Friday 30 July 2010

Flickr photo group: usability errors

If you ever want inspiration about what not to do, this is a great place to start. Usability problems photographed around the world; not just limited to the web.

Flickr photo sharing group - UX errors

University homepage content

Depending on your perspective, this is a case of either "It's funny because it's true", or "That's so depressingly familiar, we might as well just give up".

As it's Friday, I'm in the former camp.

Venn diagram of what people want from university homepages and what they actually get

Cartoon found on xkcd.com

Online prototype tool Mockingbird enhancements

This great tool that I blogged about a while back has some new features in the pipleline. The downside is that you'll have to pay for them.

Wednesday 14 July 2010

Website owners manual

This is a really excellent book, written for those of us who have responsibility for a website, but don't really feel they know what they should be doing.

User experience poster

A really nice single sheet poster on techniques to enhance the development process and bring some user focus. Print out and share.

"User experience: How can it help?" poster by Elizabeth Whitworth (PDF)

Usability case study: Twitter sign up

There's nothing like a success story to inspire... Here, Luke Wroblewski outlines how Twitter improved their sign up rate by 29% by revising the registration process.

Preparing for usability testing

A couple of great articles on organising usability testing, with lots of useful tips on things like setting the right tasks, phrasing your scenarios and recruiting participants.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Challenging times in HE website management

I'm at the UKOLN conference in Sheffield right now. The theme is "The Web in Turbulent Times".

A couple of presentations worth a look, kindly recorded and made available on the University of Sheffield site.

Sunday 4 July 2010

Repositioning user experience as a strategic process

I missed out on this session by Jon Innes recently. Shame as it looked really interesting. Fortunately though, a version of the slides are available on slideshare.

It's all about integrating usability into the planning and development process.

Remote usability testing tips

Advice from a range of usability professionals on remote usability testing - how they set things up and the technologies they use.