This is a video from last year’s edition of FOWD, but I’ve only just stumbled upon it. 37 Signals‘ Ryan Singer delivers a great talk about Usability in Web Applications. Topics covered range from using emphasis to make your designs more usable up to using human language people can actually relate to. It’s a long video, but definitely worth the watch.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.Stuff Tagged ‘web design’
The concept of fiddling with and tweaking your design project on the final stages of development is probably not foreign to you, but the idea of doing it after your project is done might be.
If you work as a freelancer, you probably live on a project-by-project basis, and you realize that you just can’t spare the time to gradually refine each and every one of your projects. However, if you’re an in-house designer or developer (or if you’re just a freelancer who runs his/her own blog), you can probably appreciate the merits of a product-oriented mindset which is concentrated on getting a product out and then refining it continuously through it’s lifespan. (…) more after the jump ›
On the Web, first impressions are everything. Your page may have great content, it may just be what users are looking for, but, if your design fails to captivate users in a mere 5 seconds, your content might just never get noticed.
Enter the 5 Second Test, a quick Usability Test that costs next to nothing and can deliver great results. It’s basically like any other usability test you’ve probably conducted before: there are users, tasks, and the application/site you’re testing.
At the start of the test, give your user a task to perform:
You’re on Application X’s home page. What are the ways you can subscribe to the application?
After informing the user that the page will only be visible for a short period of time, ask her to try and remember everything she sees.
You would then show your user the home page for about 5 seconds, and afterwards have her write down everything she remembers about the page. Finish up by asking one or two questions to assess whether the user has completed her task.
Sounds useful, doesn’t it? There are several benefits to using this method, the most proeminent being that it’s cheap and that you can conduct a whole lot of tests in a small window of time.
Even though conducting this kind of usability test is easy, I’ve found a handy tool that simplifies it even further. As a developer, you can create three kinds of test: classical (which is the one I described), compare (in which users compare two different interfaces) and sentiment (in which users describe their mood and most and least liked elements in the interface). As a user, you can take random tests and, as the page puts it, make an interface designer happy!
Yesterday I gave a small lecture on designing and developing for the Web with IE6 support in mind. The presentation covers some of the most common bugs and techniques to circumvent or altogether avoid those little annoying issues that plague us all. Some of the bugs and their solutions were taken from Chris Coyer’s excellent post at CSS-Tricks on the same subject. Without further ado, here is the presentation:
Ah, CTRL-Z. I’m sure at some point in our lives, everyone has wished they had the ability to go back in time and Undo something they did. The ability to undo, however, is rather commonplace in the computer world. It allows one to revert a document to an older state by negating the last action(s) performed and all of their consequences.
If you have used a computer before, I’m sure this feature has saved you numerous times. It’s so deeply rooted in our subconscious people sometimes use it without even thinking about it. If undo is so successful on the desktop, what is the reason for it’s almost non-existance in Web Applications?