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. Most of us are skimmers rather than readers, and poor link text forces the user to slow down and read the text around the link to figure out the context. The user may not even stop to read around the link and simply miss out on a good link. Read More

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 our users?

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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 through radio buttons, but none of them have a default option for the contribution amount.

They not only misuse the radio button–they miss an opportunity to anchor users’ expectations for how much they ought to contribute to the campaign. Read More

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 a Mac recently, I left Spotlight alone, up in the corner of the screen. Then, I needed something that wasn’t in my dock and it seemed like too much trouble to root around on the hard drive looking for the application, so I figured I’d give searching a try. Success. Read More

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 process and should go unnoticed, silently contributing to the accurate expression of a voter’s decisions.

Usability issues come to our attention when the process fails, as shown by the notoriety of the hanging chad. Lost or erroneous votes could affect the outcome of an election, especially in a neck and neck race like we’ve seen in recent elections. In early January, Clive Thompson’s story, Can You Count On Voting Machines, ran in The New York Times Magazine. The piece looks at the troubling weak points in the machinery on which our elections rely.
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