Blog Usability – How to Reach Your Blogging Happy Place
Congratulations! You’re a blog owner. It has a catchy name. After submitting a blog post, you’re amazed at the inbound traffic. The ads in your sidebar are paying your mortgage. People recognize you on the street as that “Cool Blogger”. Next year, you’ll retire to some tropical island because your blog success is like winning the lottery. Or not. A focus on the usability of your blog can help create a happy picture much like the one you’ve just read. First, let’s begin with the...
Read MoreBlog Usability – How to Reach Your Blogging Happy Place
Congratulations! You’re a blog owner. It has a catchy name. After submitting a blog post, you’re amazed at the inbound traffic. The ads in your sidebar are paying your mortgage. People recognize you on the street as that “Cool Blogger”. Next year, you’ll retire to some tropical island because your blog success is like winning the lottery. Or not. A focus on the usability of your blog can help create a happy picture much like the one you’ve just read. First, let’s...
Read MoreUsability Tea
As I return to a less intense work load than in weeks past, I thought I’d relax with you and share some recent usability blog posts that caught my eye, but I haven’t had time to write or comment on them. Four Bad Designs. Jakob Nielsen picks four examples of designs that missed their mark. Each example is right-on, but my favorite is the first one. Without incentive, there’s no reason to care about the call to action. Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results. There...
Read MoreWeb Site Feedback as Your Secret Online Marketing Tool
There’s a small trick I do with my online order form that helps to identify one of the first problems a web site may have. I purposely don’t ask for a business address or phone number right away. I don’t want to know what these are. As a web site usability consultant, when I visit a client’s web site for the first time, learning how to contact them is my first official task. If I can’t locate this information, or it’s a pain in the neck to find, I’ve...
Read MoreThat’s a Nice Form You’re Wearing
In my dating days, I was a guy’s worst nightmare. When I went out with my friends, I may or may not have been looking for a cute hunk. Most likely, I was there to dance and flirt with a drummer. The worst thing a Coyote (man on the hunt) could do was to throw me a pick up line. I would move away from the bar. I would roll my eyes. I would turn to a girlfriend and face my back to him. Sometimes I’d laugh at them because their pickup line was sooooo bad! I needed to get to know...
Read MoreUsability Bliss and Utopian User Interface Dreams
I laughed when I read SEO and Usability: Don’t Beat a Dead Horse, which is a response to my SEO and Usability: Be That Stallion and Round Up The Herd. He has a point and I though it was likely a sign that I’m a usability idealist. Carlos del Rio wrote: You need to reach with both (SEO and Usability) hands to efficiently take advantage of your site changes. But wait… word of mouth advertising? Brand building? I love design but I certainly don’t send out e-mails to my friends saying...
Read MoreSEO and Usability: Be That Stallion and Round Up The Herd
As more and more people jump on the SEO and Usability bandwagon and write about it, a few different arguments are presented. In some, one set of skills is more important than the other, or “first”. For others, one can’t live without the other. Still others think they have a purpose together and create new terms for practicing it. I’ve written extensively over the years on the relationship between SEO and web site usability. Five years ago I felt that SEO efforts were...
Read More15 Ideas to Increase Camping Web Site Usability
It’s that time of year when families who own recreational vehicles (RV’s) and camping equipment begin to book their camping trips for the summer. Holiday camping has to be done well in advance. Before the snow has melted in most parts of the USA, families are dreaming of lakes and fishing, hiking, fairs, camping on the beach and nights by the fire, staring at the stars in the night time sky. The Internet has made searching for and contacting campgrounds easy, with some campgrounds even ...
Read MoreAn Upsetting User Experience Due to Poor Web Site Usability
My approach to web site usability goes far beyond what you see on a web page. The lines between the Internet experience and off-line experience are blurred more and more as we adapt our lives to the technology we have available to us. The user experience, both on and off-line, sometimes blend together. This is usually overlooked by web site designers who haven’t had the experiences or training to understand the ramifications of every element they put on a page. Every step, every...
Read MoreWeb Site Usability Developers Have No Idea What They’re Doing
I’ve been tracking recent news and following discussions pertaining to web site planning, user experience design, and usability testing that are good reminders that there’s no such thing as a cozy, orderly, agreed upon approach to any of those things. Not only this, there are grumblings about why user centered design is probable at all. Pure Baloney Conglomerate Tests? offers one man’s opinions that usability testing is a crap shoot. To his way of thinking, the only way to...
Read More
