UX 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...

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...

Recently, I had the ‘joy’ of attempting to book tickets with Ticketmaster.co.uk and, I knew exactly what I was in for — pages to trawl through, lengthy reservation queues and a security enigma that wouldn’t be out of place on ‘Mastermind’.

But, thankfully I was able to breathe a sigh of relief when I found out that they were finally ditching their unnecessarily complicated, un-user friendly ‘CAPTCHA’ – after a fifth or sixth attempt, in my quest for tickets, I often feel like I am unsuccessfully attempting the latest MENSA conundrum. Considering their high volume of traffic, it’s no wonder Ticketmaster receive so many moans and groans from their customers. With stats showing that 25% of its users...

The concept of constraints in design can be defined as the practice of limiting user actions on a system.

Constraints limit the actions that can be performed by the user, thus increasing the usability of the design and reducing the likelihood of operator error.

There are two models of constraint: physical and psychological. Physical constraints decrease the sensitivity of controls and prevent or slow undesired...

The key to great user interface design is user confidence. But designing user confidence isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It requires more than correctly labeled buttons and interactions—although that does help. Confidence is important because you don’t want the user to get annoyed at all with the interactions in your websites or apps.

You don’t need users to be proud of themselves for being able to use your interface and to brag to all of their buddies on Twitter, nor do you need them to rank their knowledge...