Usability and user experience

"The difference (and relationship) between usability and use experience". An article on a website called Usability Geek. Maybe not something that immediately strikes you as something for anyone other than a specialist, but worth a look as the author does a good job of placing the role of usability in the wider context of website management and marketing.

McGovern on satisfaction surveys

Gerry McGovern repeats the often heard maxim - what people do and what people say are not the same. I've seen first hand many times what Gerry outlines this week.

Metrics don't equal success

A pithy, but worthwhile reminder of why we shouldn't get too caught up in various metrics collected through web analytics packages.

Reasons to try remote testing

A nice little article in which Jeff Sauro lists his 5 reasons why he likes remote testing. He lists a few services he's involved with too, so if you're new to this kind of thing there are a few companies to investigate.

Persona mistakes to avoid

Jared Spool picks on 5 mistakes he's observed in development teams using personas. There's a fair amount of effort involved in putting the user at the centre of your design in this way, so it makes sense not to fall into these traps and waste the effort you've put in.

Nielsen's heuristics in action

Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics are nicely illustrated in this article pulling together lots of examples of good practice.

Does your CMS support your content strategy?

A blog article by a content management system (CMS) developer with a refreshingly enlightened understanding of content strategy. Rachel Andrew writes about how the CMS should serve to support website editors to do a better job, focusing the content that they write.

Website usability for mobile users

Jakob Nielsen has done a couple of studies in recent years that reveal a lot about user behaviour on websites when using mobile devices. Some companies are very aware of these differences and develop strategies accordingly.

Content management system usability

A well considered and structured series of principles for the usability of content management systems.

User time on web pages

Jakob Nielsen summarises some new research revealing more about how long users typically spend on web pages. Basically an interesting and detailed piece of work that can be summarised as, 'not very long at all, almost all of the time'.