I met Caroline Jarrett in 2010 in Lisbon Portugal, where we were both speaking at a conference. Caroline is a usability consultant in the UK, and she specializes in designing forms. She has a great book, Forms That Work. In this podcast Caroline and I have a fun conversation about designing usable forms. You can listen…
Tag Archive: usability
7 Tips To Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #3
This is the 3nd in a series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your Top 3 Recommendations. And Tip #2 was Say “You”, “They”, “Customers”, “Users”, or “Research”. Don’t say “I”. Now for Tip #3. The context is that you want to see your recommendations implemented. How…
The Only Two Things You Really Need To Know About Web Design
In his (great) book, Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug has a chapter called “Billboard Design 101: Designing pages for scanning not reading.” The idea is that people don’t read all the text at a website, they scan it. So you should think “billboard” when you are deciding what to put on the page, instead of…
Losing Sleep Over Poor Design
I’m writing this from the CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver, BC. I’d like to enjoy Vancouver, but I’m having a hard time doing so because I have a Sony clock radio in my hotel that keeps waking me up. The alarm goes off at 5:50 am every day. I can’t figure out how to…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #96 — Past Experience And Expectations Determine Where People Look
Where do people look first on a computer screen? Where do they look next? It depends partially on what they are doing and expecting. Left to right? — If people read in languages that move from left to right, then they tend to look at the screen from left to right. If they read from…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #93 — Titles Provide Context
Read this paragraph: First you sort the items into like categories. Using color for sorting is common, but you can also use other characteristics, such as texture or type of handling needed. Once you have sorted the items, you are ready to use the equipment. You want to process each category from the sorting separately….
100 Things You Should Know About People: #33: Bite-Sized Chunks Of Info Are Best
I am about to head to Portugal for a week, and I was interested in exploring different possible destinations in Portugal. I may not have much time for touring (I’m going to speak at the UXLX conference there), but if I did have time, where should I go? I have to admit to pretty much…
A Five Minute Version of Neuro Web Design
I get wonderful emails from readers of my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click. People write me and say how much they loved the book, etc, etc. It’s one of the benefits of writing a book! A request from a reader – A few days ago I got one of those emails and…
An Interview With Steve Krug: Everyone should do usability testing
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…
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…