Frederik Van Zande's Library tagged "best practice" →  View Popular

"Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks. "

www.useit.com/...streams-feeds.html - Preview

usability research study social media marketing twitter facebook linked in RSS best practice

Shopping online is risky. Customers rely on relatively small, 2-D product images or sometimes video to get an idea of the actual 3D product they are potentially buying. One of the most common reasons for online returns is the item appeared different on the site, and the customer expected a different color, higher quality, different size or other attribute than what was perceived from the image.

If a customer has a negative experience buying online, even if only once, the buyer will likely be more cautious for every future online purchase. This wary customer needs more trust-builders to convert. Common concerns include sizing and color fears.

www.getelastic.com/-uncertainty-in-product-photos - Preview

e-shop e-commerce product information photos size color best practice

Tables get a bad rap—especially in the Web world where, once upon a time, Web developers misused them for HTML layout. But tables are still very useful for the purpose for which they were originally intended—a way to show relationships among discrete data points.

www.uxmatters.com/...designing-tables-101.php - Preview

webdesign tables information design best practice usabilty

Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.

www.useit.com/...familiar-design.html - Preview

best practice usability redesign webdesign familiar

This year, I was invited back to Malmö Sweden to give a new workshop at the From Business to Buttons conference. Because I was so close to the home of Hans Christian Andersen, I organized the presentation around a fairy tale. Like most fairy tale people, the ones in my talk made some mistakes.

karenmcgrane.com/...y-youre-living-in-a-fairy-tale - Preview

content strategy content best practice introduction presentation

Hosting a company's content and services on 3rd-party social networking sites involves both tactical risks (lower usability) and strategic risks (less user loyalty).

www.useit.com/...social-mega-ia.html - Preview

usability youtube social media content best practice mega-IA

Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results, as follows:

1. Decide on your filter value-selection paradigm—either drill-down or parallel selection.
2. Provide an obvious and consistent way to undo filter selection.
3. Always make all filters easily available.
4. At every step in the search workflow, display only filter values that correspond to the available items, or inventory.
5. Provide filter values that encompass all items, or the complete inventory.

By following the attribute-based filtering design best practices this article describes, you can ensure your customers can take care of business without having to spend time struggling with your search user interface.

www.uxmatters.com/...ing-faceted-search-filters.php - Preview

faceted search layered navigivation filters best practice usability

Bill Scott and I have reviewed hundreds of RIAs while compiling examples for our book Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, and subsequent talks and articles. We recently realized that we had amassed quite a list of applications. Thinking other designers and developers might be interested in these resources, we applied two simple criteria to identify the top fifty:

www.insideria.com/...50-most-usable-rias.html - Preview

ria best practice usability application webdesign

Frameworks have changed the way we develop web applications and many amazing products and services have been delivered as a result.

As developers we take these [frameworks] for granted, they help abstract a lot of the day to day leg work of our applications, and help us develop features more quickly.

carsonified.com/...app-by-1000-with-1-line-of-sql - Preview

sql best practice performance

Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.

We’ve put together this guide to save you the time and frustration of figuring it out for yourself. With 23 different email clients tested, we cover all the popular applications across desktop, web and mobile email.

As the number of email clients continues to grow, we’ve decided to simplify the web-based version of the guide to focus on the 10 most popular email clients on the market. For the complete report on all 24 email clients across the desktop, web and mobile email world, download the complete guide in PDF format.

www.campaignmonitor.com/css - Preview

e-mail css htmlm guide best practice webdesign support reference

MySQL is a very feature rich relational database management system (RDBMS) which has more than 11 million active installations and 60,000+ downloads/day. MySQL is commonly known to be an open source project available for free under GNU General Public License – this version of MySQL is called Community Server. MySQL Community Server is very often used in a development stacks consisting of Apache with the popular mod_php module interpreting PHP code running on Linux (LAMP – Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP). All very successful free open source projects that together serve millions of websites today and the number is growing rapidly. Popular open source systems like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, PHPbb and many more all run on this software stack.

www.tripwiremagazine.com/...nt-tools-and-cheat-sheets.html - Preview

mysql software tools cheats best practice

In my previous post, Cookie-less Session Variables in JavaScript, we discovered how JavaScript session data could be saved to the window.name property. Today, we create a JavaScript library to exploit this property.

www.sitepoint.com/...cript-session-variable-library - Preview

cookie javascript sessions recording best practice

We’ve all heard the adage, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” For many e-tailers, both large and small, the weakest link lies in the checkout process. Mistakes at this critical juncture are costly and unnecessary. Below, I’ve gathered 12 of the most common mistakes I see with checkouts.

www.getelastic.com/12-checkout-blunders - Preview

checkout e-commerce e-shop user experience ROI optimiziation blunders best practice

Web forms aren’t great conversationalists. They ask a bunch of questions, then wait until you answer them all before they respond. So when you register for that cool social network or use an e-commerce site, it’s pretty much a monologue.

You can blame most forms’ poor etiquette on the way they’re built. Web forms that use a basic submit-and-refresh model of interactivity don’t respond until you hit the “submit” button—but it doesn’t have to be this way. Real-time inline validation can help people complete web forms more quickly and with less effort, fewer errors, and (surprise!) more satisfaction.

Inline validation gives people several types of real-time feedback: It can confirm an appropriate answer, suggest valid answers, and provide regular updates to help people stay within necessary limits. These bits of feedback can be presented before, during and / or after users provide answers.

www.alistapart.com/...inline-validation-in-web-forms - Preview

forms usability best practice user experience error messages validation javascript

With tens of millions of blogs online today, major corporations have started to recognize the value of a corporate blog for communicating with customers. However, corporate blogging is far different than the more traditional blogging that most of us encounter on a daily basis. Corporate blogging brings its own unique set of challenges and opportunities that must be considered and addressed by the company in order for its users to have a positive experience.

In this article we’ll examine the issues that face corporate blogs, we’ll observe some current trends, and we’ll look at a large sample of blogs from companies of various sizes in a wide variety of industries.

www.smashingmagazine.com/...log-design-trends-and-examples - Preview

coporate blog strategy design best practice

There have been numerous creative logo design showcases, logo design resources and logo design tutorials posted across the Web. While these help you to create a powerful toolbox for your logo designs, first you need to gain a solid understanding of what makes a logo design good and what you need to consider before starting using this toobox.

www.smashingmagazine.com/...tips-for-effective-logo-design - Preview

logo design best practice

Websites that let users customize the UI have the same measured usability as regular sites. Sites for customizing products, however, score substantially worse due to complex workflow.

www.useit.com/...customization.html - Preview

customization UI user interface personalization product customizer usability best practice

This week we've got a special treat! Live from the halls of SES San Jose, our own Jen Lopez sits down with the one-and-only Matt Cutts to discuss NoFollow.

As we all know, there was some controversy about Google's shifting views on nofollow earlier this year. So now that some time has passed and Big G has refined their position, what would Matt recommend to sites that have lots of nofollow tags already in place? Watch this exclusive interview to find out.

www.seomoz.org/...-friday-matt-cutts-on-nofollow - Preview

seo nofollow best practice

If you're in SEO, you probably hear this question a lot. Sadly, there's no cut and dry answer, but there are sets of best practices we can draw from and sharpen to help get close. In this blog post, I'm going to share our top recommendations for achieving on-page, keyword-targeting "perfection," or, at least, close to it. Some of these are backed by data points, correlation studies and extensive testing while others are simply gut-feelings based on experience. As with all things SEO, we recommend constant testing and refinement, though this knowledge can help you kick-start the process.

www.seomoz.org/...targeting-on-page-optimization - Preview

seo page optimization copywriting best practice

I have reached the conclusion that most organizations have a blog simply because they feel they should. Many marketing departments fail to “get” blogging and have poorly visited blogs with few comments. Because their blog fails to perform, they conclude that blogging is an ineffective marketing tool and either remove it entirely or leave it to languish.

www.smashingmagazine.com/...ruths-about-corporate-blogging - Preview

blogging corporate blog company best practice strategy e-marketing