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 […]
Continue reading “What is Web Usability?” »Tag: Usability
What is “Cross-browser compatibility?”
Here’s the first clue: it’s not creating a pixel-perfect replication of your ideal version of a site in all browsers. In fact, cross-browser compatibility ultimately has very little to do with what a web site looks like, and a lot more to do with how it functions. It also has relatively little to do with browsers, and perhaps could better be explained as multiple user-agent compatibility. “Compatibility” (in this context) is not a term which means “looks and behaves identically” […]
Continue reading “What is “Cross-browser compatibility?”” »Usability and Trust
Without both, it’s very difficult to have a successful online business. Unusable web sites have an incredible ability to generate a lack of trust in the business — as soon as one feature fails to work correctly, or doesn’t behave as you expect, there’s an immediate connection made: “If they can’t get this right, what else might they have problems with?” Will they lose your financial data? Will they ship you the right product? Will they bill you the right […]
Continue reading “Usability and Trust” »Usability Issues with Domain Management
Working as a web developer, I find myself dealing with a lot of different domain registrars, hosting services, etc. It’s inevitable. It’s also not the slightest bit uncommon to run across one very specific usability inconvenience with how these services manage their services. (Not all of them — but enough that it’s irritating.) This specific problem is that when you’re managing domains, some of these services handle multiple-domain management in the following manner: Select the action you wish to perform. […]
Continue reading “Usability Issues with Domain Management” »Following User Navigation Paths
An interesting thread at Cre8asiteforums, titled “When lots of your visitors go straight to search? discusses a member’s curiosity about navigation patterns after noticing that a significant percentage of his visitors — 25% — go directly to search after arriving at his site. It’s an interesting element of site navigation to investigate, and the thread raises a pretty significant number of additional questions worth analyzing. The navigation path of any given user will be fundamentally unique. However, when taken in […]
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