After reading “Pick a Format (Any Format)” by Nick Bradbury (tip by: Jeremy Voorhis on Octoblog) we must say that we totally agree. The point in the post is simple: I keep running across sites that offer the same exact content as an RSS feed and an Atom feed. What’s the point of this? Making [...]
Earlier I wrote about Pogosticking and why it should be avoided. I mentioned that pogosticking is: Unnecessary navigation and extra clicks that occurs because pages do not match the information users need to find what they are looking for. Then I’m reading this book from 1999. It’s a classic: Web Site Usability (a designer’s guide) [...]
How to let ordinary people make wise predictions for you better than experts. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki digs into that phrase and gives excellent examples of how it can be used on the web. I wrote about it earlier after hearing James Surowiecki on MP3 from SxSW. Two weeks ago, Boxes and [...]
From a former colleague I just learned that Capgemini started our first official corporate weblog: CTO Blog by corporate CTO Andy Mulholland and Northern Europe Asia Pacific CTO Ron Tolido. There are two things I think are really excellent: Their biographies — extremely well written, and that the weblog has a corporate commenting policy Example [...]
Blog linking can be painful. Sometimes it’s the one thing that takes most time when I’m writing for this weblog. I just saw a brilliant example from the new Alistapart article by Joe Clark.
You might wonder what a code example is doing here in a blog about usability and web standards. As you might know, Thomas and I are both web developers, and we’re really obsessed about making usable web applications. What better way than to share code for things that make web apps more usable. Thomas has [...]
Just a quick note: I’m attending Jesse James Garrett’s event in Copenhagen May 31st, “The elements of User Experience“. I’m really looking forward to this, as I’m a big admirer of Jesse and Adaptive Path. You probably know that it was Jesse James Garrett who coined the term “AJAX”, which I think is a way [...]
Michael Heilemann wrote a rant on Billetlugen, a Danish company that sells tickets to concerts, etc. Two weeks ago they sold 85,000 tickets to Madonna’s only concert in scandinavia, August 24 in Horsens, Denmark. I had the worst user experience ever, and Billetlugen’s systems failed to sell me the tickets. We were on holiday in [...]
While browsing on Google today I discovered that they had just launched a new service called Google Trends. Apparently you can use this service to “see” what the world is searching for. Actually this is kind of misleading as you have to give it a query first. It will then show you some graphs and [...]
For those of you in Denmark in the Copenhagen area. May 19 I’m speaking about rapid prototyping to make usability testing earlier and more often. The focus will be on the benefits and the business value user testing creates early in the process, so at this event, there’s really no focus on Ruby on Rails [...]
As a followup to my post 25% of all web users are disabled, I saw that Microsoft commissioned Forrester to make research about accessibility and assistive technologies.
They found that 57% are likely to benefit from assistive technologies.
One usability mantra states: The fewer mouse clicks to get from A to B the better. This is always in front of every usability experts mind. But have anybody told Microsoft? Fabian von Schéele from the research institute EMPA in Switzerland has in a study concluded that Windows XP is less efficient as a work [...]
Quite some time ago Ari Paparo wrote an interesting article about “Getting it right”, all the big and little details that matter to make a successful web application. I remember Blink.com that he writes about and used it to port my browser bookmarks between my home PC and my various work PC’s. I don’t really [...]
Wayfaring, a new maps based webtool is working to make the interface easier to use. From the Wayfaring blog: At this point, we only have a handful of friends and family looking at the site. Truth be told, it’s mostly our Moms’ doing beta testing. Our Moms’ have already weighed in on some features and [...]
I got a question from Kimberly, one of our reader, in the Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist post where she asks where the best place to display the asterisk indicating a required field in af form is: [...] I’d like to see the askterick appear before the label so that a user isn’t forced [...]
After a tip from Ars Technica I found that is was possible to cheat Google into letting you test their new front page design (you can do it too!). Click on thumbnail to see larger screenshot As far as I can see the only difference is that they now display their categories (Images, Groups, News [...]
I just thought I would share a good experience I had today :) Many websites today are divided into sections – some even exist in different versions that the user has to choose from. If you visit the Dell website (and many others!) you are asked to make a choice of whether you are shopping [...]
If you are a frequent reader and take a look at the front page sometimes, you might have noticed that we updated the layout quite a bit. The new layout is the first of many steps we will take to make the life easier for blog readers.
Bryce Glass (soldierant) and Frank Spillers have created a stunning diagram on User Experience (Via Column Two).
This one’s really nice. you can edit an HTML form with this interface (click to enlarge). You can literally create a form in seconds.
Ever heard of pogosticking? Until recently, I had experienced it a lot, but never heard of “pogosticking”. Here is how to avoid unnecessary navigation and extra clicks that occurs because pages do not match the information users need to find what they are looking for.
