Category: usability
-
How To Save Money And Time On User Testing: Run Multiple, Iterative Pilots
In my last blog post I reported on a study I recently conducted about differences between men and women in what they planned to purchase online for Valentine’s Day. (see Who is the Most Romantic). I used UserTesting.com (affiliate) to collect the data, and I had an interesting insight about running user tests while I…
-
10 Ways To Get User Feedback
Recently I was talking to someone who is relatively new to the field of usability and user experience. He has developed a web application and wanted some ideas for getting feedback from users. He commented that he was planning on sending out a survey to users to see what they think about the web application.…
-
10 Best Posts of 2009
It’s that time of year — so here is my list of the 10 best posts from my blog in 2009. I chose the 10 that I believe have had the greatest impact/most thought provoking/most interest from my readers. #1: Dopamine Makes You Addicted to Seeking Information — I thought this was an interesting post…
-
100 Things You Should Know About People: #19 — It’s a Myth That All Capital Letters Are Inherently Harder to Read
WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS COMMONLY BELIEVED, BUT NOT TRUE — You read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words that are in all capital letters all have the same shape: a rectangle of a certain size. This makes words displayed in all uppercase harder…
-
7 Steps to Successful Web Site Redesign
Jacek Utko is a newspaper designer. He has designed/redesigned many newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe and won world awards. He believes strongly in “giving power to the designers” and that designers should embed their personal vision into the work they do, even at the expense of being a team player. Utko’s words and work…
-
Web Site User Experience Anatomy
GUEST POST: This is a guest post by Craig Tomlin Just like human anatomy, the anatomy of a web site is composed of different user experience parts that must all work together seamlessly. Optimizing the user experience of each part however is problematic: Where do you start? How much user experience testing and adjusting should…
-
Eyetracking Studies — 7 Traps to Avoid
In my last post I talked about eyetracking. I don’t actually do a lot of eyetracking work, but this past week I was asked to give a talk on a panel about eyetracking at the SES (Search Engine Strategy) conference in Chicago, so it is kind of on my mind. So one more post about…
-
Recovery.Gov Website — For The Average Citizen?…Not
Have you been wondering where all the “stimulus” money is going that the US government is giving away to get us out of the recession? The US government has a website where you can go to look up anything and everything you want to know about the stimulus money. I’ve created a video podcast review…
-
100 Things You Should Know About People: #9 — Blue and Red Together is Hard On Your Eyes (Chromostereopsis)
What is it about red and blue? — When lines (or letters) of different colors are projected or printed, the depths of the lines may appear to be different; lines of one color may “jump out” while lines of another color are recessed. This effect is called Chromostereopsis. This effect is strongest with red…
-
100 Things You Should Know about People: #2 — You READ FASTER With a longer Line Length But PREFER Shorter
Have you ever had to decide how wide a column of text you should use on a screen? Should you use a wide column with 100 characters per line? or a short column with 50 characters per line? It turns out that the answer depends on whether you want people to read faster or whether…
