Make Your Website Better

In her all-day day session at EDUI2009, “Usability Testing Without the Scary,” Dana Chisnell laid out the entire process for usability testing. Breaking the process down into small parts that are easy to understand, Dana showed us how to be comfortable with the process, rather than intimidated. Here’s what she shared about creation of the [...]

In her EDUI 2009 Workshop, Usability Testing Without the Scary, Dana Chisnell discussed how to best support great site design. User testing is essential, even if you only have time to spend one hour with one person. If one person has a problem, it’s legitimate to assume that others do too, and to make design [...]

Dana Chisnell presented an all-day session at the EDUI Conference held in Charlottesville  September 21 & 22, 2009. She founded Usability Works and does usability research, user interface design, and technical communication consulting and development. She is co-author of the Handbook of Usability Testing.  The focus of the workshop was to show how eminently doable [...]

Tricks and techniques work better for improving website usability than do structured methodologies, Jared Spool (CEO, User Interface Engineering) said at the EDUI conference last week. Spool says that there is no evidence that methodologies result in quality designs, and that design can’t be institutionalized to conform to usability templates. He equates methodology with dogma, [...]

Yesterday I met with the web team at the University of Virginia College of Arts & Sciences to review results of user testing we conducted to learn more about the usability of a design template for academic departments. We conducted the test at the end of April, timed to take place before students began studying [...]

I’m re-reading Prioritizing Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger, as I’m planning and completely overhauling my workshop on how to improve your web site to better meet business and marketing goals. One of the best things about writing articles and planning workshops is that I get to go back to the basics. And [...]

Some interesting comments from the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) on the ROI of usability. The article  provides examples and statistics for each return on investment. I find the observation on increasing market share, quoted below, particularly compelling.
Web sites are becoming more usable across the board as noted by Jakob Nielsen, showing general improvements as certain  conventions [...]

This week I conducted user testing for the University of Virginia’s Arts and Sciences web site. I’ve been working with the web team for nearly two years. When we began working together, we were looking at what changes were needed to make the site easier to use. The site had recently been overhauled by the [...]

One of my favorite books on web usability is Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. He says that usability is not “rocket surgery,” it’s common sense, and that anyone who’s interested can learn to do it. “After all,” he comments, “usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average [...]