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:
I was reading something today on a web development blog when I noticed this on the side bar:
And that’s not a random-tip thing. It’s something you see next to every post! and the audience of that blog is web developers who actually make web sites, which makes this explanation not only unnecessary, but kind of offensive, too.
Many people involved in the creation of web sites have probably heard of the “Three-Click Rule” before. In case you haven’t, it’s the rule that says that all information on a web site must be reached within three clicks at most, otherwise users will be frustrated and leave your site.
How accurate is it though?
Most web sites that allow their users to express their opinion about the contents or items they’re offering use a score-based rating system (5 stars, a scale of 1 to 10 and so on). The problem in those kind of systems, in my opinion, is that they don’t really work.
What motivates users to rate something is how they feel about it. If they had a good experience, they would want others to experience the same thing. If they were disappointed, they would want to help others avoid it. It’s an emotional feedback. That’s why we see many people giving perfect scores to items they like, even though they’re not perfect or have serious flaws.
Colors are more than just making your site look prettier. They play a major role in its usability. But before we know how, we need to learn a bit about color temperature first, which classifies colors as either Warm colors or Cool colors.
Warm and Cool colors (not 100% accurate)So, what’s the difference?
In almost every site there’s a way to contact the people responsible about it. This is usually done by either:
Both methods eventually lead to the same thing, which is contacting whoever you’d need to reach. But are they the same from a user experience point of view? from what I’ve experienced, I personally believe that using a contact form, in most cases, is the way to go.
