My posts about: usability
The government has a form that allows you to report a benefit thief online. I would LOVE to have been in the meeting where they came up with the options in the dropdown menus ....
Hair: ...
The Information Commissioner's Office webform is a joke - the validation is awful. Also, they seem to have confused the internet with email.
I thought it was interesting to compare two graphs as they seem to go in opposite directions:
SEOmoz's new one on the relationship between word count and the likelihood of people linking to you
Nielsen's ...
Google seems to have redesigned the header section of its results page, removing the links to other types of search (web, images, news, blogs etc) and removing the ability to sign in.
The Express has a new homepage beta. I was rude about it on Twitter today. I thought I should be more constructive. So here's a wireframe for an alternative.
The idea is that the 4 main areas - each dedicated to one of the Express's obsessions - pull in content from around the web (including the Express's own) in real time and link to it.
If you liked the list of user-experience twitterers that Done Bright put together, you may have wished, like me, that you could see the bios / description of each account. Well, I've played around with the Twitter API, and now you can!
Five changes I'd make to the new Web User beta design. Well, they did ask ...
Three's a trend. And five's a default. Four examples of sites whose logo is a link to the homepage - and who make this abundantly clear by changing the image on mouseover.
In March, I appealed to the Audit Bureau of Circulations to sort out its terrible ABCe website. It's had a redesign. Here's a list of its latest problems.
I hate mobile versions of websites. And ITV's dismal mobile site demonstrates why.
Here's a round up of bad or hard to use login designs and functions - things to avoid if you ever sort your login out.
Microsoft seem to have reacted badly to my post on the usability of bing - someone left a comment defending it without revealing they were a Microsoft employee (which is illegal in the UK). And they've either manually deleted the post from the bing search results or it's taken them more than 4 days to index it ...!
bing is a usability disaster - confusing links allied to unusable functionality. And is it called bing or Bing - make your mind up Microsoft.
A review of the usability of taps - avoiding arrest for getting my camera out in public toilets and showers - in order to see what lessons the design of everyday objects can tell us about web design.
With a 140-character limit, avoiding unnecessary apostrophes could make the difference between your tweet fitting ... and not (this is no excuse not to include an apostrophe when you should).
Carousels (sliders as they're sometimes known) are a good way to promote several items of content without using up too much space on your homepage.
Here's a roundup of sites using them - and how successful I think they are. Having studies several, I think the best ones.
Newspaper websites are failing in some obvious ways to make their stories readable. Too many are using small fonts, long off-putting paragraphs, no subheadings, no in-content boxes or pictures, and no in-content links.