Links are New Yorkers (Writing great web links)
A good link has no time for small talk or niceties. It acts like a signpost, like a promise. With a good link, what you see is what you get.
If most of today’s web links were married they’d be heading for divorce. Because they never keep their promises. “Darling, I’ll be home at 10.” But […]
Great websites work beautifully
Humans are dominated by visuals. But the Web reflects a movement away from this visual dominance.
For millions of years we lived in a world dominated by visuals and images. We saw the lion coming. We didn’t need to be able to name the lion. We didn’t need to be able to write the word “lion.” […]
Business case for deleting content
The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.
I recently worked with an organization that had managed to delete a substantial quantity of content from its website. It was not an easy process. In fact, it took years of […]
Choosing the right classification words
Climate change or global warming? Pandemic flu or bird flu? Learning or training? Should we choose the ‘correct’ words or the words people actually use?
According to Google, every month an average of 300,000 people search for climate change, while 2.2 million search for global warming. Yet the official term on most government and media websites […]
Block reading: how we read on the Web
We don’t scan a webpage. Instead, we scan a particular block or section of it.
I was working with a company who, based on research, had discovered a top intranet task. It was interesting that the web team initially had no idea what this task was about, even though there was huge demand for it in […]
Don’t design ‘what if’ navigation
Every time you add navigation options you add confusion and complexity. Too much choice is the bane of web navigation.
I just got a new satellite navigation system for my car. Last weekend I was driving from Dublin to Galway.
“Hi, I’m Navvy your friendly new navigation assistant.”
“Hello Navvy”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Galway.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
Sometime later […]
The best websites are useful and ugly
Functionality and usefulness are far more important to the success of your website than how nice and elegant it looks.
The first time I saw the Grand Canyon was a truly memorable experience. The depth, distance and hazy rainbow of colors were like nothing I had ever seen before. The great Colorado River looked shoe-lace-wide down […]
Web design is the design of words
In the design of physical products, the use of words is often seen as a sign of a flaw of the design. On the contrary, in web design, without words, there is no design.
“If a design depends upon labels [words], it may be faulty,” Donald Norman writes in his book, The Design of Everyday Things. […]
The economics of classification
Everything that is added to a classification subtracts from what is already there, prompting the question: Has more been added than subtracted?
I use a survey service called SurveyMonkey a lot. It’s a great service. Recently, they upgraded, adding lots of new features. The problem is that some of the older features that I regularly use […]
Why was the milk kept at the back of the supermarket?
Supermarkets are 77 years old in August and they have learned many lessons in self-service that can be applied to websites. Getting a litre of milk must be amongst the top tasks of customers going to a supermarket yet traditionally milk was always at the back of the store. Old style grocery marketing suggested you […]
