Creating a Web with Better Usability, Piece by Piece
Web Usability is the blog of Mattias Lundmark - manager, web developer and usability engineer.
The iPad is out of the bag and it turned out to be… a zoomed-in iPhone. Which is not iBad, it’s just a little iSad.
By building on one of the most successful devices of the last decade, iPad already got basically everything that makes the iPhone a great device (and a great success): awesome touch interface, App Store, accelerometer. Add in iBooks to make it a Kindle killer, and you are starting to look at one iRad device.
So what didn’t we get?
No one is betting against Apple this time either – it would be crazy given their previous successes. After all, building the technology on the iPhone brings a lot of benefits:
So is the iPad an iFad? No, but expect the second generation of the iPad to be what it was for the iPhone – a much needed shoring up of the most glaring weaknesses.
Wanna read more about the iPad? Mashable has a great summary.
Online instructions can be a lot of things – tutorials, FAQs, troubleshooting manuals or user guides. Depending on the quality, they can be lifesavers or sources of major frustrations. These tips will help you write instructions that provides a better user experience for your users, which will save both them and you a lot of time and trouble.
AutoComplete is a really clever little feature that makes automatic suggestions based on previous entries in text fields of web forms. It has excellent browser support, being enabled by default in almost all modern browsers (including even *gasp* IE6+, yay!) . And best of all, it requires almost no effort on your part to make it work!
In this entry, I will cover the basics of enabling AutoComplete for your web forms (it is really simple, trust me) and also provide some examples on how it is used on the web, since following de-facto standards is what makes AutoComplete tick.
Image by Sebastian Bergmann
Split testing is a cheap and reliable way to test two or more versions of a design against each other and see how they perform under live conditions. When split testing you focus one or a couple of quantitative metrics (such as like revenue, number of completed sales or sign-ups) and use them to judge how each design performs. It is a great method if you want to try out an advertising campaign, a set of rewritten purchase instructions or a new sign-up process. Sure, the method has its flaws (which I will get to later) but it is still a great method for finetuning a web page that every web developer should have in her toolbox.
In this post I will be outlining the basics concepts and list the pros and cons of the two main methods for split testing – A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing.
If you get five usability designers (or usability experts or user experience directors or whatever they want to call themselves) and ask them to describe the meaning of the term user experience, you will probably get five different explanations. In this edition of A List Apart, Sharon Lee tackles the subject of user experience and its application for the web in her article “Human-to-Human design“. It’s an excellent read so be sure to check it out. I would like to share some of my thoughts on the subject with you and provide some good, concise examples of how the user experience mindset that Sharon wrote about can be and is already implemented on the web. Read the entire post…