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Entries tagged with usability:

Is your shopping cart killing your sales?

Jun 17th

Does your website offer a shopping cart? If so, how's it working out for you? Are people buying your stuff as much as you expected? Are they buying anything at all?More >>

Small business web consulting

Apr 20th

Are you thinking of building a website for your small business? Or perhaps your existing website isn't working as well as you expected? While most of us know of someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who designs websites, like everything in life, you get what you pay for. If you want to save money, you're going to have to get it done right the first time.More >>

Website usability assessment

Mar 27th

Are you one of the many small business owners who invested in a website, and now some years later you feel that the internet thingy doesn't really work? If you've come to the conclusion that your website isn't working for your business as well as it should, then you're probably ready for some honest and independent advice from a professional.More >>

Exit popups harm your reputation

Mar 8th

It's hard to understand why some business owners still think that implementing exit popups on their website actually benefit their readers in some way.More >>

Your trendy search boxes are not useful

Feb 15th

It's disappointing to see an increase of these new trendy search boxes on websites.More >>

Eclipse goes FUBAR

Jul 20th, 2009

While not my preferred development platform, I've recently had to use Eclipse once again while working on a collaborative project. While Eclipse is pretty popular with web development shops, I've never been in love with it because I just found too many things about it which are annoying.More >>

Coles broken giveway

Jun 8th, 2009

Coles are currently running a giant gift card giveway promotion but this is what happens when you try to register online:More >>

A new design

Apr 20th, 2009

If you've been here before, you'll probably notice a complete change of design. With a greater focus on clarity and essential features, our content now stands out much more, with fewer distractions. We make much better use of whitespace and, apart from content-related images, have almost eliminated all graphics.More >>

Is IE doomed?

Mar 30th, 2009

Looking at the latest browser stats shows us that Firefox has recently overtaken Internet Explorer as the preferred browser for the majority of web users. The last four years indicate a steady decline in market share for Microsoft's once-dominant but mediocre gift to the world:More >>

Common usability blunders

Mar 23rd, 2009

The folks over at Smashing Magazine have put together a list of some very common usability blunders in web design. In no particular order, these are the problems designers still create for their customers:More >>

What Joomla can learn from Wordpress

Mar 16th, 2009

Over at playingwithwire.com, Viktor Petersson explains why Wordpress is a better platform than Joomla, from a usability perspective.More >>

How not to use meta refresh

Feb 16th, 2009

Point your browser to one of the most popular websites in Australia, click on any one of their articles and you might just be unpleasantly surprised to find the page refresh automatically, even while you're reading it.More >>

Dodgy listings on realestate.com.au

Jan 19th, 2009

There's plenty of evidence that real estate agents continue to engage in dodgy practices. Shonky agents like David McFarlane, for instance.More >>

Linkedin groups spam

Jan 12th, 2009

Linkedin groups was designed to be a place for members to form communities around professional interests.More >>

Multiple versions of IE

Nov 24th, 2008

A clever bloke by the name of Yousif Al Saif has come up with a way of having multiple versions of IE running on your windows workstation. Handy for us poor sods who still have to support what is probably the worst standards-compliant browser ever made.More >>

Don't be lazy when configuring security certificates

Nov 17th, 2008

If you're going to offer a secure protocol to your users, don't do what CSA Australia did, as I indicated in an earlier post.More >>

Dumb dialogues from Intel

Nov 10th, 2008

After upgrading my Intel wireless driver and management software from Dell, and having launched the management software, I was greeted by one of the dumbest dialogues I have seen in a long time:More >>

Sucky web design for beginners

Oct 20th, 2008

If you've visited here before, I guess you already know by now that I'm a bit of a critic of sucky web design. Well, I just got spammed by some bloke from a recruiting agency by the name of Techgen, proudly telling me to check out their brand new snazzy whiz-bang website.More >>

The most ridiculous captchas of all time

Oct 13th, 2008

If you search the web for what people think of the dreaded webform captchas, you'll see that there are plenty of us who think they largely suck because they irritate the very people they're supposedly designed to protect.More >>

Don't mislead your customers

Oct 6th, 2008

While using a misleading keyword phrase in your adwords campaign may get your website more traffic, it's also very likely to backfire because your potential customers won't buy from you when they find out you lied.More >>

The vagueness of "about us" pages

Sep 29th, 2008

Jokob Nielsen concludes that the usability of website about us pages has actually decreased over the last five years, asserting that many organisations prefer to spin weasel words and marketing bullshit instead of offering an honest and concise summary of what they actually do.More >>

Still partying like it's 1999

Sep 15th, 2008

Q: Who gives you a clear picture of what's going on in the business community by helping you instantly visualize and understand the relationships that drive decisions and create opportunities?More >>

