#23973
Many people have a hard time talking about the distinctions between different kinds of Web development, which makes it difficult to decide how to proceed. This article offers a quick survey of various Web projects and of the techniques that address them.
Korman, Jonathan. Cooper Interaction Design (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Heuristic Evaluation
#24230
Not Getting Personal: Assessing Website Effectiveness 
Websites are sometimes evaluated primarily on first impressions or personal preference. More difficult to ascertain is their success in terms of communication. Assessments of websites can benefit from research and developments from fields such as usability studies, linguistics, professional writing, and rhetoric.
Durham, Marsha. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Web Design>Assessment>Usability
#11872
Web usability has traditionally been focused on increasing ease of learning for the novice users. This makes great sense and should continue to be the main goal. Remember Jakob's Law of the Internet user experience: users spend most of their time on other sites than your own. Thus, users rarely learn enough about any given site to become true expert users.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2000). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#13562
Official Winter Olympics Site: Not Even Bronze
An early tweaking raised the Salt Lake City website to 70% compliance with homepage usability guidelines. Inside the site, however, task support falls far below medal contention.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability
#26624
The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#28257
The early Web's explosive growth rate has slowed, but even the mature Web is still expanding and recently crossed the 100 million websites mark.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#31800
Online Persuasion: Seven Ways to Persuade People to Buy
Persuading people to do what you want them to do on your website isn't as hard as you think. Read through these top tips and so your online conversion rates can soar!
Halabi, Lisa. Webcredible (2008). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce
#19275
Online Yaşam ve Tasarım Kültürü
Hergün yüzlerce menü görüyor, onlarca 'checklist'i işaretliyor, formlar dolduruyor, bilgi gönderiyor, sepete atıyoruz. Bir sitenin tasarımı denince akla sadece grafikler, 'grid'lerin yerleri, menünün boyutu, renkler vs. geliyor, ancak bütün bu makyajın altında bir sitenin çatısı durumunda ve siteyi diğerlerinden ayıran temel etkenlerden olan sayfadaki farklı elemanların sunuluş biçimi, kullanıcıların siteden beklentilerini karşılamadaki ve kullanım kolaylığını sağlamadaki yeterlilik göz ardı ediliyor.
#14339
An Open Discussion on Web Navigation
What is navigation? • Central metaphor for the web • If they cannot find it, they cannot buy it • Conventions forming, but… • …It depends • Future: Will navigation be less or more important?
Instone, Keith. Instone.org (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability
#26637
Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents
When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are no longer browsing a website, they shouldn't be given a browser UI.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Adobe Acrobat
#19408
Optimal Line Length: Research Supporting How Line Length Affects Usability 
What is the optimal line length when reading prose text from a monitor? Certain aspects of usability have been researched for over 120 years. One active area of investigation has been the influence of line length on the speed of reading prose text. Weber (1881) made the first research-based recommendations when he suggested that an ideal line length was 4 inches (100 millimeters). He stated further that the maximum never should exceed 6 inches (150 mm). The same year Javel (1881) reported that line lengths should be no longer than 3.6 inches (90 mm). Two years later, Cohn (1883) confirmed that 3.6 inches (90 mm) was the best length, and that 4 inches (102 mm) was the longest admissible line length.
Bailey, Robert. Web Usability (2002). Design>Typography>Web Design>Usability
#19030
Optimize Your Site's Usability
A specter is haunting the world of business: The specter of customer empowerment. Users rule the Internet and vote with millions of mouse-clicks every day. Users go where they are well treated, so customer-centered Web sites that are easy to use and pleasant to visit get the credit card numbers. Sites that are difficult to use or take forever to download suffer the death penalty. This simple fact is the reason usability has become a core competency for business survival in the network economy.
Nielsen, Jakob. ZDNet (1998). Design>Web Design>Usability
#25364
When you make a web page easy to grasp, in the very first 10 seconds after a visitor arrives, you can both increase its credibility and improve its search engines ranking. Rachel shares precise methods for composing effective text for Web sites.
McAlpine, Rachel. Wise-Women (2004). Design>Web Design>Writing>Usability
#21100
Poor password usability can ruin your web registration process. While passwords are a painful fact of life, there are ways to minimize the problems that users face. This article contains suggestions on how to best collect passwords during the registration process, and it will help you determine if you should allow users to save their passwords.
Ledwell, Joshua. WebWord (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability>Security
#28261
PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption
Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Adobe Acrobat
#19757
PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption
Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Usability>Web Design>Adobe Acrobat
#31996
People Finder: Searching Without Logic? Improving the People Finder Application
One of the most frequent tasks on many intranets is finding people within the company. Providing an effective way to search people is thus a key goal in designing intranets. This goal becomes even more important for an organization like Emirates, a leading international airline, which has over 35,000 employees with over 140 nationalities and where more people are likely to use this feature more frequently.
Deshmukh, Vivek. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Interface
#14206
People Search Once, Maybe Twice
Lately, we've been focused on the effectiveness of Search. When looking for content, users often end up using the search engine. In a recent study, we observed that users only found their target content 34% of the time with Search (less than with categories). We wanted to know why.
User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search
#19335
Web personalization is much over-rated and mainly used as a poor excuse for not designing a navigable website. The real way to get individualized interaction between a user and a website is to present the user with a variety of options and let the user choose what is of interest to that individual at that specific time. If the information space is designed well, then this choice is easy, and the user achieves optimal information through the use of natural intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. In other words, I am the one entity on the world to know exactly what I need right now. Thus, I can tailor the information I see and the information I skip so that it suits my needs perfectly.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Design>Web Design>Personalization>Usability
#22458
Pervasive Usability - Planning For an Uncertain Future
Usability is a phenomenon that has dramatically changed the way the products, including Websites, are designed and manufactured.
Kheterpal, Suneet. SitePoint (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability
#31128
What bugs me is not the results of the major search engines, but the results of internal web site searches.
Rockley Group, The (2008). Design>Web Design>Search>Usability
#22715
Planning a Usable Website: A Three-Step Guide
Learn how to involve usability from the start of the web design process.
Moss, Trenton. Webcredible (2004). Design>Web Design>Usability
#21050
Users need feedback from websites. Buttons, links, and other interactive elements should respond to elementary user input. All web designers probably try to account for user feedback, especially in controls like buttons and links, but a lot of websites have strange ways of letting the user know what he can or can't do. There are some de facto standards from the software visual interface world that apply to web design, as well as a few guidelines that make pliant response more effective.
Baker, Adam. Merges.net (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability
#18727
Para la mayoría de las personas resulta confuso que, al hacer click en un link o botón, la página responda lanzando una nueva ventana del navegador. Añade otra dimensión a la complejidad de la navegación. Sin embargo, muchas veces nuestro cliente necesita un pop-up, o nosotros mismos decidimos que el visitante de la página podrá manejarlo. Más allá de las discusiones acerca de usar o no un pop-up, hay un problema que los corrompe sistemáticamente, que los hace perversos, que agrede a usuarios avanzados y principiantes en su navegación, confunde a los buscadores, y genera ruido en el código. Este problema es que, existiendo varias formas de lanzar un pop-up con código Javascript, las más usadas son las incorrectas.
Razzari, Manuel. Nosolousabilidad.com (2003). (Spanish) Design>Web Design>Usability>DHTML
#26633
Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search
