Posts Tagged "usability"

These may sound obvious, but I’ve recently found these are not obvious. 1) Usability Testing Needs Serious Planning For what are you testing? If people will understand that flow? Make it through the process? Understand choices? Like a design? Understand messaging? There are so many things you could be testing. You should start with those […]

As of when I’m writing this, I no longer get notifications that someone sent me a message on Facebook. I used to, and that was very helpful. I had no other way to know I had a message waiting for me on Facebook… until I hit the Facebook site, and saw the lit-up icon along […]

In early April 2011, an eBay staffer gave a talk at the Product Camp conference. Part of his presentation was talking about a problem eBay was seeing, which they called pogosticking. This is where a shopper is on eBay search results. She clicks on an item to view the item’s individual page. She spends less […]

I was recently asked if I’d like to take a survey about what content might interest me. OK, sure. I assume this takes very little time, so let’s do it! Here is a screen shot of just one of the many questions. Click to enlarge. Thing one, ouch ouch ouch. Thing two, holy cats, that’s […]

In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about how I think some sites are mis-using the colour grey, especially for text. They’re making text harder to read, which hurts the user experience. Today, I want to write about a different take on using grey and how it affects the user experience. Today’s example is eBay. A […]

I’m convinced that if you want something to be NOT noticed, not easily read, and not easily found on your web page, your best bet is to make it grey. Let’s start with hard to comfortably read with this screen shot from a website’s navigation: Grey on black. Not comfy for reading. Grey seems to […]

For years, when you posted a comment to Facebook, you then hit the button to submit that comment. Facebook started taking that away recently, first in private messages. They even had to add a “what the heck does that icon mean” checkbox asking if you want enter to submit the comment or if enter should […]

I was trying to buy tickets online from a website where I was not sure if I had purchased before. So I acted like I was a new account. Upon checkout, I got this message: Well, which is it? Your system MUST know. Your system has to know if there is an account with this […]

I was stuck in the hell of trying to get support from Network Solutions last week (on behalf of a client’s domain). I was filling out the support form when I hit the pull-down menu for “select a topic” (the reason why I’m contacting support). What unfurled was the most jumbled, wacky menu I’ve possibly […]

Last night, my boyfriend and I were trying to book flights on his iPad. We had already researched options, and knew we wanted certain flights on American. He opened the American Airlines iPad app, which in many ways is a lot like their website. So this is double fail, if you ask me. I don’t […]