Spamming the search engines with deliberate typos

Sep 8th, 2008

With so many websites competing for the same keywords, it's possible to attract some visitors by deliberately spelling keywords badly. While this will make you look pretty silly in most peoples eyes, the minority who can't spell may still get to your website via a search engine.More >>

How not to configure security certificates

Aug 11th, 2008

This is what happens when you don't know how to configure the security certificate on your website. The folks over at CSA Australia provide a feedback link, which when clicked, rewards the customer with this:More >>

Get your mum to test it

Aug 4th, 2008

Here's some great advice on how to cheaply but effectively test a website for usability: I've used a subtle variation of this on a number of occasions, and I can tell you that it really works.More >>

Yellowpages search still sucks

Jul 14th, 2008

Here's why the yellowpages search still sucks from the point of view of those who matter: their users.More >>

Our top 40 local searches

Jun 23rd, 2008

A few months ago I wrote about how most of our visitors come here via a Google search. A small percentage of those even use the search box on the top-right, once they get here.More >>

Testing your website on a tight budget

Apr 14th, 2008

Steve Krug, author of the excellent Don't make me think offers a great website usability tip for those on a tight budget:More >>

VMware design stupidity

Mar 24th, 2008

Here's proof that sometimes software designers make really, really stupid decisions.More >>

Stupid browser no more?

Mar 10th, 2008

Good news for standards based developers. Microsoft have now decided that IE8 will comply with web standards by default.More >>

Southwest Airlines booking form

Mar 3rd, 2008

Here's a portion of the reservation form at Southwest Airlines. Can you spot what's wrong with it?More >>

Sensis: from bad to worse

Feb 11th, 2008

A few days ago the folks over at the SMH Mashup Blog asked does whitepages search suck?. The overwhelming reply was along the lines of yes, it does suck.More >>

How not to display images

Jan 28th, 2008

This is how not to display images in your online store or product catalogue: If you're going to offer a clickable link entitled larger image, then you should actually offer a larger image of the product you're trying to flog. Otherwise you're running the risk of wasting your customers time and increasing their aggravation.More >>

Shop smart and save?

Jan 21st, 2008

So says the slogan on most of the product pages at Getprice, the Aussie online comparison shopping resource. Their contact page event tells us that:More >>

JB Hi-Fi: Australia or New Zealand?

Jan 14th, 2008

JB Hi-Fi have a pretty strange way of serving web pages to their customers. If you omit the (silly) dubya-dubya-dubya from their Australian website address, you get their New Zealand website instead:More >>

Jacob's gift

Dec 24th, 2007

Jacob Nielsen has a free gift for all web designers, business analysts, information architects and usability evangelists. Finally, something interesting to read at the beach.More >>

What do Dimmeys sell?

Dec 21st, 2007

This is what happens when you get your website builders to make your brand new website and they forget to change the content meta tags:More >>

Hey stupid, click here!

Dec 10th, 2007

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the stupidity of using click here when hyperlinking. Fast forward to the current times and I can tell you that the stupidity still prevails. Now, Brian Clark at Copyblogger tells us how that stupidity is actually a good thing:More >>

20 usability tips for bloggers

Oct 14th, 2007

Do you have a blog but need some ideas on how to make it work better? If so, make sure you read Tom Johnson's fantastic usability tips for bloggers. Here's the gist of what Tom's saying:More >>

Don't send HTML-only newsletters

Oct 2nd, 2007

Does your organisation send out email newsletters to your customers or prospects? If so, here's a tip.More >>

Stupid browser, V7

Sep 26th, 2007

I'd like you to hover your mouse pointer over the mugshot on the left. What does the tooltip text say?More >>

Captcha images shut out people too

Sep 20th, 2007

If you currently use captcha images on your website, you should watch this video and find out just how difficult you're making it for some of your users to interact with your webforms.More >>

Building accessible websites

Sep 14th, 2007

For anyone who's fair dinkum about web accessibility, make sure you read Joe Clark's highly informative book Building Accessible Websites. Although Joe is kind enough to offer an electronic version on his website, the paper edition is still a very good buy for those who prefer the feel of paper.More >>

Westpac's website woes continue

Sep 8th, 2007

The SMH Blog reports on Westpac's continuing problems: Thousands of Westpac customers went without their internet banking and online broking services for most of yesterday following a website glitch which, as of this morning, has still not been completely fixed.More >>

Fancy formatting mistakes

Sep 5th, 2007

Jakob Nielsen illustrates why fancy formatting using a big red type for important information, even though it's at the top of a website homepage, is a mistake.More >>

Lessons in website design

Aug 16th, 2007

Some things I've learnt about website users over the years: Users don't care about your website and can't be bothered learning how to use it.More >>

