Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster

The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Search

Information Specialists at the Intersection of Information Architecture and Usability

Discusses the intersection of information architecture (IA) and usability.

Head, Alison J. Florida State University (2001). Articles>Information Design>Usability

Innovative User Interface Design

More and more websites are developing innovative user interface designs. Check out some of our favourites and see what new ideas you can glean!

Fidgeon, Tim. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability

Interaction Modeling: User State-Trace Analysis

Interaction modeling is a good way to identify and locate usability issues with the use of a tool. Several methods exist. Modeling techniques are prescriptive in that they aim to capture what users will likely do, and not descriptive of what users actually did.

Queen, Matt. Boxes and Arrows (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Interaction Design

Interface Design as a Life or Death Proposition

While the FDA has always required thorough documentation of product development, recent initiatives have instituted a more prescriptive, design-focused procedure encouraging extensive user research at the beginning of the development process.

LeMoine, Doug. Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Design>User Interface>Usability>Biomedical

International Sites: Minimum Requirements

Users from other countries have special needs related to entry fields for names and addresses, measurements and dates, and information about regional product standards.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>International>Usability

Les Internautes Détestent Scroller?!?

Readers hate to scroll... vous risquez d'entendre plus d'une fois cette rengaine! Bien évidemment, les utilisateurs n'apprécient pas de dérouler des masses de textes contenant des informations composites et indifférenciées. Bien évidemment, les accès et les messages les plus importants doivent être placés en haut de page s'ils veulent améliorer leurs chances d'être perçus. Mais cela ne veut pas dire que le scrolling est à bannir systématiquement et que toutes vos pages doivent tenir dans un écran ! Une fois passé en mode 'consommation', l'internaute déroulera volontiers une page dont le sujet l'intéresse.

Redaction (2004). Articles>Web Design>Usability

An Interview with Andrew B. King

Web page optimization is about optimizing everything that goes into a Web page, including the text. In fact, text optimization is one of the most overlooked ways of speeding up Web sites. I see many a site with optimized graphics, but with HTML that is unoptimized, filled with comments, unused code, and whitespace. Compression can also be used to shrink the text (HTML, JavaScript, etc.) that you deliver to your impatient users.

Saila, Craig. Digital Web Magazine (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability

Intranet Portals Get Streamlined

An analysis of intranet portals found slimmer information architectures and a renewed emphasis on fresh content and useful applications. Past findings, including those on role-based personalization, were confirmed.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Design>Web Design>Intranets>Usability

Intranet Usability

The Internet hype may be dying down, but one area in which productivity gains can still be a reality is intranet development. Intranets could hardly be described as the sexy end of web development, but many companies around the world are experiencing real value from improved efficiency in terms of internal communications. Intranets can be big business. But unfortunately, Intranets often illustrate everything that is worst in web design. I imagine most readers of this article will be familiar with those corporate Intranets that become little more than a collection of department websites, each with its own navigational structure, look and feel, and content. Some organisations even pride themselves on this laissez faire approach to Intranet development, seeing the intranet as an opportunity for departments to express themselves online.

Farrell, Tom. Frontend Infocentre (2001). Design>Web Design>Intranets>Usability

Intranets Save Time--But for Whom?  

The world economy will lose roughly $100 billion because of bad intranet usability. Why is this? The intranet, as the corporate information infrastructure is called, is supposed to dramatically enhance employee productivity. That's the party line, but it's not the reality. The reality is that most intranets are a mess. Employees waste inordinate amounts of time trying to find answers to their problems, and most companies have no active programs in place to improve their intranets or make them into productivity tools. Intranets often suffer from the worst mistakes of Website design while having only a fraction of the budget allocated to marketing-oriented Websites.

Nielsen, Jakob. Business 2.0 (2001). Design>Usability>Intranets

Introducción a la Usabilidad

La usabilidad (dentro del campo del desarrollo web) es la disciplina que estudia la forma de diseñar sitios web para que los usuarios puedan interactuar con ellos de la forma más fácil, cómoda e intuitiva posible. La mejor forma de crear un sitio web usable es realizando un diseño centrado en el usuario, diseñando para y por el usuario, en contraposición a lo que podría ser un diseño centrado en la tecnología o uno centrado en la creatividad u originalidad.

Hassan Montero, Yusef. Nosolousabilidad.com (2002). (Spanish) Articles>Usability>Web Design

Introduction to Eyetracking: Seeing Through Your Users' Eyes

Over the coming months, I'll use eyetracking to evaluate a lot of world-renowned user interfaces--including Web sites like Amazon.com, Google News, and eBay; Rich Internet Applications (RIAs); and desktop applications--and analyze quantitative eyetracking data to provide best practices for designing user interface elements like navigation systems, menus, and forms, and for effective ad placement.

