pleased to see that the VIFF website has added blogs to their site, but instead of having a blog for the whole site, each post has a blog. It’s a bit confusing and very hard to find information. Essentially what one has to do, is go through the site, pick a movie, click on the details, then click on the “Film Blog”. I’ve checked a dozen movies or so and have yet to find a single blog post. Surely there must be a better way.
The Toronto Film Festival which ended a few weeks ago, has a much more useful website. The link to the blogs is not part of the main navigation bar, but it was easy enough to find on the home page. Once at the right spot it was explained that the blogs consist of 7 blogs. I’m not sure why these simply aren’t categories, but at least it’s easy enough to go through the entries and read about the many films.
In the end I’ve decided to use Facebook to write my comments. I’m not sure many people will read them, but until the VIFF re-designs their website, I think that’s the best I can do.
Highlights from An Event Apart Seattle
One of the things I love about being a web designer is that there is always more to learn, be it from other web specialists or your clients. Last week at An Event Apart Seattle Christine and I had the chance to learn from some true experts. The speakers were not only masters in their fields, but engaging and generous with their knowledge.
Here are some highlights:
- Watching Eric Meyer write CSS (you know you’re a geek when…)
- Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk on “Writing the User Interface” confirmed my experience: the words in a web design matter much more than you might think and can really make a difference in how visitors use your site. So long as it invites clicking, it matters more what a button says than what it looks like.
- Peaking into other designer’s processes, from beautiful sketchbooks to user research.
- I enjoyed Jeff Veen’s succinct message which shows the benefits of doing your design research up front vs. the cost of changing your mind partway through the build. He also discussed why web design is so much more complex now than it was in the early days of the web, when everyone using the web were of the same type (geeks).
- Shawn Henry shared insights for ensuring your site is accessible to varying abilities; from folks who read the web with braille or speech readers to limited vision users — who magnify screens to an amazing degree, but want the same site that was designed for regularly sighted users. Bottom line: there is no substitute for engaging disabled users in the design process if you want to build truly accessible sites. Her book on accessibility is free online.
- Andy Budd shared how a delightful user experience is worth more than the sum of it’s parts in the loyalty that can create.
No more bells and whistles please. Just get to the point!
Even although there have been countless articles written about bad websites, the trend seems to continue. After all that’s been said about usability and web effectiveness nothing has changed.
A colleague of mine working for a biopharma company needed to find a contractor capable of handling their clinical trials. These types of studies cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and thus can’t just simply be handed out to companies without doing appropriate research. Of course the most logical starting point is a search on the Net.
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Too Many Choices Doesn’t Lead to Better Choice.
Web Content Management consultant and author, Gerry McGovern looks at a study of jams to demonstrate that on the Web simply giving people lots of choice is not necessarily the best approach.
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Keep your Users Happy with Clear Navigation
The first step in designing your website is planning its “information architecture”, of which navigation is an important component. Planning your navigation will not only determine what content needs to be written, but the naming convention that you choose will make of break your website.
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Top Usability Blunders
A website is described as being usable when users understand it and find the information they need quickly. When planning your new website or website redesign, it’s important to remember the following key points to ensure good usability of and hence it’s success.
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