38 posts tagged with usability. (View popular tags)
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The Employable Web Designer ― Andy Rutledge at Design View constructs a list of suggestions to help aspiring designers better craft their own preparedness and, if necessary, adjust their degree plans toward a more effective and responsive result in the web design field. (previously)
posted on Jun 28, 2008 - View this thread
Bill Gates files a bug report: "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail ... like that piece of e-mail. That's my job."
posted on Jun 26, 2008 - View this thread
30 Usability Issues to be aware of In this article we present 30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood. What is the difference between readability and legibility? What exactly does 80/20 or Pareto principle mean? What is the law of proximity? What is meant with minesweeping and satisficing? And what is Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation? What is banner blindness? How can you measure eye-tracking? Why fold area isn't that important. OK, it’s time to dive in.
posted on Oct 8, 2007 - View this thread
Magic Ink - Information Software and the Graphical Interface
posted on Apr 7, 2007 - View this thread
Frog Review - Talking frogs review websites.
posted on Apr 15, 2006 - View this thread
Ye Olde Graphics Shoppe. We hope you will find something here to your liking. You will notice some changes and additions and a new look. We have decided to simplify things rather than have nonsense pages.....too many really :-)) We have a NEW Graphics Assistant Lady Belle ho has added some terrific new dusting graphics and page sets for you to enjoy.
posted on Nov 6, 2005 - View this thread
Bin Ladin Determined to Strike In US - The Memo From A Design Perspective A desginer looks at the original memo and re-designs it for usability.
posted on Apr 12, 2004 - View this thread
Ren & Stimpy create a home page for the web, perform usability analysis on it, and analyze the results using multiple regression. "With the help of three hardworking, good looking, talented, and underpaid graduate students, we'll find a better way to make a home page!"
posted on Aug 15, 2003 - View this thread
Usability Bazaar sounds like a crazy idea: getting together a group of people that will create usability guidelines for open source projects. Do you think that can work? Do OSS projects actually have usability problems? And can this actually work? Generally, usability people don't seem to get involved in open source. Why? (via webword.com)
posted on Jun 17, 2003 - View this thread
Just in: Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter “C” Unusable.
posted on Apr 29, 2003 - View this thread
Emotion and design: Atrractive things work better.
Of note here is that Don Norman works with Jakob Nielsen. In this essay he addresses the accusation that usability people want ugly design.
posted on Jul 13, 2002 - View this thread
30 days to a more accessible website This series is entitled "30 days to a more accessible weblog", and it will answer two questions. The first question is "Why should I make my weblog more accessible?" If you do not have a weblog, this series is not for you. The second question is "How can I make my weblog more accessible?" If you are not convinced by the first answer, you will not be interested in the second.
posted on Jun 25, 2002 - View this thread
Guimp.com claims to be the world's smallest web site. And it probably is.
Jakob must be spinning in his crypt.
You don't have to scroll, though.
posted on May 27, 2002 - View this thread
This orthopaedic surgery site seems more like a design exercise than an actual attempt at an informative site. Imagine that someone told you to make the site using poor technology choices, couple it with non-professional content not conducive to trusting the doctors, and add a map to the office that does more to enable chuckles than get people to into the business. It's so bad, it's good, and most definitely do not skip intro on this one.
posted on Apr 13, 2002 - View this thread
happy birthday jakob Though we all like to scream about his pronouncements or catch him when he makes an error in his own rules, it's time everyone who has a job relating to human factors to acknowledge that Jakob Nielsen's tireless promoting of usability is very likely the reason our bosses or our clients are willing to consider allowing usability testing. Thanks guy! Wish I could afford to buy you that rogers and hamerstein collection...
posted on Aug 20, 2001 - View this thread
Driving Over Jakob Nielsen: use left arrow to move left, right arrow to move right (which is quite useable really!)
posted on Jul 18, 2001 - View this thread
Usability Analysis of UseIt.com How well does usability guru Jacob Nielsen fare when his site is analysed in terms of his own usability guidelines?
posted on Jun 25, 2001 - View this thread
Jakob Nielsen on Bill Gates' Micropayment Strategy (news section on right) Jakob Nielsen has acknowledged that Bill Gates might be smarter than him (no sh*t, Sherlock!). Gates would rather integrate micropayment systems into their server apps than IE to make Linux a non-issue for businesses wanting to use their micropayment system. Yet more monopoly nonsense or a smart business plan?
posted on May 18, 2001 - View this thread
Something is coming...something wonderful! It's not a monolith but it is black and full of stars. It's iaslash, a new and remarkable slash-site that focuses on information architecture and all the sub-categories that fall nicely underneath. This comes as close to a one-stop-shop for IAs as any other resource available. Visit often and make your comments heard.
posted on May 16, 2001 - View this thread
A Flash usability white paper that says Flash can improve the usability of a web site.
Palm Beach Butterfly Ballot Reportedly Cost Gore "The newspaper said the ballot confusion also hurt President George W. Bush; 1,631 people voted for both Bush and Buchanan, whose hole was directly under that of Bush"
posted on Mar 11, 2001 - View this thread
According to an Alexa Research report, Web users are morons (entering URLs into search engines to get to sites) and perverts (most popular search term is "sex"). I, for one, am shocked.
posted on Feb 16, 2001 - View this thread
Invasion of the Usability Experts! It's about time someone said this, and I'm glad it was Dale. [ via kottke, where another conversation is going on ]
posted on Jan 12, 2001 - View this thread
WAP usability report - Cheap! only 18 bucks, Jakob cares about you, otherwise he would have charged you 80k.
