Posts in: Usability
- Site improvement: Clean(er) URLs
- I used to use dynamic URLs for the “Quick bytes” and articles on this site (for instance, seeqb.php?entry=xxx). They worked just fine. However, some search engines won’t index those entries, ignoring everything after the ? (Google is capable of indexing ‘dynamic’ URLs.) Now, I’ve got faux-static URLs. Instead of ’seeqb.php?entry=xxx’, the permanent link for each Quick [...] [8 Dec 2003]
- Eye strain: Fixed-pixel font sizing is evil
- It seems news home pages everywhere are wedded to tiny type. Miami.com (Miami Herald) and the CJOnline.com (Topeka Capital-Journal), for example, use 10 pixel or smaller font throughout their home pages. LATimes.com and NYTimes.com both use tiny type in their navigation. This is a bad thing. Tiny type is hard enough to read in print. Put it [...] [25 Nov 2003]
- The usability of M&M’s pick your country map
- M&M’s (the candy) has a campaign where you can vote online for your favorite M&M’s TV ad. Visit the M&M’s web site and you’ll get a Flash-based image map where you can choose your country (and language). Considering society’s “geographic illiteracy” it doesn’t make much sense to put such a hurdle on the home [...] [14 Nov 2003]
- The magic of ‘personas’
- Want to find out what users want? Try to get in their head. One way to do that: create a persona. Alison Heard explains what a persona is (’…[A] hypothetical-user archetype, developed for interface design projects and used for guiding decisions about visual design, functionality, navigation, and content’), and why creating one is a good thing. Jesse [...] [23 Oct 2003]
- Death to pop-up/drop-down menus!!! (not really)
- Carl Zetie slams drop-down (or pop-up) menus on forms in his Information Week article “Usability, Accessibility, and Profitability.” Zetie writes: The most annoying error is the misuse of pop lists. Many Web sites ask users with a U. S. address to enter their state abbreviation…by picking from a pop list. Because the HTML pop list is [...] [14 Oct 2003]
- Site map vs. Site index
- Chiara Fox explains the difference between site maps and site indexes. Blogger is now FREE! The first good thing to come out of Google’s acquisition of Bloger: it’s all free. No more premium Blogger. We all get to use the good stuff. *GASP* What?! PNGs in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows? Found on Glish.com: How to get Internet Explorer [...] [11 Sep 2003]
