Website optimization is more of an art than science. You will need tools, techniques and some patience to tweak & re-tweak things until everything is just about right. Today we’ll take a look at how Visual Website Optimizer can help you optimize your website using A/B and multivariate tests.

iPhone owners will argue until their dying breath how good the Apple handset is, Android users pushing the flexibility of Google’s operating system. Some swear by WebOS or Windows Mobile, even so, all of these OS’es have their own limitations which continue to frustrate even the most die-hard users.

There is no such thing as the perfect mobile operating system but with all software products there could always be improvements. What would be included in your perfect mobile operating system? We will discuss this below.

Customization

A huge prerequisite for any mobile owner. The ability to switch wallpapers whenever you feel like, change a theme or assign different ringtones to your contacts, it gives the user a feeling of control, they have power over the phone – not what Apple or Google tell them they can and can’t do.

iPhone owners have long wished for a way to personalize their devices and Apple relented to a point with the introduction of iOS4. Now, iPhone owners can apply a lock-screen and background wallpaper – insane. This is much to the delight of Android users, if the OS can’t perform the specified task, you can bank on there being an app available on the Android Market that can.

WebOS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Android all support theming, with iPhone users needing to jailbreak (and invalidate their warranty) if they wish to do so. Apple believe that the application of themes would “take away from the user experience” because it “spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone.” Enough said.

Most support widgets – little home screen apps that update to display real-time information – the best you get on an iPhone is the date and time, perhaps a push notification from time to time.

The perfect OS would allow users to customize the UI of their phone, handing back control to the person who showed faith in the company by handing over hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros to buy its phone in the first place.

Built-in Social

Whilst most modern mobile operating systems make use of social features, none of them store social networking data so that other apps can access it. Confused, let me explain.

Say hello to Android or WebOS. Both of these operating systems allow you to specify your social-networking or email accounts to populate contact information or display information by way of a widget. This is great, but if you wanted to pull this information for a different purpose, you would be unable to – you would need a specific app to give you the functionality you wished for.

There is a mobile operating system that allows developers to pull social networking data specified by the user: Samsung’s Bada platform. Designed specifically to challenge the likes of Android and iOS4, Bada is a linux-based OS that has a built-in social layer – currently supporting Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Myspace (Samsung has already announced it plans to add in more social API’s) – meaning a potential app developer can access profile data without having to make a separate connection to the service itself.

This in essence, allows the user to enter their social network credentials once and then specify what apps can access it. Bada will also update your location data to Samsung’s servers, developers will be to grab your location without having to build in a system within an app to manually search for your current location.

The perfect OS would seamlessly integrate social services with the platforms PIM implementation, reducing the need for the hundreds of Twitter app developers to code their own implementation to complete exactly the same task.

Toggle Between Basic and Expert Modes

Mobile operating systems deal with app crashes differently. On an iPhone, if the app crashes, you simply get chucked back to the home screen.

On Android, if an app quits unexpectedly, you get a funny little error message asking you to try again and force close the app. For me, this helps me identify why the app is misbehaving, for first-time users this might be a little bit daunting and give the impression the phone is doing something it shouldn’t (when in fact it is educating the user).

The perfect OS would allow the user to switch between an expert mode that contains all of the network information like Carrier APN’s, firmware and debugging tools, to a basic mode which makes use of wizards or graphics to explain the functions on a phone.

Making The OS Self Aware

No, I don’t want your Motorola Droid to start killing in the name of Skynet.

Most modern smartphones have issues with battery management, gone are the days of a 4-day charge, it’s now become the 4 hour charge (OK, I am overstating that a tad). Tell me if I am wrong (I’m sure you would anyway) but I don’t think many modern mobile operating systems have an intelligent system to automatically adjust settings on the phone to maximise battery life.

I know you can get apps, for example JuiceDefender on Android, that sit in the background and disabling your phones data connection when its not in use, only to switch data back on once in an allotted time period to give your apps a chance to refresh its data.

