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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

McGovern on customer feedback

How reliable is your customer feedback? How do you know you're listening to the right ones? Could your attempts to address the comments you get about your website be doing more harm than good?

Opening links in new windows - a usability no-no

You want your visitors to stay on your site. You 'help' them do this by opening links to other sites in new windows. Everyone's a winner, right? Wrong.

Eyetracking - real world examples

Three unrelated eyetracking articles, all with different focuses and interesting for different reasons. The key thing to learn here (if you didn't know it already) is never assume people take in information in a linear fashion - their attention is fleeting and moves in sometimes unexpected directions.

Design by committee

We all know that design by committee leads to horrendous design and yet committees happen anyway. Paul Boag writes a great piece that looks at the graphic design process chiefly, but I think the principles apply equally to website structure and to content strategy (or at least, deciding what to cut and what to keep).

Web forms - usability & accessibility

I've been doing some reading up on web forms lately as we're working on introducing a new feature to the University's content management system. The forms that will be generated obviously need to be accessible, but we're keen to help publishers ensure they're as usable as possible too.

It goes without saying that my number one point of reference has been Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney's book - Forms that Work. The accompanying website has tons of useful advice and links to further information too.
Forms that Work - free online resources and book promotion

Caroline Jarrett recently gave a presentation at the Usability Professionals Association conference.
Design tips for complex forms - presentation slides from Caroline Jarrett

A great introduction to making web forms accessible is provided by Webcredible.
Making accessible forms - article by Trenton Moss for Webcredible.com

Jakob Nielsen looks at the things you should consider when using checkboxes and radio buttons.
Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons - article by Jakob Nielsen

A more techie article, but interesting and useful nonetheless. I like the breakdown of the guidance here into what's accessibility, what's usability and what's law.
Accessible forms: Guidelines, examples and accessible JavaScript tricks - article by Mike Foskett for websemantics.co.uk

Finally, a great article from Web AIM (Accessibility In Mind):
Creating Accessible Forms - WebAIM.org

Information seeking behaviour

A collection of theories and opinions on how people look for information online, and what we should be doing to cater for these behaviours.

Donna Spencer highlights four modes of information seeking behaviour. This is a great article and has informed my approach to structuring websites and organising content.

The 4 modes of information seeking behaviour:

• Known-item information seeking
• Exploratory seeking
• Don’t know what you need to know
• Re-finding information

Donna outlines each and goes on to discuss the implications for web design.

Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them - article by Donna Spencer for Boxes and Arrows


Jakob Nielsen's article is pretty old now (2003), but he references some interesting earlier academic research and his observations on the rise of Google and the expansion of broadband access certainly ring true for me.

Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster - article by Jakob Nielsen

Jared Spool talks about the value of getting the right words on the page to help the user on his way. I've previously blogged this one...

The right trigger words - Jared Spool on labelling and links

Print vs web publishing - Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen outlines his views on the difference between writing for the web and writing for print, based on the way users consume content.

His example of an article in the New York Times illustrates his point beautifully.

Writing Style for Print vs. Web - article by Jakob Nielsen

Psychologist’s view of usable design

Fascinating article in which a psychologist applies research in the field on human behaviour to website design principles.

The usability principles Susan Weinschenk runs through weren't new to me, but the reasoning behind them was. A slightly different angle providing fresh insight and links to much more reading.

The psychologist’s view of UX design - article by Susan Weinschenk for uxmag.com

Jared Spool on Amazon

Slides and audio from Jared Spool as he appraises just what it is he feels Amazon do better than everyone else.

Revealing Design Treasures From The Amazon - slides and audio by Jared Spool

An attendee at Jared's presentation has kindly gone to the trouble of summarising the session.

Overview of Jared Spool's Amazon presentation - blog post by Karen Fojas Lee

Jared's a big fan of Amazon. He recently wrote a great piece in praise of their customer review ratings feature.

Amazon's 2.7 billion dollar question - article by Jared Spool

First impressions of your website matter

A relatively old, but interesting piece of research about how long it takes for a website visitor to form an opinion on your website - about a 20th of a second.

Why does this matter? The researchers believe that these quickly formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the "halo effect".

So with a positive impression, your visitor should cut you a bit more slack when they encounter problems.

This research was first reported in 2006. It was one of the reasons we went to such great lengths to check out the University's new design with end users. I organised emotional response tests, focus groups and surveys around this time to help us get to the current look and feel.

Steve Krug talks about something similar - the reservior of goodwill - in his book "Don't make me think". Visitors perservere with your website until their reservoir of goodwill is used up. So it seems one factor dictating the size of the reservoir will be the visitor's first impression.

First impressions count for web - BBC News article

Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye - article in Nature.com