Usability posts

One of the most important tasks on your plate as a web designer is usability. Usability is defined as a gauge of the quality of the user’s experience when interacting with your website. Any website you design should always be seamless from the standpoint of the user. They should find your site easy to navigate without having to first undergo special training. Usability is normally based on several different factors.

A person looking through your site wants their ease of learning to be top-notch. They’ll want to quickly learn the user interface so that they can jump right in and accomplish fundamental, navigational tasks. Efficiency of use is another factor: after they’ve learned to navigate your site, they’ll want to accomplish tasks speedily. Even if the user has used the site before, they’ll need to easily remember enough of the process to be able to use the site effectively the next time. This is called memorability. When they’re using your site, they may experience some errors, but are these errors frequent...

There’s an expression in advertising that goes “I know that 80% of my advertising isn’t working. I just don’t know which 80%”. The same logic applies to all forms of design, including web design. If only we knew which part of our page content, layouts and workflows were not working as well as they should, wouldn’t that be amazing?

It would seem like a godsend to know what works when it comes to user experience design, to have confirmed in harsh quantifiable data which of two layouts, elements, or routes is the optimum and this is the promise of A/B testing. It is a powerful tool, but it is not a panacea and over-reliance on it can not only blunt your...

The Mobile First philosophy has radically changed how professionals approach Web design and become the way companies as diverse as Facebook and IBM build their products.

The Mobile First approach is to start designing for mobile devices — which typically have less screen size and less capabilities than desktops — and progressively enhance the product; so that desktops get an enhanced site experience rather than mobiles getting a pared down one.

We grabbed the opportunity to...

HTML5 came with all new APIs, new input types and attributes for forms. As is often the case, those major additions often obscure the minor upgrades and I think that this is particularly true of the download attribute.

As you know, there are some files that the browser doesn’t automatically download; images, other web pages and depending on the settings in your browser, sometimes even PDFs. The download attribute gives the browser a native...

When it comes to designing a truly intuitive, responsive, and coherent website that’s also unique and interesting, it often feels like it’s difficult to reconcile the two sets of priorities. But in fact, nothing is further from the truth: there are only a few fundamental ideas that need to be employed in order to easily make the best choices in your designs.

The most essential of these concepts is that beautiful, usable designs are not difficult to make when the UX is given precedence, and the design is adapted to suit it. After all, the nature of user experience...

What makes a great website? There are many ways to measure the effectiveness and quality of a website. Web designers can use a handful of quantitative data that will help them determine if the web design is effective, especially for e-commerce where the added value to a business is measurable. But for any site, one of the most telling signs is user experience.

Web user experience (UX) describes the overall experience of a website visitor. It gives us a glimpse of how they feel when they browse a site. It therefore allows us to check for areas that need improvement.

Which pages produce high exit and bounce rates? Where do visitors spend more time? What pages get the most activity?

Stripping a website to its barest form, ignoring for a moment, content which is only text and images, all a browsing experience is, is navigation. It’s clicking links that take you to other pages with more links. The main navigation of your site is such a crucial part of this as it represents the persistent doorway to the most important pages of your content.

Many sites also have secondary navigation, relegated to the bottom of the site, containing ‘boring stuff’ such as Terms of Use, or Privacy Policy links; it makes...

Let’s be clear: people hate filling out forms. Since most websites are lead generators, however, encouraging users to fill out forms is often not just important but critical. So how can web designers create better, more effective forms that will encourage their users to buy a product or leave their details?

Training a puppy can offer great insight in to how to build web forms that are clear and concise, encourage users to fill them out, and increase responses and ROI. 

Most new dog owners struggle a bit to train their puppy. New owners have high hopes that the puppy will learn to do its business outside, sit, stay, lay down, roll over, shake, and understand the concept of “no”. There are three things that all new dog owners must know about training their dog. First, if a puppy is skeptical or scared of its owner, then training the puppy will be...

One major issue with JavaScript-based applications is that they break the Back button. If you update content on the page with JavaScript rather than loading a new page from the server, no entry made is in the browser history; so when the user clicks Back, expecting to go back to the previous state, they end up at the previous site instead.

Drag and drop is a great way for users to interact with your web applications. But the usability gains will be lost if, after spending time moving through your application, users click...

The greatest sites out there are always notable for their attention to detail. One often underestimated detail is the existence of a useful and user-friendly 404-error page. WordPress provides an easy way to create and customise the 404-error page, but unfortunately, the simplicity in customization does not automatically mean effectiveness.

The well-known WordPress SEO expert Joost de Valk (aka yoast) reports his recent findings from several years of website SEO audits. According to this report a significant...

When Marissa Mayer jumped ship at Google to take over the reigns at the web’s second biggest name in search, no one doubted she had a job on her hands.

Interest was sparked worldwide by the fact that not only had Yahoo! appointed a woman (gasp!) as CEO, but that she was also pregnant (gasp!!). Little was made of Mayer’s distinguished career, or her evident suitability for the role that has seen her carry herself with a self-assuredness fostered by a real understanding of the industry.

With possible rebrands floated, hints about major revisions to its search operation, and even reports that the famous ‘!’ was about to be dropped; it was inevitable...