The function could automatically prioritize the needs of the background apps running on the phone, dedicating resources to each app when it needed it the most.

For me, the perfect OS would have built-in controls that could intelligently monitor your phones’ use and change settings accordingly. Would be a great way to help improve battery life and allow your phone to get to know you a bit better!

Multitasking

Something that both Android and WebOS does superbly, multitasking is still not a standard feature on modern mobile operating systems. Although implemented in iOS4, full multitasking and notifications still haven’t been created to meet most user expectations.

Windows Phone 7 will launch without full multitasking support, limiting the function to official Microsoft apps and stopping any third-party developers from utilizing it.

A large percentage of smartphones are launching with a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, for a phone this is a huge amount of power and memory. The excuse that the phone physically couldn’t handle a large amount of apps at the same time doesn’t hold any weight now.

The perfect OS would allow users to run as many apps as they like and cycle through them if they should choose, in the mobile age it should be a right not a privilege.

Conclusion

It was very tempting to include network coverage issues (looking at you Apple) but the above issues would go a long way towards making a mobile operating system work for both heavy and light mobile users. The great thing is we are able to receive a fair number of official updates as well as those developed by the mobile hacking community, an solution to our needs is never far away.

What features would go towards making up your perfect operating system, let us know in the comments.

Each day more and more people are opening up their email inbox to find an invite to Google Wave (Google Wave). With that shiny new invite comes the inevitable quest for ideas about to how to put the medium to good use.

Should you happen to be one of those people, we’ve got a number of different resources that you can use to get up to speed with Google Wave. This time around, however, we wanted to look at how people are actually using it now. From process modelling and customer service, to project collaboration, annotation, and gaming, the examples listed here highlight the power of the newborn medium, and in part, showcase what we can expect as the platform matures.

1. SAP Gravity: Modeling within Google Wave

Understanding the power of real-time collaboration and its relevance to clients, SAP Research in Australia (Australia) has developed a business process modeling tool called Gravity that works within Google Wave.

The sophisticated tool, which can be embedded within a Wave as a gadget, allows for team members to remotely build complex models in unison, or after catching up via playback, without having to leave Google Wave.

Gravity and Google Wave work together harmoniously to create a modeling environment that appears to be just as robust as, if not more flexible than, expensive desktop software built for the same purpose.

We think SAP is certainly on to something here, and we encourage you to watch the video demonstration of Gravity in Google Wave in action.

2. Salesforce: Google Wave for Customer Service

Salesforce, like SAP, has figured out that they can use the Google Wave platform to support client needs and tackle real-life problems. As such, Salesforce has created a Google Wave extension that clients can use to help automate, and even personalize, the customer service experience.

Watch the demonstration video to see how the Salesforce extension gives customers the ability to use Google Wave to interact with an automated support robot. Of course, customers can request assistance from a human within the Wave as well.

What makes this example stand out is the fact that not only is the Google Wave dialogue being stored as a case record within Salesforce, but, because the robot is connected to the Salesforce Service Cloud, the robot can access previously stored customer data for tailored service. Ultimately, Salesforce has found a way to potentially save clients money on customer service efforts, all the while maintaining active records, with the assistance of Google Wave.

3. Mingle: Integrated Project Collaboration

Mingle is a project management and team collaboration tool developed by ThoughtWorks Studios, who realized that they could add Mingle’s project management metadata to conversations in Google Wave.

The integration is still a work in progress, but a demonstration of the concept was highlighted at Enterprise 2.0, and the basic idea is to give Google Wave users/Mingle clients the ability to bring their Mingle task data, which takes the form of cards, into Google Wave. Existing Mingle cards can be embedded into Wave conversation threads, and new Mingle cards/tasks can be created within Google Wave.

This particular use case highlights how Google Wave can work with existing project management systems for more streamlined and cohesive communication, creating parity regardless of where the user is accessing project data.

