THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[May 30, 2001]
Bohmann Usability: Language Selection Waste Homepages - "A large number of European websites waste homepages on language selection while their American counterparts rarely commit this usability mistake. I recommend that multi-language sites use English as default."
SF Gate: Web going multilingual / More firms translate for global reach
Nua Internet Surveys: Online shoppers avoid fancy features - "The most popular and important features for online shoppers are search capabilities and product information."
[May 28, 2001]
Florian N. Egger: Human Factors in Electronic Commerce: Making Systems Appealing, Usable and Trustworthy (1999) - "Usability is defined as the system's ease-of-use and throughput. First, it is imperative that online shopping systems minimise user costs in terms of learnability. Further, these systems should accommodate the shopping behaviours of both novice and expert users who might employ different strategies to carry out their task. Lastly, systems should be flexible with respect to the format of user input and tolerant of errors."
SearchEngineWatch.com: iLOR Makes Google Even Better - "iLOR is a new search service that takes the power and relevancy of Google's results and adds on some nifty features that many searchers may find useful."
Jakob Nielsen: Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals Earn Good Money - "A survey of 1,078 user experience professionals finds that usability specialists make more money than designers and writers in the same field. In all three areas, salaries are highest in the U.S., lower in Canada and Asia, and much lower in Europe and Australia."
[May 25, 2001]
Frontend Usability InfoCentre: Intranet Usability - "A well-implemented corporate intranet can change the way a company works. And ease-of-use should be the central criterion by which all intranets are judged."
ACIA: People: An Interview with Vivian Bliss - "I do not believe you can create a durable information architecture without knowing and understanding the content, the users' interaction with the content as both creators and seekers and the context(s) in which the content is used. At this level of understanding it becomes clear that managing content is vital to creating a useful and usable information system."
CyberSpeaker: Is your Online Business Customer-Friendly? - "Buying online eliminates the physical presence and personality of the salesperson from the process. This makes the Web site copy critical in creating a one-to-one relationship with the customer or prospect."
Balancing Background with Font Colors and Images
90% of spam is sent by known spam outfits
[May 21, 2001]
Frontend Usability InfoCentre: The Joys of Prototyping - "At the heart of any good user-centred design process is the practice of prototyping. By creating and testing interfaces in rough format, designers are able to feed through improvements and feedback from users quickly and easily." (by Tom Farrell)
[May 20, 2001]
John Suler, Ph.D: Psychology of Cyberspace
Research Articles on Internet addiction and related online behaviorex
[May 17, 2001]
Intranet Journal: Best Practices For Successful Intranets - Part one - "Involving target users early in the planning process is essential to ensuring usefulness and usability. Their perspectives on what they'd like accomplish on the intranet, and how they would go about achieving their goals, will eliminate hours of guesswork for those outlining the basic site structure, functionality, and content." (by Hank Barnes)
Ancestry.com: Google and Copernic 2001: Two Intriguing Search Engines - "Trying to find something on the Internet can be as complicated as surmounting your favorite brick wall ancestor problem." (by E. Kerstens)
[May 16, 2001]
evolt.org: The usability phone interview - "... when you need to test a very specific audience on a specific part of a site and you don't have time to visit them (or they to see you), it's an option."
BusinessWeek: Picture This: A Password You Never Forget - "Since the brain retains memories of images, especially faces, very accurately, new security systems are going graphical."
[May 14, 2001]
Jakob Nielsen: Search: Visible and Simple - "Search is the user's lifeline for mastering complex websites. The best designs offer a simple search box on the home page and play down advanced search and scoping."
Seth Maislin: Building Search Smarts - "Remember that the burden of effective searching is often on the user, and that the user is rarely as familiar with the site structure as the writers, editors, and programmers. Use your human language skills to interpret the data in advance and to build a search algorithm that incorporates language rules and considers exceptions."
[May 12, 2001]
Web Techniques: Stalk Your User - "User shadowing is an increasingly popular usability-testing method. ... The challenge is to translate the research into design implications and market opportunities." (by Jeffrey Veen)
Michael L. Dertouzos: "... the fundamental thing that will set human-centered systems apart is that the computers will serve you."
[May 10, 2001]
UIWEB.COM: Critical thinking in web/interface design part 2: idea generation - "The ability to generate alternatives comes from intuition, but is amplified by experience. The more website navigation models you have studied, the wider the range of ideas you can pull from when designing a specific navigation system from scratch. The more usability studies you've watched, the better your sense for matching different kinds of designs with different kinds of users." (by Scott Berkun)
CHI-WEB Archives - May 2001: Click to make us your homepage - "The old discussion of those make-this-your-homepage links has popped up again. Does anyone have statistics on usage rates for these buttons? Do people ignore them or find them useful?"
LinkQuality - Web Integrity Benchmark - "On large sites, the manager needs to determine the level of link failure that is acceptable and have alarms in place when that level is reached."
[May 9, 2001]
Amazon.com: Everyone Is a Designer: Manifest for the Design Economy - "Will the Internet of the future just be enhanced television with 'buy-now' features ? Is it destined to become no more than another leisure and commerce medium, or can it be steered away from this fate by designers, taking it to surprising new directions?" (by Miekke Gerritzon)
merges: Simplicity costs less and works better - "... simplicity will generate more money, because, even though you may not be offering every service to everyone, you'll be offering something valuable to just the right people."
[May 8, 2001]
Wired News: Digitizing Archives Not So Easy - "Technology used to transmit digital information changes so rapidly that it's often difficult for those trying to preserve it to keep pace."
Jakob Nielsen: Intranets Save Time- But for Whom? - "Thinking about the intranet as a productivity tool can prevent such mishaps. For every service or application you put on the intranet, estimate the impact on users around the company. If usability is low, then training time goes up and productivity goes down."
[May 7, 2001]
NYTimes: New Economy: Privacy Concerns for Google Archive - "... Google's search capabilities might have opened Pandora's box." (by Susan Stellin)
Elegant Hack: Articles and Papers on Information Architecture (Thanks Christina Wodtke)
[May 5, 2001]
Stephen Downes: What is an Information Architect? (1999) - "... information architecture might not only be about architecting individual Web sites, it also will be about architecting massive networks, and even cities."
Computerworld: Information architects design the user's experience as he travels through a Web site.
[May 4, 2001]
NYTimes.com (free registration required): Compressed Data: A Pessimistic Assessment of Privacy
Fool.com: Protect (Some of) Your Financial Privacy
[May 3, 2001]
Kuro5hin.org: Is the Internet free-ride over? - "Would free sites be run by individuals and non-profit organizations and the rest are just in it for the money? ... I predict that many users are upset that they no longer have free access, and that the Internet is slowly turning into a corporate pay-per-use service."
Geek.com: Deja archive available through Google - "The archive looks like it's all there, and many users will be quite happy about that. It truly is a huge amount of data that is useful to many, especially those who troubleshoot computer issues with software that isn't always up to date."
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