The book covers:
If you’ve read something about web usability and user experience, you probably already realize how valuable they are, and how much they significantly contribute to a site’s success (which is a lot by the way).
Web usability, however, seems to be fairly new to the average person involved in creating and/or managing sites, especially in businesses. And, unfortunately, the majority still don’t care about it since they can’t see how it could help them succeed. In fact, those people might be against its practices, since they conflicts with how they envision a site should be.
So, in this article, I’ll write about 4 characters (or positions) that are involved in making and managing web sites the most, along with examples of how they tend to think (stereotypically) based on my experience with each one of them, and how to respond to them and hopefully convince them otherwise.
I just found out that my archive pages had no styling at all (the information wasn’t displayed correctly). This happened after I changed some file names about 2 weeks ago, and I apparently forgot to update the archive page. Should be fine by now.
Links are one of the things that stand out and attract people’s attention when they view a page on the web. We’re used to seeing links that say “Click here” or “more” for example, but those kinds of links say nothing about the pages they’re linking to, and force people to read the context of every link to understand where it’s going, which could get very frustrating, especially if they are looking for something in a hurry.
So, here are some quick tips you could use to make your links’ names as useful as possible:
Many people use tag clouds on their web sites to inject more “web 2.0″ into it these days. But does your site need one? and if it does, will it actually be helpful and usable, or just waste space?
The book covers:
Huh?One of the qualities that makes a web application (or web site) great is displaying informative, helpful error messages when things go wrong, while trying its best to prevent errors from happening in the first place, to insure a smooth experience.
Many web sites though still don’t display error messages that help users recover from errors. They just tell them that something wrong happened. For example, here’s a message I got repeatedly yesterday as I was trying to send a private message on facebook:
I was checking out Audible’s Device Center today when I saw this table:
2, 3 and 4? hmmm…It looks fine at first glance, but when you see that the formats are represented by numbers that audible came up with, you have a problem.
There are a plenty of usability concepts you should have in mind when planning and designing your site’s interface. One of them is knowing which types of elements would stand out on a page, and utilize them to attract users’ attention.
Why would you want to do that? you might want to inform them about an error message, promote your site’s features, help them find the next step or whatever they need to notice by that time.
In this article, I will give you a small idea on how to utilize them efficiently. Note that any of those elements, if used excessively on page, will lose their privilege and cease to attract users’ attention:
Advertising is the most popular ways to monetize a web site. Site owners put ads on their web sites hoping people would click on them to make revenues through clicks, referrals or however the ad(s) they’re using work. Most of those people, however, don’t realize that a big percentage of their site’s users don’t even see the ads in the first place. In other words, they’re ad-blind. They mentally block-out whatever looks like an ad while they’re surfing online.
The reason behind this is that Internet users develop ad blindness as they get more experienced on the web. They get familiar with how ads are formatted, placed and displayed on web pages, and learn to ignore them and focus on parts of the page where they expect to find relevant information. That’s because, most of the time, ads aren’t interesting nor related to what we’re looking for.
Not all ads are ignored though. According to Jakob Neilsen’s post which discusses this matter, users are more likely to pay attention to ads on search results pages or classifieds site, since they’re related to what they’re looking for. On those kind of pages, ads are considered as contents.
What I will write about here isn’t how to overcome ad blindness, and make more revenue (which is beyond the scope of this blog), but how to avoid proposed solutions that will affect the usability of your site and the overall user experience. Here are some proposed solutions and why you should avoid them:
