Category Archives: Usability

Usability in less than 30 minutes.

First Impressions – Home page content & design

Posted on June 16, 2010 by garrett

What is the first impression of a customer who visits your web site? Today, I visited the Prudential home page where I was greeted with the content and imagery below. First impressions of Prudential This guy has a lot of … Continue reading →

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IE6 nearing extinction? Not really, 2010 browser stats

Posted on June 2, 2010 by garrett

CNN proclaims, Internet Explorer 6 finally nearing extinction Except, not really. See below for latest browser statistics from our consumer/physician clinical information web site, which gets about 2 million visits or 5 million page-views per month. Internet Explorer 6 — 9.7% in … Continue reading →

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Your Top Questions on Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski

Posted on April 22, 2010 by garrett

Form Length Better to have form on one or multiple pages? Evaluate every question, then ”Keep, Cut or Postpone” Perform best practices audit using spreadsheet & breaking up by section & data collected. Apple check-out system uses dynamic accordion form. Makes … Continue reading →

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Latest Facebook design & ambiguous icons

Posted on February 9, 2010 by garrett

The latest Facebook design has one major issue, the ambiguity of the icons for Friend Requests, Mail and Notifications. Name the first thing you think of when you see each of the icons. Friend Requests – Friends, People? What about … Continue reading →

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Windows Security Essentials misses primary goal of XP users

Posted on December 21, 2009 by garrett

Windows Security Essentials I recently discovered Windows Security Essentials and installed it on a new Windows 7 desktop. Satisfied with the product, I went back to the Web site, to see if Windows Security Essentials was compatible with Windows XP. … Continue reading →

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Writing for the web

Posted on October 13, 2009 by garrett

Users come to your site to complete tasks The web is a functional, task-oriented place. On the web, we want to find the information we’re looking for quickly. We go to the web to get answers to our questions or … Continue reading →

Posted in Usability, Writing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

User Experience Search Engines

Posted on September 2, 2009 by garrett

I’ve set up a user interface design / user experience search engine (#1 below). Thanks to @cbehrlich for the heads up on her user experience search engine (#2 below). User experience search engine #1: http://snipurl.com/uxsearch User experience search engine #2: … Continue reading →

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Best practices for naming documents and files for web

Posted on September 2, 2009 by garrett

To ensure users don’t have trouble downloading files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel files or PDF’s), follow these guidelines when naming files to be uploaded and used on your Web site. Remove spaces from file names (hyphens are okay to separate words) … Continue reading →

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Providing highly relevant user feedback

Posted on September 15, 2008 by garrett

Web site features and functionality continue to grow, making it important to carefully consider and display only the most relevant feedback to your users. I came across this example when trying to find a service to update my status on … Continue reading →

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Click here and other meaningless link text

Posted on June 16, 2008 by garrett

The urge to insert the phrase “click here” or “more” is somewhat common among content contributors when creating links on a page. Non-descriptive link text makes your site difficult to scan and causes accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO) issues. … Continue reading →

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