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Index of articles on web site analysis, internet strategy, site development and site promotion. Note: All links open new windows. To return, close the new window. The URLs in this site are provided for the benefit of our visitors. If website owners do not wish for us to link to their sites, kindly inform Website Analyst and the link(s) will be removed immediately upon receipt of specific instructions. Linked material is © its respective owners. LucDesk - Information Design, Web Usability, User Experience News and features from around the web. Updated daily. The log of Lucian Millis. Usability News (powered by Moreover Technologies) Web content usability IBM developerWorks "This article sets down some guidelines and tips for developing standards by which you can measure the usability of your Web site's content." Is usability worth it? System Concepts "Unsure if that usability intervention will save you money? Use this form to calculate the benefits of usability to your organisation, and get the answer in hard cash terms." Designing Medical Products for Usability Medical Equipment Designer "Ergonomics dictate interface between hand and surgical tool" When designers ignore consumers, products can flop USA TODAY "Sometimes, the problem with faulty designs is that no one wants to say no to a bad idea. It might be the pet project of an overbearing CEO who ignores the advice of his development team. Or a company invests millions in a gizmo only to have consumers, brought in at the 11th hour, reject it." KISS Your Visitors if You Want Them Back GROKDotCom "Short and sweet: Here's what the top 100 websites have in common: fast download times; few graphics; little, if any, multimedia; no frames; similar navigation systems; high contrast text with lots of white space; most links in "traditional" blue underlined text; no background imagery; very few obvious JavaScript tricks; no DHTML; no splash pages; and a very solid database-powered backend. Simple." Measuring User Experience Christopher Schmitt, Digital Web Magazine "... developing site goal definitions before you build the site is a very good thing." Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step Rogelio V. Lizaola and A. King, Web Reference "Numerous bugs were discovered in Netscape and Explorer in how they handle CSS, and we found some elegant workarounds to these and other problems. What follows is a step by step CSS layout tutorial that shows how we got to the final design." Style vs. Design Jeffery Zeldman, Adobe "When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don't start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name - at least, in some circles." Effective Alt Text Anthony Quinn, Frontend Usability InfoCentre, 07/10/2001 "Good alt text can be a useful tool for enhancing the web interface. It provides supporting information, helping users gain an understanding of the structure web pages and an insight into the behaviour of key controls and interactive elements." Flash and Usability Flash Design "Some Flash designers think that they can improve the overall look and feel of their sites by simply adding graphics and flashy color to create 'eye catching' visual elements. But users (other than graphic design students) do not visit sites with the desire to sit through several minutes of downloading and another several minutes of pointless flashy animation." Back to Top Importance of having your own domain name Sumantra Roy, 1stsearchranking.net "The only way to make money online is to build up credibility among your customers. Having your own domain name is the first step in doing that. (...) It makes your customers feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with some fly by night operator." Navigation in Web Applications Interaction Design "Frequently in Web applications, users get lost because the model of navigation on the Web differs from that in non-Web applications. This difference causes confusion among users, and designers need to adapt their design rules to the Web to help people use the application successfully." Linking customer behavior to e-commerce strategy News.com, 12/6/2000 "The challenge for companies is to guide the consumer to the behavior matching the company's strategy; where this is not possible, companies should match the strategy to the customer's behavior." Does Site Performance Really Affect Your Profits? E. Sovish, Workz, 09/2000 "Because an estimated 1 billion or more Web sites reside on the Internet, it's harder and harder to have a truly original site. Therefore, you need to distinguish yourself by how you deliver, not just what you deliver." Hey Flasher, Stop Abusing your Visitors Flazoom.com, 06/20/2000 "As designers we have to look past the 'flashy' features of Flash and start thinking about how it can make our sites better and easier to use." Back to Top Make your web site easy to use Ron Scheer, RonScheer.com, 03/30/2000 "Assume the user is impatient and easily frustrated. Research shows that web site visitors give up quickly if they encounter unexpected difficulties or delays. This is bad news for anyone who wants to do business on the web. It means losing customers before they make a decision to buy." Make your home page mean business Ron Scheer, RonScheer.com, 03/30/2000 "Keep ads to a minimum, and keep them separate from your content. Same goes for web rings. A banner ad at the top of your home page is a mistake. It’s the worst location both for you and the advertiser. The visitor has come to your site to see your content, not to be lured away by somebody else. Located at the top of the page, ads are typically ignored by visitors, and they take up valuable real estate." Are your pages upside down? Patrick J. Lynch, visualLogic, 02/03/2000 "You should think of a home page as a vertical stack of screens of information, and lay out major navigation pages to take maximum advantage of the only area you can be sure the reader will see when the page loads-the top of the page." Recipe for a Successful Website Nathan Shedroff "Would you leave out sugar in a cake recipe? Would you bake bread without yeast? Of course not, but that’s what 95% of the websites on the Internet are doing-especially the commercial sites where it is even more important. Most sites serve up pages like half-baked cookies without everything necessary to make them delicious." Next » More Articles from web analysts and strategists. Read. |
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