John Rhodes of Webword found this fantastic lightbulb joke from Szuc & Gaffney: Q: How many usability people does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. They’re too busy complaining about the door knob. Check out these other suggestions by Matthew Oliphant, Ryan, Chris McEvoy, Jared Spool. Q: How many usability people does [...]
Trend: Live search will gradually replace traditional search in web applications. As mainstream programs such as Windows Vista matures up to release, and live search is deeply integrated, we can expect more web pages implementing live search. Apple’s Spotlight and MSN Desktop Search uses the same Live search paradigm that we’ll probably see a lot [...]
Very interesting read from a user interface point-of-view. I stumbled upon a walkthrough of Windows Vista. An interesting perspective here is that the search field has gotten a prominent position on the Start menu itself. From BentUser – Windows XP and Vista Side-by-Side (via MadMan’s LinksMatic: Windows XP vs Vista): The start menu has evolved [...]
More numbers show up that back up my claim that 25% of your users are disabled. (“disabled” to me is physical as for instance a visual impairment, and technological as using a small screen or wireless device).
I had a chat today with a former employe of Danish Center for Accessibility, and he pointed me to Tiresias, an organisation that has collected statistics from Europe. I was told Tiresias is known for it’s conservative estimates and high credibility.
Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website have some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, has learning disabilities or motoric disabilities such as schlerosis, parkinson’s disease, etc. A so-called functional disability.
But how about users with a technical disability: Wireless devices, slow internet connections, old browsers, feed readers, etc. These should be considered as well, as there are probably more people with technological disability than functional disability.
To follow up on Thomas’ post from yesterday about how to improve usability on out-of-the-box wordpress blog, we decided to prioritize the 23 20 point list that we’ll work on. (Three items are already done since we started the list).
We prioritize improvements so that we get the low hanging fruit done right away.
Many blogs today use common blogging software like WordPress or Movable Type. Tools like these are very easy to set up and you will probably get your blog up and running with the default design within 10-15 minutes. This speed comes at a price though… Very bad usability. Help us fix the birth defects.
In the previous “Mullet-style blog layout and complete archive page” we had a look on the Mullet-style blog page that makes more content available on the fronpage, and also argued for replacing monthly archives with a single archive page.Danish “brugervenligeblogs.dk” pointed me to a research document from July 2005: Blog Mainstream Market Penetration Likely Limited [...]
Show a bunch of test users a webpage for 50 milliseconds and they have already made up their mind whether or not the page is good. Put this into context and you can see how important it is to have a good looking front page that appeal to its audience. A new Canadian study shows how important it is.
Usability work is often related to user experience, and both concepts have a remarkable recognition among usability professionals, among other web consultants, among our clients and in corporate management. I would like to go beyond the words “User Experience” and give a clear, concise, simple definition that’s easy to remember, that everybody can understand. I [...]
How do you build a system that can deliver and update content to 100,000 people simultaneously? Via Ajaxian.com I saw this article from MacRumors on what traffic they got when Steve Jobs delivered his keynote on MacWorld a few days ago.
Also in this post: Ajaxinfo (the guys behind AJAX usability metrics), AJAX ROI faceoff, where a traditional webapp is compared to an AJAX webapp. For the visually oriented, there is a video comparing the two applications.
I usually use an English version of Windows. But from time to time I find my self stuck with a Danish Windows. Besides the obvious language differences in the GUI, I find it a major problem that all the keyboard shortcuts have changed. But what if there where an easy solution to this life long problem? Maybe this is it…
Blog frontpage that increases user experience and improves findability of content. The key is the mullet. The idea is to have a long tail of many older entries that represent previous content.
Don’t you hate when you have typed in a huge form and clicked submit just to realize that you forgot one tiny little required field and that you now have to re-enter all the information again? I just read an article on A List Apart by Brian Crescimanno called “Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist”. It’s a very good and recommendable read. Here are just a few comments on the article spiced up with my own personal rant on the subject.
BayCHI has put yet another audio recording online. The latest event is a two hour presentation with Jensen Harris of the Microsoft Office team. He shares his thougts on usability and the challenges of shaping the new user interface.
It’s important to use video clips to make your points, as I argued earlier. In usability, video clips document research and guidelines. Ironically, video clips are hard to find (if available at all). However, one exception shines in the dark night of publically available usability videos.
Want to know how to make your website more readable and accessible to its users? Start by using the correct font and don’t forget to tweak and style it correctly either – it makes quite the difference! Understand how in the great article “The Anatomy of Web Fonts” by Andy Humes.
Via Ajaxian I saw an alleged article by Jakob Nielsen “Why Ajax sucks (most of the time)”. I jumped right into the joke, and read the Ajaxian post carefully. The small print on the article gives away the spoof.
Jakob Nielsen posted an article today in his ‘alertbox’ column about video on the net, where you can actually see a videoclip. He presented the video clip at lasth week’s “Usability Dagene 2005″. It reminds me that usability testing videos are an eye-opener, and can be used for making strong points to also at management level. Let your end-users make their points. They know better than you. They know better than management.
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