Frederik Van Zande's Library tagged usability →  View Popular

"Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms.
Selenium...
* runs in many browsers and operating systems
* can be controlled by many programming languages and testing frameworks. "

seleniumhq.org - Preview

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"In October 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users. This was a follow-up survey to a previous survey. We received 665 valid responses to the screen reader user survey. More in-depth analysis and documentation on the free-form responses will be available in the future.

A few disclaimers and notices:

* Totals may not equal 100% due to rounding.
* Total responses (n) for each question may not equal 665 due to respondents not answering that particular question.
* The sample was not controlled and may not represent all screen reader users.
* Care should be taken in interpreting these results. Responses are based upon user experiences with web content that is generally inaccessible. We cannot help but wonder if responses may have been different if screen reader interactions with web content were typically very positive.
* Data was analyzed using JMP Statistical Discovery Software version 8
* We hope to conduct a survey of this nature again in the future. If you have recommendations or questions you would like asked, please let us know. Additional analysis of this data and details on the responses to open-ended questions will be available in the future."

webaim.org/...screenreadersurvey2 - Preview

usability accessibility survey browser

To make menus and links simpler you have to think like a customer. You also have to reduce the number of links and focus on the task at hand.

giraffeforum.com/...eb%e2%80%99s-biggest-challenge - Preview

menu usability content link focus reducing

"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

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"From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues. "

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

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Understanding of your site visitors’ intent is one of the most delightful parts of web data analysis. In this article, we’ll learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data—data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.

But let’s take a step back. Why should you care about this in the first place? Good question.

In the good old days, people dutifully used site navigation at the left, right, or top of a website. But, two websites have fundamentally altered how we navigate the web: Amazon, because the site is so big, sells so many things, and is so complicated that many of us go directly to the site search box on arrival. And Google, which has trained us to show up, type what we want, and hit the search button.

www.alistapart.com/...simple-effective-life-altering - Preview

search usability search queries information needs analytics

Avinash Kaushik demonstrated that site search analytics (SSA) is a powerful tool you can use to assess customer intent quantitatively. In SSA, as with all flavors of web analytics (WA), you can work from the top-down; by starting with clear, measurable metrics based on your organization’s goals, you can benchmark and continually optimize the performance of your content and designs. While goal-driven analysis is wonderfully useful, we’ll explore a different, “bottom-up” approach that relies on pattern analysis and failure analysis to help you understand your users’ intent in qualitative ways that complement the top-down approach.

www.alistapart.com/...h-analytics-from-the-bottom-up - Preview

usability research search queries search information needs

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

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

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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

www.volkswagen.co.uk - Preview

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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

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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

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As I was preparing for my SES Extreme Makeover session, analyzing the lucky businesses that were chosen for a free makeover, I became fascinated with a particular e-commerce site.

There was no question that the pages on this site performed exceptionally well. Bounces were under 20 percent and the exit rates were very low. I also knew this company had been testing using Google Website Optimizer.

www.grokdotcom.com/...-page-optimization-isnt-enough - Preview

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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

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This is the first in a series of three articles examining the specific learning difficulty known as dyslexia and how web design can impact the ability of those afflicted to access information on web pages. The specific needs of dyslexics tend to be overshadowed by the more widely understood needs of the visually impaired. Unfortunately, design decisions that benefit the latter group tend create problems for the former. This is never more evident than in so-called “accessible” text only pages with their emphasis on high contrast and complete lack of images and colour.

accessites.org/...ning-for-dyslexics-part-1-of-3 - Preview

usability dislexia color contrast

Making your site as user friendly and easy to navigate as possible is every developers goal and implementing autosuggest is one way to help achieve it. Not only is it helpful to the user but is also somewhat expected now that most of the top sites have already built this functionality into their own sites. This collection includes standard auto suggest scripts, del.icious tag suggestion, autosuggest control to search images on Flickr, and advanced table filter with auto suggest control.

www.tutzone.org/...chniques-for-implementing.html - Preview

javascript user experience usability design pattern autocomplete

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.

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

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User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success. Underneath the arguments, I see a fundamental culture clash. In academia, text (and lots of it) is the only way serious people make serious arguments, and very polished presentations are often seen as prima facie evidence that the presenter may be hiding a weak argument with graphic frou-frou.

www.alistapart.com/...visual-decision-making - Preview

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A sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns.

Please add tags, notes, and comments, and suggest new examples.

Over time, I hope to add patterns that illustrate user behavior and the information architecture of search.

I'll be blogging about patterns at findability.org/, there's a slidecast, and I'm writing a book on the topic.

www.flickr.com/...72157603785835882 - Preview

webdesign search search results usability design patterns resource