#13557
Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability
#31193
Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited: A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce Websites
A list of common mistakes with e-commerce shopping cart design were identified in a previous issue of Usability News. This article revisits that list and reviews how 500 of the top Internet retail sites of today implemented their shopping cart design.
Naidu, Shivashankar and Barbara S. Chaparro. Usability News (2007). Design>Web Design>E Commerce>Usability
#26632
Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005
The oldies continue to be goodies -- or rather, baddies -- in the list of design stupidities that irked users the most in 2005.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#18459
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability
#14931
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability
#19024
When analyzing numbers related to the growth of a website, I normally recommend looking at them on a logarithmic scale. The reason is that the Web and the Internet both experience exponential growth. Therefore, Web statistics are better analyzed in terms of growth rates than in terms of linear growth.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1998). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Log Analysis
#13743
If you were to draw a picture of Dave Kleinberg's professional life, it might come out looking like a tree. Hierarchies have long played a key role in his thinking. 'At least 80 percent of all the information we encounter every day can be organized into hierarchies,' Kleinberg says. A hierarchy is a tree-like structure that begins with a single point, or node, which describes the most general aspect of a topic. This node, often referred to as the root, is then divided into branches that contain increasingly specific information.
Kleinberg, David. Builder.com (2001). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#19282
Regular web users will almost certainly be aware of an increasing amount of ‘invasive’ advertising appearing online. A variety of methods are now being used to make online advertising almost unavoidable for the user.
Farrell, Tom. Frontend Infocentre (2001). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>Usability
#23045
Studies regarding how people evaluate a web site's credibility show the critical importance of information design and structure. Users trust sites that are well-designed and well-organized. Poor navigation is the key element that decreases earned web credibility.
Semantic Studios (2004). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Rhetoric
#14212
We hear all the time from web designers that they spend countless hours and resources trying to speed up their web pages' download time because they believe that people are turned off by slow-loading pages. What we discovered may surprise you.
Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability
#26872
The Truth About Google's So-Called "Simplicity"
Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it.
Norman, Donald A. uiGarden (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Search
#30822
Turn Usable Content into Winning Content
Findable. Scannable. Readable. Concise. Layered. We know much these days about how to make Web content usable--thanks to experts such as Robert Horn, Jakob Nielsen, Ginny Redish, and Gerry McGovern. What we don't understand as well, however, is how to make content win users over to take the actions we want them to take or have the perceptions we want them to have. We don't understand how to make Web content both usable and persuasive. I, by no means, intend to imply that we should sacrifice the usability of content to make it more persuasive. Truly winning content must be both.
Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#20864
Maybe Web-access through television sets doesn't need to be as usable as a normal computer if it can provide other benefits.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Usability>Web Browsers
#22383
Suggested tasks for testing of ecommerce sites such as compare product features for products A and B.
Bohmann, Kristoffer. Bohmann Usability (2000). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce
#19622
Two Kinds of Titles for Web Pages (In-Context and Out-of-Context)
Most writers know the value of an informative title, but many beginning web authors don't know that each web page needs two kinds of titles. The in-context (IC) title always sits at the top of a page, with the rest of the document immediately beneath it. The in-context title of this page is 'Two Kinds of Titles for Web Pages (In-Context and Out-of-Context)'. The out-of-context (OOC) title is frequently displayed by search engines or archive pages, as part of a long sorted list.
Jerz, Dennis G. Seton Hill University (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability
#20622
Two Sigma: Usability and Six Sigma Quality Assurance
On average across many test tasks, users fail 35% of the time when using websites. This is 100,000 times worse than six sigma's requirement, but Web usability can still benefit from a six sigma quality approach.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#22752
UK Accessibility Investigation of 1,000 Web Sites - Results Released
An investigation of 1000 UK Web sites carried out on behalf of the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) reveals unacceptably poor (in fact woeful) accessibility. At least 81% of sites failed to meet the minimum accessibility standard, and this figure is likely to be much higher.
Dodd, Jon. Usability Professionals Association (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Usability
#26035
UK E-Commerce Losing Half Its Local Business
UK e-commerce businesses could be losing as much as half their local business, if they opt for a 'dot com' web address.
Usability by Design (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce
#30641
Understanding Usability Issues of Bidirectional Bilingual Websites
Over the past ten years, there has been an ever-increasing amount of usability recommendations for improving website design. Much of the data has focused on navigation of single-language websites. But few studies have tackled the problems of bilingual sites, and virtually no information has been gathered about usability of bilingual or multilingual sites where the languages are not written in the same direction (for example, English, which is read from left-to-right, and Hebrew, which is read from right-to-left).
Guren, Leah. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>Web Design>Localization>Usability
#13185
Understanding Users: Making the Transition from a Paper to an Electronic Reference System 
Online technical documentation can be used as an effective job aid if designed properly. However, in many instances designers put the paper documentation online without concern for usability. To design an effective online technical reference system, technical communicators should understand how users interact with the legacy system and how they will interact with the system once it is converted to an online form.
Steward, Sherry. STC Proceedings (2001). Presentations>Web Design>Usability
#25519
Database-driven content management systems are everywhere. And with them come URLs only a robot could love. Bill Humphries shows how to transform CGI-generated URLs into meaningful user interfaces through the power of URL mapping.
Humphries, Bill. List Apart, A (2000). Design>Web Design>Usability
#20262
Database-driven content management systems are everywhere. And with them come URLs only a robot could love. Bill Humphries shows how to transform CGI-generated URLs into meaningful user interfaces through the power of URL mapping.
Humphries, Bill. List Apart, A (2000). Design>Web Design>Usability
#14495
This website provides information and resources related to usability in website design. We believe that helping people do their work in an effective and enjoyable way should be the top priority in design because if a product is not usable, people will not use it.
#19213
Usability and Gratifications -- Towards a Website Analysis Model 
This paper discusses website usability issues. Specifically, it assumes that the usability of a website depends more on the perception of the user than on the objectively assessable usability criteria of the website. Two pilot studies, based on theoretical notions of uses and gratifications theory and similar theories, are presented. In the first study, experts evaluated three websites on the national park Mesa Verde in a more formal approach based on criteria defined in the literature. In the second study, non-experts evaluated the same three websites in a more informal and personal approach, using concurrent, or “thinking aloud,” verbal protocol methods. Results show that overall assessment of the websites differs between experts and non-experts. Specifically, overall the website assessed as worst by the experts was liked most by the non-experts. Cognitive and emotional needs as defined by uses and gratifications seemed to make more of a difference with regard to website use, and less with regard to website evaluation. Results from these studies provide the basis for a user-centered website analysis model that may make use of but not depend on usability criteria defined by the literature.
Bunz, Ulla K. Rutgers University (2001). Articles>Web Design>Assessment>Usability
#19289
Improving ‘brand experience’ online is not normally regarded as the primary goal of a usability strategy. In some circles usability and branding would even be seen as mutually exclusive, based on the assumption that successful branding relies on ever more garish visual design and an extensive use of animation, audio streaming, or whatever the latest cutting-edge technology might happen to be.
Farrell, Tom. Frontend Infocentre (2001). Design>Web Design>Marketing>Usability