4. Ecomm Conference: Annotating a Live Event

Just last week our CEO, Pete Cashmore, wrote about how the savvy people behind the Ecomm conference doled out Wave accounts to attendees so that they could collaborate, in real-time, to annotate presentation content. The result was arguably a much better way to consume conference content than attempting to follow hashtag tweets on Twitter (Twitter).

You can read the full account, which was documented by Charlie Osmond, on the FreshNetworks blog, but here’s an excerpt that we think drives home the utility of the use case.

“Here’s what happened: an audience member would create a Google Wave and others in the audience would edit the wave during the presentation. The result would be a crowd-sourced write-up of the presentation: a transcript of key points and a record of audience comments.”

We happen to think this particular use case is genius, especially for content-rich seminars and events where attendees are typically taking their own individual notes. With the shared Google Wave experience they can combine forces to create a more meaningful and accurate recounting of information shared in conference sessions.

5. Gamers: Google Wave RPGs

A very detailed Ars Technica post highlights that there’s a growing collection of Google Wave users who are using the medium to play wave-borne RPGs (role playing games). As mentioned in the post, there’s a even a Wave dedicated to serving as an index for all the Wave RPGs currently in existence, and the last time we counted it included upwards of 300 contributing members, and a combination of 30 different ideas or full-fledged games.

According to Jon Stokes, the author of the post, Google Wave is adequate for some RPGs, but it could certainly be improved to allow for a more enjoyable experience. In the excerpt below, Stokes describes the current RPG (RPG) experience within Google Wave:

“The few games I’m following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions (”table talk”), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn’t be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who’s added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.”

In researching his new book, Googled: the End of the World as We Know It, to be published next week by Penguin Press, author Ken Auletta had extensive access to the company’s inner workings and reported widely on its impact on the media landscape.

In a Fortune.com exclusive, he offers ten enduring lessons drawn from his journey into Google’s realm:

1. Passion wins

Start with the words of advice — “Don’t settle” — that Larry Page offered the Stanford graduating class in 2002. This intensity was revealed in the zeal with which he and Sergey Brin inspired the entire company to “serve the user,” to take more risks, to radically improve search.

Or as CEO Eric Schmidt told me: while he assumed that “Google would be an important company; the founders always assumed that Google would be a defining company.”

A moment after venture capitalist Michael Moritz finished describing Google as “a rare” company, I asked Moritz, an early investor in both Yahoo and Google, whether he felt the same enthusiasm for Yahoo.

He winced, hesitated, then finally said: “Yahoo is a company I’ve been close to for a long time and feel a lot of affection and loyalty towards. But within the first 18 months to two years of being associated with Google, I began to understand this was a very different company than Yahoo. It was rooted in the studies of the founders. Google was built on a foundation of Larry’s and Sergey’s intellectual pursuits. Yahoo was built on the foundations of Jerry’s and David’s interests. And there’s a big gulf between those two.”

That deficit of passion, he suggested, was a reason that Jerry Yang and David Filo chose not to be fully engaged full-time with the company they created.

2. Focus is required

Passion without focus can lead you astray. Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit and a Silicon Valley mentor who spends a couple of days each week at Google, thinks the key to Google’s success is “focused passion.” He credits Schmidt for bringing a focus to the founders.

In an interview with Betsy Morris of Fortune, Steve Jobs offered an interesting and, typically, upside-down perspective on focus: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the many things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”

Media mogul Barry Diller, who had an unsettling session with Page and Brin in the early days of Google, when Page would not look up from his PDA to talk to him, now thinks what might be construed as rudeness was really focus.

“They had their own method of communicating and processing,” Diller said. “They give much less quarter than other people do to common business courtesies. They’ve stayed true to this. It’s a spectacular strength. It means you never get de-focused by the crowd.”

3. Vision is required too

Without vision, even the most focused passion is a battery without a device. “Don’t be evil” is a vague incantation. But Page and Brin’s effort to make “all the world’s information available,”and to first and foremost serve users, is a vision.

