Usability

9 Common Mistakes in Web Design

By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions. Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them.

Best Practices for Social Web Design

In this article I’ll showcase some of the current top social news sites, will identify trends and patterns in their designs and suggest some best practices to follow when designing such sites. Let’s begin by looking at four popular social news sites and see how their designs compare

In Interfaces Similar Things should have Similar Names

A good interface usability rule-of-thumb is: when two things do the same, name them the same... but when two things do something different, name them differently

Create an About Me page

One of the most important and least used aspects of any website is the “About Me” page. It’s not enough to have an interesting site and great product if your visitor can’t find a way to relate to you. Never under-estimate the power of personality. The internet isn’t a cold, sterile environment. As a matter of fact, within the last 15 years, it’s developed into a community addicted to interactivity, and communication. If you don’t believe me, check out Twitter. Twitter is a good example of why “About Me” pages are crucial. If you can amass a group of followers based on 140 characters of random biographical chatter, it’s a safe bet that those readers would also like to know a bit more about you.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the most essential aspects of any “About Me” page. At the end, you’ll be totally empowered to make your own page, because we’ll strip away all of your excuses!

Navigational Design

Designing Drop Down Menus and Good Practice

As a general rule, most Web developers, especially usability enthusiasts, say it is bad practice to use drop-down menus because they are confusing, annoying and oftentimes dysfunctional. From a design standpoint, however, drop-down menus are an excellent feature because they help clean up a busy layout. If structured correctly, drop-down menus can be a great navigation tool, while still being a usable and attractive design feature.

247 Web Usability Guidelines

Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice. We use this list of guidelines in our consultancy work. For best results, remember to interpret the guideline in context

Layouts etc

8 Layout Solutions to Improve your Designs

The organization of content is probably one of the most important and influential aspects of any good web design. Organizing information into a well-built layout is the basis of a website, and should always come before styling concerns. Without a good layout, the website doesn’t seem to flow correctly, and nothing connects the way it should.

In this article, we’ll discuss 8 useful layout solutions and techniques that will help you create a clean and organized content layout. The 8 techniques include sliders, tabs, progressive layouts, structured grids, modal windows, rollover elements, accordions and mega drop-down-menus.

7 Interface Design Techniques to de-clutter

If you can take a complex device or a piece of software and somehow rearrange, reorganize and redesign the interface to make it easy to use and understand, then you’re well on the way to delivering a better user experience.

In this article I’m going to talk about 7 practical techniques that you can utilize in web design to make your websites or web applications simpler and less cluttered.

5 Writing Tips for Web Designers

Poorly written web writing misleads visitors and wastes millions of hours daily. For today’s more than one billion Internet users, that translates to frustration