The worst thing I can say about John Rhodes is that the writing coming from his usability blog has been alarmingly infrequent in the last couple of years. 13 posts in the last 12 months just doesn’t really cut it! Thankfully, the reason for his blogging silence is pretty straightforward: he’s been writing a book. Sweet! The book is entitled “Selling Usability,” which is a bit of a misnomer, since the subject of the book is perhaps more accurately described […]

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Part 1 (Contracts, Site Requirements,Information Architecture) Part 2 (Hosting and Security) Part 3 (Navigation, Scent) Part 4 (Semantics, Structure vs. Design, Universal design) Part 5 (Interaction, Errors, and Administration) After all the labor you put into designing an elegant site which allows users to readily follow the scent of information, all the work dedicated to developing effective semantics and separating your structure from design, it’s easy for you to still end up with a royally screwed up web site. Designing […]

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Part 1 (Contracts, Site Requirements,Information Architecture) Part 2 (Hosting and Security) Part 3 (Navigation, Scent) Part 4 (Semantics, Structure vs. Design, Universal design) Part 5 (Interaction, Errors, and Administration) You could say that this part of the series is really breaking the concepts of information architecture down into components immediately relevant to web development. Practically speaking, I’m going to cover the necessities of navigation design, the concept of “scent of information” and the question of design “noise.” (Canonicalization was supposed […]

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Usability The extent to which an item is capable of being used, or is convenient and practical in use. (Wikipedia) Recommended Books: Don’t Make Me Think: 2nd Edition Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience Web Site Usability Handbook Usability is one of those areas of web development which is extremely important, extremely obvious when you look at it; and easily overlooked if you’re not actively looking for it. It’s simply the question of whether the site is easy to […]

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The whole world of spam is an accessibility nightmare. The concept behind web accessibility is to ensure that users can access the complete functionality of your web site — but how do you cope with the fact that spambots will happily take advantage of any hole you leave? Comment forms, contact pages, email addresses and enrollment forms. All methods of giving critical access to previously unidentified users — and all in positions where you just need to find that crucial […]

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