Some time ago, I ran across an interesting post on Clients from Hell: Website user who couldn’t find an article emailed our help desk. We sent him the link to the content he couldn’t find. Client: “Please change the letters in your email to blue, so I can click the link.†Clients from Hell While this was intended to ridicule a misunderstanding — that the client couldn’t click the link unless the letters were blue — it does stand to […]
Continue reading “Make those links clickable, please!” »Tag: Usability
Usability testing isn’t for you? Really?
Whenever somebody tells me that they really don’t see the point in doing usability testing on their web site, I can’t help myself from asking why. Let’s be honest here — what’s a really good reason for skipping usability testing? The first thing that comes to my mind, of course, is because you’ve just finished a major usability review. I can understand wanting to give it a skip if you’ve just gone through the usability testing process! But, surprisingly, that’s […]
Continue reading “Usability testing isn’t for you? Really?” »When More is Less
One of the most famously cliched spy movie themes is the absurdly complex method (and accompanying explanation) in which the villain intends to kill the hero. Layer upon layer of killer sharks, laser beams, poisonous gases, and robot assassins employed with the sole intention of killing one fundamentally normal person (albeit a very suave person, of course.) And, naturally, it always fails. Something goes wrong in the system; gross negligence of maintenance causes a malfunction; or some unanticipated exception allows […]
Continue reading “When More is Less” »Best Practices in Web Development: Part 5
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 […]
Continue reading “Best Practices in Web Development: Part 5” »Best Practices in Web Development: Part 3
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 […]
Continue reading “Best Practices in Web Development: Part 3” »