It’s one that successfully drove Google to index the Web, make news and books searchable, treat ads as information and to reject dollars if the ads were not “relevant,” help users search for the best or cheapest products, find simple travel directions, store and search their e-mail, and share calendar information.

Such a vision does not come from survey research. In his 2005 speech to graduating engineers at the University of Michigan, Page told them they didn’t have to go to business school. He said he had read an entire shelf of business books when he was younger, and among the lessons he learned was that “many of the amazing insights that happen in business actually come from people who really aren’t in the business.”

4. A team culture is vital

Google’s allocation of 20% of employee time to projects of their own choice give them a sense of proprietorship. True to its open-source, wisdom-of-the-crowd ideals, Google has created a networked management that functions from the bottom-up as well as the top-down. In both directions, it unleashes ideas and effort.

As Larry Page astutely observes: “There is a pattern in companies, even in technological companies, that the people who do the work — the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers if you will — typically get rolled over by the management … you end up kind of demoralized. You want to have a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and the engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing.”

5. Treat engineers as kings

For most Valley companies, engineers are the equivalent of the television writer, the movie director, the book author. They are the creators. The 20% time Google grants its engineers gives them a sense that they are liberated to take risks, to follow their passions.

Innovation, as Bill Campbell told The McKinsey Quarterly, comes when “the crazy guys have stature, where engineers really are important…. empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.”

It is no accident that Page and Brin and Schmidt spend so many hours each week in meetings with engineers. For most traditional media companies, the engineer is less central.

However, as digital is now part of the mainstream, and as older media companies struggle to master its challenges, they would do well to heed the advice Google’s David Eun offers: Don’t do what these companies traditionally do and stick “the geeks in a corner.” Instead, CEO’s should have at their elbow “a top Chief Technical Officer.”

6. Treat customers like a king

An important reason Google is usually listed among the world’s most trusted brands is that it conveys a sense that the user comes first. Advertising may produce 97% of Google’s revenues, but to a user it doesn’t feel that way. Google services are free, and they’re user friendly, just as an iPod is.

The lessons Larry Page took away from reading Donald A. Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things while a graduate student at Stanford, helped shape Google’s approach to its customers. Or as Page said, “Having an attitude that your customer or users are always right, and your goal is to build systems that work for them in a natural way, is a good attitude to have.”

To understand how Google earned the trust of its users, go back to its 2004 IPO. Again and again it referred to the users as sacrosanct: “We believe that our user focus is the foundation of our success to date. We also believe that this focus is critical for the creation of long-term value. We do not intend to compromise our user focus for short-term economic gain.”

By focusing on the user, Page and Brin provided an organizing principle for Google employees that echoed Sam Walton’s adage: ” ‘If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.’”

7. Every company is a frenemy

What Lord Palmerston said of nations applies as well to corporations: There are no permanent allies, only permanent interests. A medium like the internet blurs the borders between companies, sometimes making it more difficult to sight a potential rival or to distinguish between ally and foe.

Google started as a search engine, but quickly realized it could efficiently sell ads or aggregate news or search books or use its infrastructure to create cloud computing or expand into video by acquiring YouTube or expand into mobile devices.

At the same time, Google’s AdSense helps newspapers by supplying them with ad dollars; AdWords partners with ad agencies to sell products; YouTube is a coveted promotional platform for the television networks; Android software supplies an operating system for more than a few mobile telephone companies.

These horizontal ambitions, coupled with the fears aroused by the speed of technological change, inevitably frays the bond of trust among companies. Most companies become frenemies, both cooperating and competing.

8. Don’t ignore the human factor

As a journalist, the deeper one burrows, the more complicated narratives and the people who populate them usually become. Among the enduring truths I keep bumping into when there is the luxury of time to get to know people or institutions, is that their decisions are often made for what are not, strictly speaking, reasons of logic. These can be ascribed to human factors. How to measure wisdom, judgment, sensitivity, relationships?

