In a previous post I reviewed Steve Krug’s latest book, but recently I had the opportunity to interview Steve about the book. It’s a fun interview, and I think you’ll enjoy hearing Steve talk about: who he wrote the book for (not an obvious answer as I discovered) which part of the book he thinks…
Category Archives: usability
How To Test A Web Site Design In An Hour And On a Shoestring Budget
I have a friend who volunteers to be on an advisory board for a land trust conservancy organization. They have been designing a web site for the land trust. But they are all volunteers, and the organization doesn’t have a budget for web site design. They have a programmer donating her time to put together…
Web Site Bloopers
I’m amazed by the continual “bloopers” I find on websites. Maybe my expectations are too high, but I expect major companies and organizations to fix issues they have with their websites. Here are a few of my favorites: This blooper from Hertz has been going on for months – look at the calendar, it’s wrong……
100 Things You Should Know About People: #28 — Things that are close together seem to belong together
Do you want a quick and easy way to make any web page easier to use and more intuitive? If you want people to realize that two things “belong” together, then put them near each other (close proximity), and put other things a little further away. Sounds simple, right? Many usability and user experience principles…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #27 — We go below the “fold”
For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about “the fold”. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a browser, and that in order to see anything…
How To Save Money And Time On User Testing: Run Multiple, Iterative Pilots
In my last blog post I reported on a study I recently conducted about differences between men and women in what they planned to purchase online for Valentine’s Day. (see Who is the Most Romantic). I used UserTesting.com (affiliate) to collect the data, and I had an interesting insight about running user tests while I…
10 Ways To Get User Feedback
Recently I was talking to someone who is relatively new to the field of usability and user experience. He has developed a web application and wanted some ideas for getting feedback from users. He commented that he was planning on sending out a survey to users to see what they think about the web application….
10 Best Posts of 2009
It’s that time of year — so here is my list of the 10 best posts from my blog in 2009. I chose the 10 that I believe have had the greatest impact/most thought provoking/most interest from my readers. #1: Dopamine Makes You Addicted to Seeking Information — I thought this was an interesting post…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #19 — It’s a Myth That All Capital Letters Are Inherently Harder to Read
WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS COMMONLY BELIEVED, BUT NOT TRUE – You read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words that are in all capital letters all have the same shape: a rectangle of a certain size. This makes words displayed in all uppercase harder…
7 Steps to Successful Web Site Redesign
Jacek Utko is a newspaper designer. He has designed/redesigned many newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe and won world awards. He believes strongly in “giving power to the designers” and that designers should embed their personal vision into the work they do, even at the expense of being a team player. Utko’s words and work…