Store Finders and Locators
Finding addresses and location information on company websites has gotten dramatically easier, but users increasingly turn to search engines first for this task. A website's most fundamental purpose is to serve as a company's To assess the ... [... more]
Use It |
Company News
Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good intranets. This year's winners focused on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to 'knowledge management'), and better-presented ... [... more]
Use It |
American English vs. British English for Web Content
Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language. There are many differences between American and British English, including: So, which version of English should you ... [... more]
Use It |
When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods
User experience research methods can answer a wide range of questions. Know when to use each method by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases. Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a ... [... more]
Use It |
PR on Websites: Increasing Usability
Advanced full-day tutorial on writing specialized info like press releases for the Web at the Usability Week 2009 conference in Washington DC, San Francisco, London, and Sydney. Compared with a similar 2001 study, a new study of journalists as ... [... more]
Use It |
Agile Development Projects and Usability
Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain. Depending on how ... [... more]
Use It |
Aspects of Design Quality
Usability scores for 51 websites show some correlation between navigation, content, and feature quality, but no connections to other usability areas. The easy answer is that some design teams have good designers, listen to their usability ... [... more]
Use It |
About Us Information on Websites
Over the past 5 years the usability of corporate sites' About Us information improved by 9%. But companies and organizations still can't explain what they do in one paragraph. To find out how users find and interpret website profiles of companies ... [... more]
Use It |
Interaction Elasticity
Usage goes down as interaction costs increase. User motivation determines how fast demand drops, following an elasticity curve. How many clicks should we have from the homepage to a product page? How many seconds will users wait for a page to ... [... more]
Use It |
Read More: 56 Design Guidelines
There was a clear connection between following the usability guidelines and having a design that supports user success. In fact, the correlation between guidelines compliance and success rate is very strong at R2 = .61, indicating that the ... [... more]
Use It |
Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages
Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential. For email to fulfill its potential, however, ... [... more]
Use It |
Using Link Titles to Help Users Predict Where They Are Going
Some browsers pop up a short explanation of a link *before* the user selects it. Such link titles can give users a preview of where the link will lead, improve their navigation, and reduce disorientation. Having the title "Author biography" pop [... more]
Use It |
