Category: usability
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #61 — People Learn Best By Example
Let’s say you are a marketing person and you are going to send out an email to your customers about a new product offering. And let’s assume that you use a web application like MailChimp to create and distribute your emails. Here are some directions from the MailChimp web site on how to build an…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #60 — Cognitive "Loads" Are The Most "Expensive"
You are paying bills at your online banking website. You have to think about what bills need to be paid when, look up your balance, decide how much to pay on your credit cards, and push the right buttons to get the payments processed. As you do this task, you are thinking and remembering (cognitive),…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #34 — Too Much Stress Results In Poor Performance
A few days ago I found myself in a hotel room outside of Chicago with my 19 year old daughter moaning and sometimes howling in pain. She’d been sick for a week, each day with a new symptom, and this morning her eardrum felt like it was going to burst. We decided that I should…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #33: Bite-Sized Chunks Of Info Are Best
I am about to head to Portugal for a week, and I was interested in exploring different possible destinations in Portugal. I may not have much time for touring (I’m going to speak at the UXLX conference there), but if I did have time, where should I go? I have to admit to pretty much…
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An Interview With Steve Krug: Everyone should do usability testing
In a previous post I reviewed Steve Krug’s latest book, but recently I had the opportunity to interview Steve about the book. It’s a fun interview, and I think you’ll enjoy hearing Steve talk about: and much much more. The interview is 20 minutes — you can download it from the Neuro Web Design podcast…
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How To Test A Web Site Design In An Hour And On a Shoestring Budget
I have a friend who volunteers to be on an advisory board for a land trust conservancy organization. They have been designing a web site for the land trust. But they are all volunteers, and the organization doesn’t have a budget for web site design. They have a programmer donating her time to put together…
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Web Site Bloopers
I’m amazed by the continual “bloopers” I find on websites. Maybe my expectations are too high, but I expect major companies and organizations to fix issues they have with their websites. Here are a few of my favorites: This blooper from Hertz has been going on for months — look at the calendar, it’s wrong……
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #28 — Things that are close together seem to belong together
Do you want a quick and easy way to make any web page easier to use and more intuitive? If you want people to realize that two things “belong” together, then put them near each other (close proximity), and put other things a little further away. Sounds simple, right? Many usability and user experience principles…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #27 — We go below the "fold"
For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about “the fold”. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a browser, and that in order to see anything…
