Tag Archives: usability

Where to begin?

March 4th, 2010
Incomprehensible industry jargon? Check. (What is a “TOD”, why would I care?) Apostrophe abuse? Check. Weirdly formatted unreadable text? Check. Poorly designed machine with usability failures leading to poorly designed poster to cover same? Check. I don’t know what pisses me off more; that the process of collecting tickets is so badly designed it requires a sign like this [...]
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Usability

June 18th, 2007
Usability goes all the way. It starts right at the database design. Or actually even at the design of the programming language. Most people, working on system that can use a grain of usability, tend to think that usability is only and merely a magical trade of arranging elements on an interface. But, if the database architecture is wrong, the code will be wrong. If the code is wrong, the behaviour is wrong. And if the behaviour is wrong, then no javascript can ever solve the real problem.

- Bèr Kessels

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Testify

April 19th, 2007
Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.

- Jeffrey Zeldman

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The Page Paradigm

March 7th, 2007

On any given Web page, users will either...

  • click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal,
  • or click the Back button on their Web browser.

Mark Hurst

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Of kinetic energy and friction

March 7th, 2006

Interesting new article by Nick Usborne over on A List Apart explaining how to overcome the reluctance of users to fill in forms by imparting a little more energy into the process.

A great deal of research has been done on shopping cart abandonment. Typically, when a hundred people start buying something online, of those who do not complete the purchase, seventy gave up somewhere while on the shopping cart pages.

Why? Too little energy. Too much friction.

As a formula, it is easy to visualize. In order to maximize the success of your site you need to increase the energy you transfer to your readers, and reduce the friction within the page or pages on which the reader has to do something.

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