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Usability Testing

Usability testing is the practice of sitting real users down in front of a website (or a prototype of a website) and trying to identify the problems they experience in trying to use it. There are a number of issues to consider when commissioning a usability testing session, here are 2 of the most important:…

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Error Messages – What to do

Designing error-messages is easy. So many sites make a dog’s dinner of it, that people think it must be brain surgery to get it right. It isn’t. Error messages need to do 3 things – tell the user: something has gone wrong what has gone wrong what to do about it It’s really that simple.…

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Design vs Usability

There’s a perennial debate about how design and usability can co-exist. The theory is that design is all about making things pretty, usability is all about making things usable and that the two are inherently at odds with each other. Now, some people try and cop out of the debate by arguing for co-operation and…

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Your Homepage – It’s Easy!

There’s nothing tougher than staring at a blank piece of paper – Hemingway called it the ‘White Bull’. Suddenly, you forget what it was you wanted to write – and can only vaguely remember an outline of what you wanted to do. It’s like that with a Homepage So, the important thing to do when…

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The Benefits of Validated XHTML & CSS Code

In my role as CommerceTuned UI lead, an essential part of the development process of our CSS/XHTML overhauls has been to validate all my CSS and XHTML code using the various W3C validation tools available. At first this was chiefly for debugging purposes – if the page looks strange then it could be as a result of mistakes in hand-coded XHTML or CSS – but…

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The Optimisation Scorecard

The optimisation scorecard is an holistic methodology required for benchmarking and goal-setting in both your external search engine optimisation campaign and your internal enterprise search across your website, portal, or Intranet. The success of an optimisation campaign cannot simply be judged on the number of well placed phrases your website has, or the speed and presentation of…

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Measuring Value, not just hits

The explosive growth of Internet usage in the past few years has led to an ever-increasing investment from vendors trying to tap into online consumer spending which, according to Forrester Research, will exceed US$100 billion by the end of 2003. In parallel with this increase in retail spending, companies are also investing heavily on internal,…

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