Captcha and Usability
Captcha is a necessary evil we put up with on the Internet. I did a little digging and found there is much to learn about it. I wrote about Capthca for my latest installment at SearchEngineLand – Recent Findings On Captcha & The User Experience The purpose of Captcha is to find a way to prove that you’re a human being and not a computer with abuse on its agenda. However humble and helpful the original goal, today there is software available to bypass Captcha’s, as well as...
Read MoreHiring Web Site Information Architecture – Tips for Better Decisions
Web site information architecture is an additional skill web designers may not have that you may need to outsource for. Information architecture is tied to usability testing and how humans search, sort, classify and order things. This is not the same as site architecture that SEO’s use in their work. Shari Thurow describes what information architecture is for web design, why its so important to design and how it relates to user centered design. She offers logical examples and a...
Read MoreSlideshow: Web Design Techniques To Enhance Online Marketing
For those who haven’t seen it, I presented a webcast for the American Marketing Association last June. Here is the free slideshow of the presentation. Aquent/AMA Webcast: How User Centered Web Design Techniques Enhance Online Marketing View more presentations from Aquent Webmaster When a search engine giant such as Google has a large usability department, you can be assured that user experience is vital to online and offline marketing. This webcast session will debunk the myth that...
Read MoreBalancing Search Marketing & User Experience: Why Bother?
Yesterday a colleague asked me to find information on software application response times. I responded with some qualifying questions to refine my assistance but what it boiled down was this: the corporate powers wanted to know how much they could fudge things so that an ecommerce software application could roll out into “production” even though it wasn’t ready to effectively respond to customers. Could this be a problem and if yes, who says so? Selling Customer Experience Most online...
Read MoreNo Guidance, No Interaction, No Sale: Improving Internet Shopping Usability
A good friend recently told me a story about how a company built a web site that needed user instructions to use it. The only page that was allowed to put a link to those instructions was the homepage. Therefore, should a visitor arrive via a search engine to a landing page within the web site, they were out of luck. No guidance, no interaction, no sale. I went Christmas shopping online for a computer armoire. I knew exactly what I wanted because I had done previous research on the manufacturer...
Read MoreSneak Preview: Emotional Design and Affective Computing
According to popular prejudice, women embody ‘emotion’ and ‘irrationality’ whereas men embody ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’. As such, designing for emotions/affect stir up gender issues. Are women better designers of technology which uses emotion and affect? Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology as Experience One free chapter and several videos are available now for Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology as...
Read MoreCre8pc Web Site Reviews on Sale
In this, the season of giving, and because web site reviews are so popular, I’m offering the chance to get your site review for just $82.50, on a first come, first serve basis. What Do You Get? A full written report emailed to you in PDF format. Screenshots with notes, suggestions, etc. Fast turnaround. Input on usability, understandability, conversions, calls to action, persuasive design Feedback on information architecture and navigation Organic on page search engine optimization...
Read MoreBlended Usability and SEO Practices a Hit
Just when I was seriously considering not writing articles for other publications for awhile, something happened. I wrote an article that poured out in one take for Search Engine Land’s newly renamed “Search and Usability” column and delivered it way past my deadline. Turns out, it was a hit. I’d been pondering lately how hard it can be to describe what online marketers and web site designers and developers do for a living. Ask 10 of us what we do and you’ll get...
Read MoreAds Rile Google? Bah. What about we Humans?
This caught my attention. Google May Penalize Your Site for Having Too Many Ads published in SearchEngineWatch states Google is looking at penalizing ad heavy sites that make it difficult for people to find good content on web pages, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, said yesterday at PubCon during his keynote session. The key point Google appears to want to make is that anything that prevents people from reading content concerns them. The article goes on to say, Google has...
Read More10 Reminders for Usability Web Design To Make Site Visitors Adore You
No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong with your website. There is always a critic. You don’t want to be caught with your pants down when trying to present a professional site. Since my work permits me to see a great deal of websites and Internet applications, I can note common problems. This list is not about the common ones. This list is for repetitive web design practices that drive site visitors crazy because we keep driving them crazy. Here’s what we do: 1....
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