Kooky, quirky Safari

Jun 22nd, 2007

I tried the brand new Safari browser for Windows last week. While I'm still a little puzzled why Apple would even bother entering the Windows market, I've noticed a couple of things which I don't particularly care for:More >>

Easy printer friendly pages

May 31st, 2007

You don't need to muck around with JavaScript, page redirection or PDF integration just to make your XHTML web pages printer friendly.More >>

Structuring the page title tag

May 25th, 2007

While it's quite normal for website page titles to incorporate the site name, there are a couple of differing opinions on how this should be structured. One school of thought suggests that the site name should have prominence, like this:More >>

Stupid defaults in web forms

May 21st, 2007

One of the more important decisions in software application design is that user choices in forms should have default values, where possible, and those default values should be the most likely ones that most users would want chosen.More >>

Testing browser compatibility

Apr 24th, 2007

Unless our clients can give us a compelling reason to do otherwise, this is our preferred methodology for testing browser compatibility with CSS:More >>

Email subject lines are important

Apr 16th, 2007

It's not that I'm the only person in the world who is busy. We're all busy. But far too often, I get an email which struggles to get my attention due to the subject line being either a single short word, too ambiguous, irrelevant or simply missing.More >>

Click on the logo and break the website

Mar 16th, 2007

On the web, it's standard practice to have your logo a clickable link which takes the visitor to your home page. Although I have seen the occasional business website which doesn't allow you to click on the logo, I haven't seen any that break the website when the logo is clickable.More >>

Flashturbation hall of shame

Mar 12th, 2007

It's no secret what I think of Adobe Flash. It seems that most commercial applications of Flash on the web either tend to be intrusive, annoying ads or over-designed websites that only detract from their own usefulness. Our industry has even coined a special term for it.More >>

Magnificent Markdown

Jan 30th, 2007

Many websites, ours included, use a lightweight markup language to dynamically serve structurally valid XHTML to the visitors browser.More >>

Adobe kuler ain't so flash

Jan 19th, 2007

Adobe have been promoting Kuler as their first web-hosted application whose reason for existing is to create, and share color themes online. But try actually getting Kuler to work on their website, if you use Firefox.More >>

More secure admin logins

Jan 15th, 2007

A good way to improve the security of your website administration login is to restrict the input field length for the username and password to something reasonable. This is commonly done with the maxlength attribute in HTML:More >>

Search engine referrals

Jan 2nd, 2007

The other day I was looking at our website's stats to get an idea of search engine referral ratios. While I fully expected Google to win comprehensively, the actual figures based on the last 10,000 page views were certainly an eye-opener:More >>

Hyperlinking to 'members only' pages

Dec 21st, 2006

I've been asked a question similar to this one a number of times over the last few years:More >>

Google loves blogs

Oct 23rd, 2006

If you want any proof that Google loves blogs, have a look at some specifics for our own website below:More >>

Sensis relevancy - deux

Oct 6th, 2006

Recently I documented the poor communication skills of the people behind Sensis, the yellowpages and whitepages company, now also promoting themselves as The search engine for Australians.More >>

Sensis ignoring your business? Sure, but why?

Sep 23rd, 2006

Do you operate a small business, here in Australia? If so, is it listed in the online versions of the yellowpages and whitepages directories?More >>

How to lose a customer, Amazon style

Aug 22nd, 2006

Having been assigned the job of transferring some 20-odd kilograms of VHS-C and Video8 tapes to DVD, I set upon the task of researching video capturing, editing and authoring software.More >>

Office personalised menus

Aug 18th, 2006

Microsoft have done a number of counter-intuitive things over the years in the quest of improved usability and after the pesky office assistant and the distracting auto spelling and grammar checker, the personalized menus introduced in Office 2000 are often the very next thing many advanced users turn off before they use any of it's components.More >>

Nielsen study endorses fluid design

Aug 8th, 2006

Jakob Nielsen adds weight to our theory that fluid design makes sense for public websites, claiming that the users with high resolution monitors almost never maximise their browser windows to the full screen.More >>

Westpac ranked the worst for website presentation

Jul 28th, 2006

One of our most popular articles is my rant on the Westpac crippled feedback page which attempted to explain that the banking giant not only had a poor grasp of web standards and design, but was also very difficult to communicate with.More >>

Better web security with SiteAdvisor

Jul 14th, 2006

Everyone who's used the web has at some point encountered spyware attacks, online scams and spamming sites which earn their profits by taking advantage of user ignorance. While Ad-Aware and Spybot S & D are two must-have tools that no Windows user should be without, there's an excellent and free browser plugin from McAfee which warns you before you interact with any of the millions of dangerous websites out there.More >>

Windows Live? Hardly.