Google has been wise in winning the trust of its users, in building a team culture, and in thinking long-term. But when you start from a blanket assumption that the old ways of doing things are probably wrong, as Google does, you’re bound to make unwise mistakes.

Page was unwise to assume Google could immediately digitize all books, just as Google was wrong to assume that it could devise formulas to better sell ads for newspapers and broadcast radio, two efforts it has since abandoned. Google has not always been wise in avoiding battles, in being insensitive to copyright, or privacy, or the concerns of government.

9. There are no certitudes

Today, Google appears impregnable. But a decade ago so did AOL, and so did the combination of AOL Time Warner.

“There is nothing about their model that makes them invulnerable,” Clayton Christensen, the Harvard business historian and author of the seminal, The Innovators Dilemma, told me. “Think IBM. They had a 70% market share of mainframe computers. Then the government decided to challenge them. Then the PC emerged.”

Seemingly overnight, computing moved from mainframes to PCs. “Lots of companies are successful and are applauded by the financial community,” Christensen said. “Then their stock price stalls because they are no longer surprising investors with their growth. So they strive to grow but forget the principles that made them great — getting into the market quickly, not throwing money at the wrong thing. When you have so much money you become so patient that you wait too long. Look at Microsoft. No one can fault them for not investing in growth ideas. But none of these have grown up to be the next Windows.”

Maybe, Christensen added, we are now beginning to “see this at Google.” The company has poured money into YouTube and Android and cloud computing, but has yet “to figure out the business model for each.”

10. “Life is long but time is short.”

The words belong to Eric Schmidt, who explained: “Life is long in the sense that we have long memories. Time is short in that you have to move very quickly. But to me the most important thing to know is that life has a way of working things out. We forget so quickly what the problem was three or four years ago. So my personal view of life is that every problem is an opportunity.”

This is a reason to think and act boldly, as Google has, to take risks, and not to be anchored down by “long memories.”

In this context nothing can support you more than the profound knowledge of fundamental issues related to your work. But even if you know most of them it’s important to know how to name these concepts and how to refer to them once they appear in the conversation. Furthermore, it’s always useful to have some precise terms ready to hand once you might need them as an argument in your discussions.

In this article we present 30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood. What is the difference between readability and legibility? What exactly does 80/20 or Pareto principle mean? What is meant with minesweeping and satisficing? And what is Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation? OK, it’s time to dive in.

Usability: Rules and Principles

7±2 Principle

Since human brain has some limits on its capacity for processing information, it deals with complexity dividing information into chunks and units. According to George A. Miller’s studies humans’ short term memory can retain only about 5-9 things at one time. This fact is often used as an argument for limiting the number of options in navigation menus to 7; however there are heated debates about The Myth of “Seven, Plus or Minus 2?. Therefore it’s not clear how the 7±2 Principle can, could or should be applied to the Web. Miller’s studies.

2-Second-Rule

A loose principle that a user shouldn’t need to wait more than 2 seconds for certain types of system response, such as application-switching and application launch time. The choice of 2 seconds is somewhat arbitrary, but a reasonable order of magnitude. Reliable principle: the less users have to wait, the better is the user experience. [UF]

3-Click-Rule

According to this rule users stop using the site if they aren’t able to find the information or access the site feature within 3 mouse clicks. In other words, the rule emphasizes the importance of clear navigation, logical structure and easy-to-follow site hierarchy. In most situations the number of clicks is irrelevant; what is really important is that visitors always know where they are, where they were and where they can go next. Even 10 clicks are OK if users feel that they have a full understanding of how the system works.

80/20 Rule (The Pareto principle)

The Pareto principle (also known as the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes. This is the basic rule of thumb in business (”80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients”), but can also be applied to design and usability. For instance, dramatic improvements can often be achieved by identifying the 20% of users, customers, activities, products or processes that account for the 80% of contribution to profit and maximizing the attention applied to them. [Wikipedia]

Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

As a result of Interface Design Studies, Ben Shneiderman proposed a collection of principles that are derived heuristically from experience and applicable in most interactive systems. These principles are common for user interface design, and as such also for web design.