Penzo, Matteo. UXmatters (2005). Design>Usability>Testing>Eye Tracking

An Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them

There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution.

Calabria, Tina. uiGarden (2005). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas

Investor Relations Website Design

Investor relations (IR) is one of the 'Big Four' standard components of a corporate website (along with public relations, employment, and 'About Us'). In the modern world, investors assume that they can go to www.company.com to research a current or potential investment. While companies must provide IR information to attract and retain investors, they must also be realistic about the types of content and features that users need most. Simplicity and a coherent story about the company are better than drowning users in incomprehensible data.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability

Involving Customers in Developing Usability Metrics  

Usability metrics are standards to measure a product against and are critical to finding out whether the product is successful in the areas that are important to its users. You can miss critical observations during a usability test if you do not use metrics to test the product. This is especially true if you are testing a product for the first time and do not know what the test will uncover. This paper describes how to find out what users want out of your product and develop usability metrics through focus group and contextual inquiry research.

Hammar, Molly. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>User Centered Design>Usability

Involving Users Throughout The Information Development Process  

Testing documents for usability is critical, but we don’t always get to do it. Even when we do, too often, it’s too little, too late. What we really want are documents that we are fine-tuning in usability testing because they already meet users’ needs, match our users’ mental models, and fit with the way that our users work.

Redish, Janice C. 'Ginny'. STC Proceedings (1994). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability

Is Multiple-Column Online Text Better? It Depends!

This study investigated the effects of multi-column displays and justification on reading performance and satisfaction of an online narrative passage. Participants read a short story displayed in one of six formats (one, two, or three columns, in either a full or left-justified format). Results showed a significant column x justification interaction with reading speed significantly faster for the two-column full-justified text than for one-column full-justified, and significantly faster for one-column left-justified than for one-column full-justified or three-column full-justified text. Post-hoc analyses indicate that the faster readers may have benefited most from the two-column justified format.

Baker, J. Ryan. Usability News (2005). Design>Web Design>Typography>Usability

Is Navigation Useful?

Some analysts conclude that navigation is useless and that navigation elements should be removed from Web pages. Don't try teaching users the site structure, don't try showing them where they are, don't try telling them where else they can go. Instead, just show people content. I don't fully agree with this analysis. Navigation is overdone on many sites. In particular, the so-called spoke design where every page is linked to every other page leads to reduced usability. Similarly, many sites have overblown footers that link to too many meta-features (say, 'about the company' or a privacy statement).

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2000). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Issues in Sizing UCD Projects

Sizing UCD projects presents special challenges to usability practitioners and consultants. Each project and UCD methodology comes with its own set of variables that makes it difficult to accurately estimate resource requirements and completion times.

Usability Body of Knowledge (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Project Management

Issues of Saliency and Recognition in the Search for Web Page Bookmarks

Describes the effect of bookmark naming on bookmark recognition. The purpose was to provide empirically-determined guidelines for web producers on how to title pages in order to optimise the recognition of bookmarks by users, and to increase the rate of revisitation as a result.

Poole, Alex. Alex Poole (2005). Books>Information Design>Usability>Web Browsers

It Is Easy To Criticize But...Challenge to Find Examples of GOOD Usability

It is easy to find examples of poor usability and many books and sites devote themselves to this. We can learn from mistakes and we can laugh and feel superior about it, but what about learning from great design?

Usability Professionals Association (2004). Articles>Web Design>Usability

It's a Small World After All: Western Usability Guidelines Predict Behavior of Chinese Users of On-line Bookstores

The present study examined whether Western usability guidelines apply to Chinese web sites. Nielsen et al (2000) proposed a set of 207 usability guidelines derived from observations in the field. We took a subset of 48 rules, and looked at the compliance rate (number of guidelines a web site complied with, divided by the total number of guidelines), task completion time, task accuracy, and users’ perceived usability and likeability for four Chinese online bookstores. Results showed a clear relationship between adherence to the rules and usability of the site: as the web site’s compliance rate increased, so did the usability and the impression the web site received from its users. These results suggest that the rules governing behavior of Chinese users are similar to those of Western users. More generally, this study calls into question the widely-held intuition that usability for Asian web sites should be different than usability for Western sites.

Yau, Josephine K. Y. and William G. Hayward. uiGarden (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>China

Iterative Design

If we have usability improvements with each iteration, is this evidence that 'usability testing' works? I believe the answer is 'Yes.' We have many studies showing that each iteration does help to improve the usability of a system—even if the improvements are only modest ones (which is usually the case).

Bailey, Robert. Web Usability (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability

Jobs@OK/Cancel

This site is a consolidation of publicly available and privately submitted job postings in HCI, Usability, User Experience, Interaction Design, Information Architecture and Ergonomics.

OK-Cancel. Careers>Job Listings>Information Design>Usability