40+ Usability Guides for Developers and Designers

If you need help determining what the standards are with user interfaces, bookmark Experience Dynamics.

May 1st, 2009 at 7:00am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

I've been building a lot of web sites lately and as I'm moving more towards mobile development, I'm beginning to question the lines of where desktop stops and the web/mobile starts.

I recently had someone talk to me about implementing a Drop Down List/Combo Box that had a total of 45,000 items listed and they just needed to pick one item from the list. And that was a web page, not fat client.

Hmmm...This may need some re-thinking on the designers part.

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4 Seconds Load Time is all you have!

A 4-second load time is all you have to show something to your users.

November 9th, 2006 at 2:00pm — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

Ref: Slashdot - Based on a recent retail research report, if your web site doesn't load in 4 seconds or less, your visitors will leave before they even get to the site.

For most techno-geeks, 4 seconds isn't long, but everyone wants fast-loading web pages regardless of what is on your site.

Keep in mind that the survey is focused towards 1,058 retail online shoppers, not bloggers or personal pages.

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The Ultimate Web Design Usability Checklist

A complete checklist for usability specialists for when you think you have everything in your web site.

November 1st, 2006 at 6:00am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

NotUsable.com provides an extensive list of usability questions you need to ask yourself about your site.

The ultimate web design usability checklist is sectioned into the following categories:

• Technical
• Images
• Content
• Navigation
• Structure
• Forms
• Multimedia
• Extra Features

The post provides a great list of questions to run through, even when everyone says the site is done.

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Exploring User Mental Models of breadcrumbs in Web Navigation

A solid usability study on the how the type of breadcrumbs can show users the breadth and depth of web sites.

June 28th, 2006 at 4:39am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

Angela Colter from the University of Baltimore did a study on exploring user mental models of breadcrumbs in web navigation and posted the results on her site.

She also defined three types of breadcrumbs:

• Location breadcrumbs indicate the position of the current page within a site’s hierarchy regardless of the path taken to arrive there.
• Path breadcrumbs show the path the user has taken within a site to get to the current page. The same content from the site can be presented with different breadcrumbs because users can take different routes.
• Attribute breadcrumbs convey product meta-information, such as subject, price, category, style, and brand.

These are the concepts that most developers don't even think about when developing web sites. A user at any time can lose track of where they're going or where they've been.

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Usability Views

A site that delivers everything about usability, Human Computer Interaction, and Accessibility.

June 15th, 2006 at 7:59am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

UsabilityViews.com supplies over 11,000 articles on how to conduct usability studies, how to architect sites based on usability, and much more.

I consider it an exceptional site for usability research.

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Joel On Software: Usability in One Easy Step

Mr. Spolsky gives his first draft of a usability article.

March 7th, 2006 at 10:39pm — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

Joel On Software talks about usability issues including...

Windows vs. Mac! 

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NEW! UX Mag - User Experience magazine

New magazine geared towards Web Site User Experiences.

January 29th, 2006 at 5:15pm — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

Just glancing at the site, it looks like it may take me a while to take everything in. Wow!

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Usability Toolkit

Another good resource for Web Usability experts.

January 2nd, 2006 at 2:53pm — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Usability

More good tools and utilities.

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