10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines - Smashing UX Design Advertisement Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. 1. A study by UX Matters found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. Tumblr features a simple and elegant sign-up form that adheres to UX Matter’s recommendation. Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels? 2. People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study. And now the baby is looking at the content.
QR Code Generator: QR Stuff Free Online QR Code Creator And Encoder For T-Shirts, Business Cards & Stickers 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website How do you evaluate a website? By asking the right questions. No website is perfect. Every website has flaws. Many things that can go wrong, whether due to technical SEO, on-page optimizations, page speed, or something else. Ready to find your website’s flaws so you can get them fixed and working properly? Great! Read on to learn 50 questions you should ask to evaluate the quality of your website. 1. There shouldn’t be multiple H1 tags on the page. The H1 tag is the focus of the page’s topic, and thus it should only occur on the page once. If you include more than one H1 tag on the page, it will cause the dilution of the focus of the page. 2. One major issue that can impact a website negatively are 4xx and 5xx error pages. If your site cannot be crawled due to these issues, you can experience decreases in performance when search engines cannot effectively crawl the site. 3. Issues can occur when error pages are not properly configured. This can introduce conflicts in crawling and indexing. 4. 5. 6.
20 Tips for eCommerce Web Design and Usability It might have happened to everybody: you find in the search engine a link to the product you need, click it and close the page in a few seconds. Simply because the site web design puts you off. Or vice versa: you come to the beautifully designed site, but understand nothing of how to navigate through it. Andy Booth, English designer and developer, has been working in ecommerce for many years and has gathered 20 ecommerce usability tips, which will come handy for everybody who wants to create online store or improve it. 1. Almost any product may come in different sizes, colors, etc. 2. Amazon.com: under the main page is the dominating search bar. 3. The next advice on our usability tips list. 4. 20 Tips for eCommerce Web Design and Usability Probably, there is no such ecommerce expert, who has not highlighted the importance of item images. 5. Generally, there are two distinct types of shopping cart implementation. 6. 7. 8. 9. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
How Gamification Can Make News Sites More Engaging Gamification, the use of gameplay mechanics for non-game applications, is transforming online news into an engaging, social and fun activity. It’s quickly becoming the next frontier in web and mobile technology. But what makes gamification successful? Simply put: motivation. By tracking readers' success, news organizations provide a sense of progress. At Mashable, we’ve incorporated gamification into Mashable Follow, our social layer and content curation tool. Activity is the core of Follow. Rewarding readers for taking these actions was an important component of Follow. Of course Follow badges are just one example of game mechanics on a news site — and here's why they work. Fostering Community As a result of the hunger for badges, readers develop a more personal and valuable community on our site. Andrew David Baron, an avid Follow user, can attest to the badges encouraging Mashable readers to comment more. Bob Aycock, another frequent Follow user agrees. Resonating With Readers Conclusion
25-point Website Usability Checklist I've been thinking a lot lately about my process. Experience is a powerful thing, but it's rare that we really sit down and try to map out what we know. A while back, as part of my 5-point Website Clinic, I developed a 25-point website usability checklist - a way to create some method out of my madness and make sure that I don't forget anything critical when I'm working with a new client. Even though it's part of one of my paid offerings, I've decided to share this checklist. Basic Overview The list is split into 4 roughly equal sections, (I) Accessibility, (II) Identity, (III) Navigation, and (IV) Content. Section I. This section contains not only traditional accessibility issues, but anything that might keep a visitor from being able to access the information on a website. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Section II. A key question when someone first comes to your site is "Who are you?" 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Section III. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. Section IV. You've heard it before - Content is king. 18.
How To Change the User Agent String in Firefox Do you need a quick way to change the user agent string in Firefox for a specific website? Choose the string that you need from a preset list (or from custom entries) with the User Agent Switcher extension. Note: Works with Firefox, Flock, SeaMonkey, and Songbird. Before Before adding the extension to our browser we tested the user agent string at UserAgentString.com and got a positive I.D. result for Firefox. After Once you add the extension to Firefox you can access the alternate user agent string in two ways. Note: The user agent string will automatically reset back to the default each time you restart Firefox. And the second is using a toolbar button. For the first test we chose Internet Explorer 8. Refreshing the page tested positive for IE 8. Next we chose the Yahoo! Moving on we chose iPhone 3.0. To keep things interesting we set the user agent string for Internet Explorer 6. And also testing positive at the extension author’s website. Options Conclusion Links
5 Frightening Facts from Forrester and the Good News for Digital Marketers Popular Today in Business: All Popular Articles Yesterday Forrester Research released its latest report on digital marketing after taking a survey from consumers in both North America and Europe. The North American survey polled 58,068 US and 5,635 Canadian online adults in Q2 2012, while the European poll took place in Q3 2012, polling 20,778 Europeans from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The report leaves advertising and social media marketing practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic high and dry. Consumers trust self-selected content more than push communications Conclusions: The good news for digital marketers is that self-selected digital pull content rules the roost with up to 70% of consumers affirming that they trust brand recommendations from friends and a median 46% saying they trust online consumer reports and reviews. Related Resources from B2C» Free Webcast: Blogging in the Age of Modern Marketers The Takeaway:
Node.js Performance Tips from LinkedIn LinkedIn's Shravya Garlapati has shared a number of tips for improving performance on their mobile site while using Node.js. LinkedIn is working with a standard HTML5 mobile site as well as apps for iOS and Android. Previously, LinkedIn has talked about its continuous integration testing for mobile, now they're sharing some of what they've learned. The Obvious and Not so Much A couple of the tips are fairly obvious. For example, make sure that you use gzip to compress requests and responses. Another tip that (one hopes) is obvious? But LinkedIn also has a few insights that might not be obvious. Garlapati also recommends using binary modules with Node.js, and standard V8 JavaScript rather than client-side libraries.
Key Tips for Better Website Usability Ron Jones | October 3, 2011 | 1 Comment inShare30 How you can fortify your website and fix usability issues. So you have a great website that is loaded with great content but is it not converting and most of your visitors leave your site within the first 60 seconds. Website usability is a common concept among web designers. It is generally known that people visit your website with a specific task in mind. Use Keyword Phrases That Your Audience Is Searching On One of the first things site visitors look for are some visual clues that help them feel they have landed on a site that will help them solve their problem. Armed with your researched and targeted keywords, you should make sure they are prominently placed on the landing page. Consistent and Intuitive Site Navigation People are impatient and hate learning new things. I remember a few years ago renting a car and as I pulled up to the gate to check out, I couldn't find the button to roll down the window. Menus. Optimized Content Strategy