WebWord

When I send out emails, especially to my consutling clients, I am always afraid that they will be rejected as spam. The last thing I need is to wonder is Did they get my email?
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Steve Outing — “Suggestions include the scroll-less home page, better ad management, more user-generated content.”
There are some things in this article that apply to virtually all web sites. Good article.
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In response to Adrian Holovaty’s posting on Required User Registation, I wrote a comment that I want to post here.
“In my experience, marketing folks ask for registration information, thinking that they will be able to use the data. However, they really can’t use the data effectively. Most marketing folks haven’t figured out what the […]

Steve Outing — “Think about it from the user perspective. Sites requiring registration in order to see their content are annoying to part of the audience. Click on a story from a home page and your quest is interrupted by a demand to fill out a form. True, many people will comply. But you’ve annoyed […]

There is a false assumption that when usability is applied the improvements seen are absolute. The assumption goes like this. If you make something better for your users, you are making it better for all users. Like it or not, both designers and usability specialists tend to think this way. The issue is that it […]

Boxes and Arrows — “When Boxes and Arrow first launched in 2001, we were blessed with the design from the talented Gabe Zentall. B&A has been growing and changing and evolving since then, and it’s time to freshen up a bit. But because we love the vibrant community that has made us—from the articles to […]

About a month ago I was offered a Gmail account. I have been using it on and off all that time and now I think I’m ready to talk about it. In case you are wondering, I use my Gmail account as a trash account. If I need to use an email address but I […]

User Instinct — “Ideally, allow the user to change the rate at which the information changes, and provide a way to pause the display and review information that has gone by already. Think TiVo with it’s ability to pause, rewind, slo-mo and instant replay.”
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Boxes and Arrows — “Gmail revealed to me my email behavior — something I hadn’t previously given much thought. By making certain things easier (and others more difficult), Gmail showed me how “typical” email applications weren’t necessarily designed according to how I used them.”
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UserFocus — “Most people use Microsoft Excel to analyse the results of usability tests, but did you know you can use it to collect the data too? This spreadsheet allows you to measure task completion rates, analyse questionnaire data, and summarise participant comments. It even includes a timer so you can measure time-on-task.”
Datalogger looks pretty […]

“A usability overview of one of the larger open source software projects: the 2.6 version of the GNOME desktop and developer platform. We look at how well GNOME lives up to its challenge of being the desktop for the masses, including a lengthy survey of a group of new users and their reactions to the […]

Confusability — “I was trying to use my arrow keys on my keyboard to navigate the flash version and when I switched to the HTML (reduced content) version I found it to be unusable if you have popups blocked.”
Most sites don’t design for failure, or change. They expect linear user activity, but that is not […]