Category: usability

  • Green screens 27 March 2007

    Today, while I was booking a flight to Sydney with Virgin Blue , I noticed a new ad on their site promoting a feature called Carbon Offset . I'd heard about being carbon neutral before, but had thought it was ...

  • Don't annoy me with your crappy form field focus 27 October 2005

    » Improved Form Field Focus « OK, when you have a page that is mainly about a form, focusing on the first field can be a good thing. Your index finger has a finite number of clicks in it, ...

  • Positive feedback 09 March 2005

    The other day when I was doing the usual post-entry ping run on the extremely useful Ping-O-Matic , I noticed the subtlest interface touch that struck me as a great example of how to educate your users about a system's behaviour. ...

  • A first foray into user testing 17 December 2004

    It may shock, surprise and disappoint you, but I did formal user testing on a website for the first time ever last week. Sure, I'd gotten people to play around with a site and asked them the non-specific ...

  • Practical usability tip #19: turn off current page links using CSS 19 November 2004

    It made it in at number 10 for Jakob last year, so it must be a matter of importance: don't have a link to the current page. He tells you why, so I'll tell you how. When you're ...

  • Page differentiation 29 October 2004

    Users prowl the Internet like lions on the savannah, hunting for information morsels, assessing prey for suitability before casting it aside. That's why we have navigation – it helps those predators navigate their ...

  • Ordering from the menu 19 August 2004

    This question can only really be answered by a room full of lab rats, but my lack of time or money to perform user testing means its easier if I just write about it. As I'm about to design the ...

  • CSS, printing and user expectation 09 July 2004

    While recently working on a large web site that contained a lot of written articles, I had cause to think about the use of print stylesheets. Eric Meyer told us about the joys of print stylesheets using the ...

  • Hidden Windows 25 June 2004

    Micrsoft aren't as famed for their usability analysis as, say Bruce Tognazzini , but there's one thing that particularly bugs me in their post 98 OSs – whenever I call a new computer home, I automatically ...

  • Simplicity, always 06 May 2004

    The interesting discussion on Keith's site over visited links , and the general outcome that they are still mostly useful, made me think of Tim Berners-Lee and how his vision of the World Wide Web has evolved ...

  • Styling Form Widgets 28 April 2004

    "With great power comes great responsibility." So said the Gods of the W3C when they handed man the gift of CSS 1. Much good was done with this boon from the heavens. Content and style – once entangled like the ...

  • Framed 22 April 2004

    I was having a look around Alex's tutorial for replacing frames with CSS divs, and I couldn't help but be curious as to "why?" Frames (and even their preferred counterparts, iframes) have ...

  • Online dating 13 March 2004

    It's all well and good to have a fire in your belly over Web Standards, but sometimes it's the small things that make all the difference. The giant leap to Standards isn't the only thing that can improve the way a ...

  • Accessible, yes; usable, no 19 February 2004

    It's always helpful when an anonymous reader sends you a message saying your site "fails miserably". In this case, it was my "claim" to Bobby AAA approval that they took umbrage to. It's best not to rebuke such ...

  • Too many steps 02 February 2004

    Even though I read all the usability books, browse all the usability web sites and meditate to all the usability mantras, I still forget about usability. This was brought home during my latest "referrer crawl". ...

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