September 30th, 2008 chris
The great Roman leader Julius Caesar recorded the earliest known version of this proverb, ‘Experience is the teacher of all things’. This holds true in usability as new designers make the same mistakes in the following areas where the seasoned designers now know when and how to use technology to create a good user experience:
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Plug-ins and bleeding-edge technology
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3D user interface
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Bloated design
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Splash pages
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Moving graphics and scrolling text
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Custom GUI widgets
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Not disclosing who’s behind information
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Made-up words
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Outdated content
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Inconsistency within a Web site
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Premature requests for personal information
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Multiple sites
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Orphan pages
Posted in Design & Usability
September 30th, 2008 chris
An organism is adaptable if it can survive significant changes in its environment, spread to new habitats, and come up with novel solutions to its surroundings. All of these abilities are characteristic of human beings. With this quality of adaptability and over years of Web exposure, audiences are slowly adapting to the following Usability Problems and today these items are slowly evolving to be a no concern anymore:
Posted in Design & Usability
September 30th, 2008 chris
Moore’s Law’s taking effect in technology today and the foreseeable future helped in making some problems in usability to become less important today. This is due to technological improvements in browsers, bandwidth, or other Internet technology. These improvements have somewhat reduced problems with the following 7 Usability Concerns:
Posted in Design & Usability
September 30th, 2008 chris
A New Year’s Resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to a project or the reforming of a habit, often a lifestyle change that is generally interpreted as advantageous. The name comes from the fact that these commitments normally go into effect on New Year’s Day and remain until fulfilled or abandoned. Usually these commitments are abandoned rather than fulfilled which is the same case for the following Usability Areas that still cause major problems today:
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Links that don’t change color when visited
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Breaking the back button
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Opening new browser windows
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Pop-up windows
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Design elements that look like advertisements
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Violating Web-wide conventions
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Vaporous content and empty hype
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Dense content and unscannable text
Posted in Design & Usability
September 5th, 2008 chris
Great Websites has some or all of the following habits or might I say qualities:
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It conforms to the way users interact with the Web, but focuses on the activity instead of a specific audience.
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It has only those features that are absolutely necessary for users to complete the activity the application is meant to support.
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It supports the user’s mental model of what it does.
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It helps users get started quickly so they can become intermediate users as soon as possible.
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It makes it easy to recover from mistakes and difficult to make them in the first place.
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It has uniformly designed interface elements, but leverages irregularity to create meaning and importance.
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It reduces clutter to a minimum.
Posted in Design & Usability
August 21st, 2008 chris
Have you been inside a Gigantic Mall that has a lot of passage ways going to the other sections of the establishment. Feeling like the Athenian hero Theseus inside a Labyrinth and feeling lost. Well, do not let that happen to your users when they are already deeply inside your site.
Follow the following guidelines to bring them back home:
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Tell users where they have arrived and how they can proceed to other parts of the site by including these three design elements on every page:
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Company name or logo in upper left corner
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Direct, one-click link to the homepage
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Search (preferably in the upper right corner)
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Orient the user to the rest of the site. If the site has hierarchical information architecture, the best way to do this is usually a “breadcrumb trail”links that indicate the user’s current location in the context of the site’s hierarchy and allow users to backtrack or move up the hierarchy. Also include links to other resources that are directly relevant to the current location, but don’t flood the user with links to all site areas or to unrelated pages.
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Don’t assume that users have followed a drill-down path to arrive at the current page. They may have taken a different path than what you intended and not have seen information that was contained on higher-level pages.
Posted in Design & Usability
August 21st, 2008 chris
There are three types of design you can follow when building your site or user interface. They are the following:
- Standard: Eighty percent or more of Web sites use the same design approach. Users strongly expect standard elements to work a certain way when they visit a new site because that’s how things almost always work.
- Convention: About 50 to 79 percent of Websites use the same design approach. Users expect conventional elements to work a certain way when they visit a new site because that’s how things usually work.
- Confusion: With these elements, no single design approach dominates, and even the most popular approach is used by less than half of Web sites. For such design elements, users don’t know what to expect when they visit a new site.
Choose at your own risk.
Posted in Design & Usability
August 21st, 2008 chris
Standards are very important in design especially in the digital world today. It ensures that users:
- Know what features to expect
- Know how these features will look in the interface
- Know where to find these features on the site and on the page
- Know how to operate each feature to achieve their goal
- Don’t need to ponder the meaning of unknown design elements
- Don’t miss important features because they overlook a design element that is not standard
- Don’t get nasty surprises when something doesn’t work as expected
Posted in Design & Usability