The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more.
In this detailed report, 37signals analyzes, reviews, and rates the search engines and search results at 25 popular e-commerce sites.
While it’s true that anyone with a Web browser can access your site, your target audience really consists of the people that will most often make use of (read, search, shop, explore) your site. Because your site can’t do everything for everybody, its success largely depends on meeting the needs and expectations of this pre-defined group of people.
Believe it or not, we are winning the war for a more usable universe of products, software and systems. Over the past decade, we’ve seen huge usability improvements, from cell phones to accounting software to web sites. But don’t even think about relaxing. Now is the time to advance.
http://www.semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000009.php
Users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters which feel much more personal than websites. In usability testing, success rates were high for subscribe and unsubscribe tasks, but users were frustrated by newsletters that demanded too much of their time.
If you are developing a navigation scheme, you will probably want to make it hierarchical if your content lends itself to this arrangement. Most people will call this a taxonomy.
The fact is that most people do not use the web for visual stimulation. People use the web to buy things, find information, make contacts, and what they notice is whether they can successfully buy things, find information, and make contacts. They do not notice the well-thought-out tag line or the expensive logo they’re just window dressing, just frosting on the cake. In fact, all the fussing we designers do to draw attention to our work often winds up just getting in the way.
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/beauty_is_only_screen_deep.php
“Technical accessibility is not enough to make a website easy to use,” Nielsen said. “The real question is whether users can get what they want from a website in a reasonable amount of time and whether the visit is pleasant for them. Users with disabilities are humans and need easy and simple user interfaces just like anybody else.”
A content inventory is a decidedly human task. In fact, we find that the process can often be as valuable as the final spreadsheet. If you invest the time in scouring your Web site and deconstructing every page (or at least a good selection of pages), you will end up as the uncontested expert in how it all goes together. And that’s invaluable knowledge to possess when redesigning your site.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000040.php
Maps are one of the most basic (and informative) infographics. The simple map. A rectangle with a few lines, some labels, and an X can impart what it would take hundreds of words to describe. Maps are an abstraction of our world, a representation of space. At their most basic, they tell us where. If tweaked and tuned properly, they can tell us where, how, and even why.
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Having wrestled with the best way to track time and manage work at Pelago, we understand how processes should work. We built Intervals to manage chaotic work loads — and to help others do the same.
