Tech

Book Review: Sell Your Book on Amazon

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Despite a way too long subtitle and “salesy” claims, Sell Your Book on Amazon surprises. Its format simplifies finding the sections of interest – couple that with the ratings from five stars indicating “a must do” item to one star meaning “Don’t waste your time.” Authors who publish their books using a print-on-demand (POD) service … Read more

Usability Testing Cheap and Fast Part II

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Dennison asked excellent questions in response to How to Do Usability Testing Cheap and Fast:
Tell me if I follow correctly: Do you do the test only on users that have their own PC with them? So if you happen to be in a store where nobody has a machine or is willing to take the test, then, tough luck?
Why worry about having the users test in their own environment (PC)? The focus of the test is on usability. Testing to see if the site works properly across different systems should be part of QA work and can be done separately.
Bill Moore from RadioTime responded:

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Using Bulleted Lists in Web Content

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Bulleted lists on Web pages help readers scan and find what they want. Two situations that do well with bulleted lists are series and instructions. Also, beware of indenting, spacing, formatting, and whitespace. Series For situations where three or more items appear separated by commas, they might work better as a list. Instead of, “Bring … Read more

How to Do Usability Testing Cheap and Fast

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Bill Moore of RadioTime shared his experience of gathering feedback from users in a sandwich shop. It’s amazing how easy it is to get user feedback with zero overhead, that’s cheap, and leads to actionable results. I asked him why didn’t he go to the (in)famous coffee shop since their wi-fi usually works well (wi-fi … Read more

175+ Data Visualization and Infographics Examples and Resources

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Since taking a class that discussed Edward Tufte‘s work, I’ve been fascinated by turning information into visual data. His site contains many examples that you could easily spend hours on the site. I have. Plus, I spent several days browsing sites with articles, resources, and examples of infovis (information visualization) in action. It’s not just … Read more

Best of 2007: Books

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The following books that I read this year are my favorites — they didn’t necessarily come out this year. Fiction: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Cliche’, but it was a great book and I was happy with the way Rowling finished the series. It was nervewracking because we didn’t want her to be too … Read more

Move Visitors Past the Home Page without Leaving

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How often does this scenario happen to you? When you land on a Web site, it doesn’t instantly answer the most important question: What is the Web site about? The second question depends on the site. For business sites: “What does the business do?” For blogs: “What is the topic of the blog?” My blog … Read more

Long or Short Articles on Web Sites

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Nielsen addresses whether a site’s content strategy should use longer or shorter content. The best answer: As long as it needs to be. Even Nielsen’s own article is long and I jumped around to get its main points. Many experience success with both long and short articles. I wrote two versions of a landing page … Read more