Jul 4th, 2006

It's been over three months since the launch of Windows Live, Microsoft's klutzy Google killer project. Like Google, Windows Live is offering personalisation of your homepage, with news, weather, mail, and (apparently) more.More >>

Why fluid design works

Jun 27th, 2006

As part of a web redesign project, a colleague of mine wanted to redo the pages to fit 1024x768 resolution but he also wanted an alternative design to accommodate the relatively small percentage of users still stuck with 800x600 pixels. He wanted to know how to go about determening the users browser resolution, so he could present the content using the appropriate template which matches that resolution.More >>

Award winners fail the website accessibility test

Jun 23rd, 2006

One of the most important aspects of public website design is to ensure that online information and services are accessible by all people, including those with disabilities. In Australia, the Disability Discrimination Act (1992), for instance, requires that all websites that receive federal funding be accessible to users with a disability.More >>

Blog usability mistakes

May 26th, 2006

Since they first appeared on the scene towards the end of the last century, blogs have emerged as one of the most effective and popular means of communication. So much so, that lots and lots of businesses use them as a means of establishing and maintaining their reputation or brand.More >>

Quality content matters more than ever

May 19th, 2006

A few weeks ago, the search engine marketing firm iProspect published the findings of their study in search engine user behaviour which revealed a definite increase in the importance of websites getting top natural search results.More >>

Computing, the Hollywood way

May 16th, 2006

On a lighter note, I read this article on The Wall Street Journal about Hollywood and their often absurd portrayal of computing and the internet on the big screen.More >>

Is SEO overrated?

Apr 29th, 2006

For those who visit here regularly, my views on search engine optimisation techniques are pretty much known. Recently, I engaged in an online discussion in a forum thread which attempted to get different opinions on whether SEO was in fact overrated.More >>

Holy meat navigation

Apr 11th, 2006

I know that Pope John Paul II has only been dead for a year now, and what I'm about to say could be interpreted as blasphemy, but did he get ripped off by his web designers or what? Take a look at his website and see for yourself.More >>

Sensis relevancy

Mar 2nd, 2006

About 18 months ago, Sensis launched its new multi-content search engine to much fanfare. According to the ZDNet article Telstra launches search heavyweight, the Sensis management had high expectations that their new search engine would be the one others would eventually be compared to, because apparently:More >>

Where's your home page?

Feb 23rd, 2006

I got an email from a friend of mine who occasionally reads this blog. His comments about one aspect of this website, and my subsequent reply, were interesting enough for me want to use them as the basis for this blog entry.More >>

The (broken) Da Vinci code challenge

Feb 16th, 2006

Sony are at it again. This time it's Sony Pictures contributing to the web monkeys of the year awards.More >>

Westpac security improvements

Jan 17th, 2006

A couple of months ago, Charles Wright, the IT blogger for The Age, questioned why virtually none of the Australian banks used dual authentication, to improve security for their customers.More >>

Ticketmaster: useful, unless you want to buy tickets

Dec 16th, 2005

A couple of days ago I attempted to purchase some tickets for the second U2 concert at Telstra Dome, next March.More >>

Westpac crippled feedback page

Oct 21st, 2005

Recently, while attempting to use the Westpac website for online banking, I experienced some problems. Not wanting to phone their hotline, I attempted to contact them via email. Like so many other larger organisations, Westpac don't publish their support email addresses, insisting you use their online feedback form instead.More >>

Top design stupidities of 2005

Oct 19th, 2005

According to Jakob Nielsen's recent article, things haven't changed all that much in web design over the years. It seems that selfishness, ignorance and sometimes even downright stupidity still persist and are becoming a common pattern. In order of infamy:More >>

Home pages are becoming redundant

Oct 9th, 2005

Recent usability testing conducted by Mark Hurst boldly asserts that Google has made home pages virtuallyMore >>

Search engine meta tags - deux

Sep 16th, 2005

In my previous post about the relevance of search engine meta tags I claimed that the keywords meta tag was almost useless these days. As a follow up, I thought I'd show you a real-world example.More >>

Dell is confused

Sep 12th, 2005

Hey Dell, Plastered at the top of your Australian website's pages is:More >>

Search engine meta tags

Sep 6th, 2005

This is old news but perhaps it's worth mentioning again. Quite some time ago, Danny Sullivan from Search engine watch had written an excellent article, which ought to re-read by every so-called webmaster and anyone else claiming to understand search engine optimisation.More >>

Flash blocker

Aug 18th, 2005

All advertising is annoying. But Macromedia have upped the annoyance factor by a couple notches with their irritating technology which allows websites to get around popup-blockers and ad-blockers. Since most browsers don't have the ability to turn off Flash on an individual website basis, many commercial websites have now adopted it as a means of advertising their wares.More >>

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