31 August 2017
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: The choice of users themselves Testing sessions’ results are only as good as the subjects you select to test the site against. They should be broadly representative of your target audience, both in terms of traditional demographics (e.g. age, social class etc.) and Internet-literacy. This
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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 peaceful co-existence and getting the best of both worlds. “Can’t we all just get along?” Well, obviously, that’s the ideal situation, and is mostly achievable if you have mature, sensible people working on a project. But sometimes (even with mature, sensible people) there’s a disagreement
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Save Money – Cut Documentation!
A lot of people wonder why websites are so expensive. “All I need is a small website to tell people what I sell and let them put in an order online – how come it’s going to cost me this much?!” Well, here’s a tip to any business looking to get online for the first time or improve its website: The fewer bits of paper between the signing of the contract and delivery of the website, the better! Now, a lot of people will tell you that all sorts of ‘steps’ are required between these two things, and that each step has to be
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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 thinking about your Homepage is to remember the key things it has to do, and the key features it has to have. And just to make life that little bit easier, here’s a list of some of them: ‘What we do’ A site’s Homepage should clearly communicate
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Follow the Leader – Best Practice
Work smart, not hard. Do not do unnecessary work. Do not re-invent the wheel. These are mottos to live by. So, how do we apply them to a website? Well, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, look at Amazon. Look at what they’re doing and the way they are doing it. Look at other big, successful online retailers too. Think about what you can learn from them. If you’ve got a brochureware site (i.e. one whose sole purpose is to introduce your company and its products/services to potential customers), look at other companies’ websites. Take a peek at big blue-chip
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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 the benefits of validation are by no means limited to aiding the website development process. Search engines love to crawl semantic mark-up Imagine search engine spider’s behaviour as like someone reading through the pages of a word document. A well-structured, validated xhtml page should be
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