Personas are part of our usability practice, and, although they’re gaining increasing acceptance in website and software design, not everyone understands them or recognizes their value.
Described by Alan Cooper in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, personas are sketches of individual people used in the design process. They are related to target markets [...]
Category Archives: Usability
Why we use personas in website design reviews
May 13, 2008 – 2:05 pm
Control Your Message By Keeping Web Copy Brief
May 6, 2008 – 10:27 am
On average, users read fewer than 28% of the words on a web page, according to Jakob Nielsen. How do you make those 28% of words count?
In his May 6, 2008 Alertbox, How Little Do Users Read, Nielsen writes about calculations he did based on research on how people behave online. He calculated that [...]
Reconciling Calls to Action with What the User Wants to Do
April 28, 2008 – 9:57 am
When writing copy for your website, good calls to action matter. These are the links (or even navigation items) that steer your users toward what you want them to do. It’s important, though, to not lose sight of what your website’s users may actually want to do.
Just because you want your website’s users to buy [...]
Pure Visibility at Internet User Experience 2008
March 31, 2008 – 9:50 am
Coming to the Internet User Experience conference 4/1 and 4/2? Internet User Experience features local and national experts in website strategy, design, development, and usability. Three Pure Visibility folks will speak at IUE.
Mike Beasley, MC, at IUE 2007
Linda Girard, Pure Visibility’s Co-Founder and Visionary,will present “Search Engine Optimization 101” at 1:30 Tuesday 4/1.
Edward Vielmetti, Pure [...]
Good Link Text Matters
March 12, 2008 – 11:13 am
Why do users click on links? Because they think there will be something good on the other side. Putting it like that makes the answer sound trivial, but that makes it no less true.
Good link text–when a link concisely and accurately describes the destination page–is good for everyone. From a usability perspective, it’s a no-brainer. [...]
Is your text readable?
March 4, 2008 – 10:55 am
According to the National Adult Literacy Study, the average adult in the United States reads at a 7th grade level. This study, if it is to be believed, indicates that that when texts are beyond the reading ability of the reader, they give up.
Are we writing text for our websites that is too complicated for [...]
Influencing Users with the Campaign Contribution Form
February 22, 2008 – 3:11 pm
Radio buttons, by their very nature, have only one option selected at a time. For the sake of consistency, it is important to have a default option when presenting the user with radio buttons. The current four candidates for U.S. president all have contribution pages on their websites that let users choose a contribution amount [...]
5 Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress
February 19, 2008 – 3:41 pm
When I first started building sites in WordPress a year ago I was disappointed in the quality of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins available. During that time I put several plugins to the test, and here are the five I use exclusively to optimize my WordPress sites. Remember website optimization still takes that personal [...]
The Modern Command Line Interface
February 14, 2008 – 1:12 pm
Command line interfaces are the wave of the future.
Aza Raskin does this subject justice in the latest issue of Interactions (January+February 2008), envisioning a linguistic command line that figures out what you want rather than requiring a structured syntax.
Still, I find myself typing all the time rather than using the mouse. When I starting using [...]
Voter confidence and usability
February 4, 2008 – 6:45 pm
Tomorrow is Super Tuesday; a huge day for the presidential primaries and a good time to look deep in our hearts and consider how we feel about usability. Usability probably ranks pretty low on the list of issues voters are considering this year. It is bound up in the infrastructure of the political [...]
