How a site presents its links is one easiest things to get right on a website, but also one of the most important! If a user can’t find the links on your site, how are they ever going to use your site? How are they going to browse, or buy, your products and services if…
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:…
There is always the temptation in life to pretend to know things we don’t. Most of the time we do it to look big and clever, especially in the workplace. The problem with doing this, however, is that when you are called on it in the workplace you’re likely to be left looking and feeling,…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
