web design

Button Placement on Forms and Popup Windows

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How many times did you complete a form only to push the “Clear” button instead of “Submit”? What about “OK” vs. “Cancel” on a popup window? (Raises both hands — one for each.) Why does this happen? Do we expect one button on the left and the other on the right? Are they too close … Read more

How I Became a Full-time Freelance Writer

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I generally don’t talk about myself as I accept that people don’t come here for my personality. Instead, people like you come for the information I provide that I hope helps you in your life. From reading other blogs, it looks like many love to hear how writers and freelancers went full-time. So here’s the … 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

170 Smashing Ideas from Designers

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Smashing Magazine provided a wealth of expert tips, advice and suggestions in its popular and valuable 35 designers x 5 questions article. To celebrate its one year anniversary, the magazine found more experts and asked new questions. The result is 50 designers x 6 questions, which contains over 170 new tips answering the following six … Read more

Site Maps: Passe' or OK?

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Monday by Noon asks if site maps are obsolete. First, let’s agree on the term site maps. These contain a site’s high level links along with the name of the page like this good example of a site map from Apple.com. Along the same lines of questioning site maps, people question the use of search … Read more

The FAQ on FAQ

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Jonathan and Lisa Price have a nice article on writing FAQ and covered many points that we may not think about. For instance, if you have a large site — you might want to show the FAQ or Help that’s relevant to the page users are on rather than give them the whole thing to … Read more