With just a shade under 50 submissions for the first round of the Usability Makeover Series, I had a hard time with the selection process. I ended up selecting Twiddy Outer Banks Rentals because I could tell they had already put a lot of effort into establishing user trust and usability. I think with a few tweaks the site could go from medium usable to extremely usable.
Why Does Marketing Hate Usability?
I hate to admit this because it feels selfish and I don’t want to appear like a usability activist. But. It secretly bothers me when I see conferences or seminars on website marketing that don’t offer a session on user centered design. I always wonder why this is. Is usability that scary?
Newspaper Design And Usability
Usability measures how satisfactory the user will find the experience of using a product or service. It’s as appropriate for newspapers as it is for coffee makers.
Yahoo: Google “Lacking In Usability”
The head of Yahoo’s real-time communications thinks the low adoption of Google’s products beyond search and Maps is rooted in that company’s engineering culture.
Nightmares in Usability
I’ve been having an entertaining and slightly heated conversation with someone who insists that forums, such as the one I founded, are hotbeds of bad information.
Design, SEO, and Usability Laws?
You read and hear it all the time. Somebody tells you to do something a certain way because it’s the only correct way.
Steps to Usability
Websites are built for specific types of viewers and must appeal to a definite target market. Users must be able to view your site, scan everything, and immediately understand what the website is about.
Google Maps Eliminates Usability Mistake
Gogole Maps had one incredibly annoying feature: Click the name of your search result in the balloon on the map, and get transported to a new page with more info on the result, including a mini-map and search results. While the more info page was very useful, the fact that it was a new page and appeared in the same tab made it very annoying, since you had to go Back to the map, and hope it reloaded correctly.
Usability Rant of the Day: Print this Page
In the past two days I tried unsuccessfully to invoke the “print this page” function on articles I read online.
RSS Usability Problems And Solutions
RSS is a family of web-feed formats that is used for web syndication. It can also be used by news websites, weblogs and podcasting, among others.