Quick run-down :
70% of the users answered no when asked whether they would like to have a WAP phone within one year;
even the simplest tasks take much too much time to provide any satisfaction to users;
even after spending a week using a WAP phone, user performance remained appallingly low;
posted on Dec 8, 2000 - View this thread
When you're an aiga member they send you e-mail, I usualy don't read them, because they're accouncements of conferences and such, but this one was about Chicago enlisting the help of AIGA to design new election ballots. 'Some possibilities for making Chicago ballots more user-friendly include enlarging candidates' names, changing the font size, altering the color of pages, making wider ballot booklets.' Since I couldn't find the article on-line, I'll just cut-n-paste the e-mail inside. :)
posted on Dec 2, 2000 - View this thread
Chicago to enlist graphic designers for friendlier ballots. [free reg may be req'd] There's been a bunch of discussion about the usability problems with various voting systems, notably punch-card ballots. Chicago didn't have anything as dramatic as a "butterfly" prexy ballot or two pages' worth of candidates, but we still had close to 120,000 discards from 2.1 million votes -- and when compared with jurisdictions using other systems, there's little evidence to suggest that voters are skipping the presidential ballot. That's just how bad manual punch card technology is. Even if we can't get rid of them just yet, at least we can make sure they aren't confusing.
Did I just post the twenty-sixth link on Metafilter today? GO AWAY. METAFILTER IS FULL. :)
posted on Nov 29, 2000 - View this thread
Greenspun on Neilsen. Damn if that don't sound like the Thrilla in Manila. I just stumbled over this piece on ArsDigita's Systems Journal site, formerly Web Tools Review. If you enjoy watching one so-called expert pick apart the opinions of another, you'll probably enjoy this.
If you're sick unto death of both of them... skip it.
posted on Nov 29, 2000 - View this thread
Overpaid, anal-retentive web usability expert puts himself out of a job? Or perhaps engages in second-round of funding to maintain astonishing levels of frankly unfathomable self-publicity? You might think so, but I couldn't possibly comment.
posted on Nov 23, 2000 - View this thread
Usability is dead? Frogdesign's creative director says: "There's no merit to focusing entirely on usability". Anyone who says that shouldn't be designing websites, IMHO. [from kottke]
posted on Nov 22, 2000 - View this thread
ELECTION: Dan Bricklin thinks the ballots sucked, too. Remember him? He helped write VisiCalc, and now runs Trellix?
I'm still wondering why no one's agitating to invalidate that election in PBC.
posted on Nov 20, 2000 - View this thread
Gore good, pull down menus bad. Jakob no likey drop down menus. I searched and could find no reference to the newest Alertbox. It may not necessarily be a hot topic but I have to agree with Mr. Nielsen. Pull down menus suck especially the ones created by CSS. Web design should not try to function like an operating system interface or a republican political campaign.
Did I include enough politics for this post?
posted on Nov 17, 2000 - View this thread
Ok, here comes the firestorm. Joel on Software has some very good things to say -- though, like most user-interface-design mavens, I think about 50% of the time that he hasn't comprehended what the problem really is... but in this piece, he's wrong.
posted on Aug 7, 2000 - View this thread
Happy birthday, theobvious.com! Five years on the web is a hell of a long time. A round of applause for Michael!
posted on Aug 1, 2000 - View this thread
Making Sure Usability 'Fitts' Flash Another thought provoking article about making better Flash sites on the web. I have to admit, I consider myself a designer, but I had never heard of Fitt's Law until I read this piece. Oh, I thought this was a nice quote:
Chris' First Law of Usability: Usability makes everything easier except for the job of the Designer.Amen to that!
Let web designers have Jakob Nielsen for usability guidance, we Flash designers have our own budding guru of usable Flash on the web at Flazoom.com. The guy behind Flazoom follows up his Cancer piece with some good guidelines for Flash on the web.
The best link in the article goes here, where he asks you to find both uses of Flash on the page. I totally missed the first one, even when I knew what to look for. His use of Flash that just blew me away - hardly any animation, just usefullness.
I'll stop cheering now...
posted on Jun 20, 2000 - View this thread
Why tab based interfaces suck This site finally fell into interface hell. Originally they used tabs as navigation and still are now... BUT it doesn't work...
Watch... every ecommerce company that copied its interface will also fall into the same interface hell...
The others include ebags.com, urbanfetch and more....
posted on Apr 8, 2000 - View this thread
Here's a gross mis-use of the web: 800-357-7766.com. This mail order company is spamming the airwaves with commercials for their goofy 'tap lights,' and at the end of each commerical, they advertise their website with this unwieldy address. For less than $50, the company could have bought 'taplights.com' and directed customers there, but instead they force people to write down an address that goes against all the reasons why we have the domain registry in the first place. Why don't they just give our their IP address instead? It's about as useful as their phone number domain name.
posted on Dec 25, 1999 - View this thread
The BBC, working with the Royal National Institute for the Blind, has created a perl script that
reparses a page, stripping out the text from tables and reorganizing it on the fly. It creates a pretty good visually impaired-friendly version of your pages instantly. I don't know how well it does on complex page layouts, but compare the BBC News site in its typical state to the parsed 'text-only' version, and you can see they are pretty close in terms of content.
posted on Nov 4, 1999 - View this thread