1. Strive for consistency.
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts.
3. Offer informative feedback.
4. Design dialog to yield closure.
5. Offer simple error handling.
6. Permit easy reversal of actions.
7. Provide the sense of control. Support internal locus of control.
8. Reduce short-term memory load.

You can learn more details about Shneiderman’s Rules For Design in Wikipedia: Shneiderman’s rules for design.

Fitts’ Law

Published by Paul Fitts in 1954, Fitts’ law is a model of human movement which predicts the time required to rapidly move to a target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. The law is usually applied to the movement of the mouse visitors have to perform to get from point A to point B. For instance, the rule can be important to place the content areas in a more usable way to maximize their accessibility and improve click rates.

Inverted Pyramid

The inverted pyramid is a writing style where the summary of the article is presented in the beginning of the article. This approach makes use of the “waterfall effect” well-known in journalism where writers try to give their readers an instant idea about the topic they’re reporting. The article begins with a conclusion, followed by key points and finally the minor details such as background information. Since web users want instant gratification, the inverted pyramid style, as supported by Nielsen, is important for web writing and for better user experience.

Satisficing

Web users don’t prefer optimal ways to find the information they’re looking for. They aren’t interested in the most reasonable and sound solution to their problem. Instead they permanently scan for quick’n’dirty-solutions which are “good enough”. Applied to Web, satisficing describes exactly this approach: users settle with a solution to a problem that is “good enough” — even if alternative solutions can better fulfill their requirements in a long run. [I-D]

Psychology Behind Usability

Baby-Duck-Syndrome

Baby Duck Syndrome describes the tendency for visitors to stick to the first design they learn and judge other designs by their similarity to that first design. The result is that users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems. This results in the usability problems most re-designs have: users, get used with previous designs, feel uncomfortable with new site structure they have to find their way through.

Banner-Blindness

Web users tend to ignore everything that looks like advertisement and, what is interesting, they’re pretty good at it. Although advertisement is noticed, it is almost always ignored. Since users have constructed web related schemata for different tasks on the Web, when searching for specific information on a website, they focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks. Large colourful or animated banners and other graphics are in this case ignored.

Cliffhanger-Effect (Zeigarnik-Effect)

Human beings can’t stand uncertainty. We tend to find answers to unanswered questions we are interested in as soon as possible. Cliffhanger-effects are based upon this fact; movies, articles and plots with Cliffhanger-effect have an abrupt ending, often leaving with a sudden shock revelation or difficult situation. The effect is often used in advertisement: asking the visitors unanswered and provocative questions advertisers often tend to force them to read the ad, click on the banner or follow a link.

Found out by Bluma W. Zeigarnik in 1927, this effect establishes an emotional connection with readers and is extremely effective in terms of marketing. Visitors can better remember what the ad is about and even smallest details are stored more clearly and precisely. In Web writing the Cliffhanger-effect is also used to bound the visitors to a web-site (e.g. “Grab our RSS-Feed to ensure you don’t miss the second part of the article!”).

Gestalt principles of form perception

These principles are the fundamental rules of human psychology in terms of human-computer-interaction-design.

* The law of proximity posits that when we perceive a collection of objects, we will see objects close to each other as forming a group.
* The law of similarity captures the idea that elements will be grouped perceptually if they are similar to each other.
* The Law of Prägnanz (figure-ground) captures the idea that in perceiving a visual field, some objects take a prominent role (the figures) while others recede into the background (the ground).
* The law of symmetry captures the idea that when we perceive objects we tend to perceive them as symmetrical shapes that form around their centre.
* The law of closure posits that we perceptually close up, or complete, objects that are not, in fact, complete. Ibm in 30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of. We perceive the letters ‘I’, ‘B’, and ‘M’ although the shapes we see, in fact, are only lines of white space of differing length hovering above each other. Source.

You can find more information in the article Gestalt principles of form perception

The Self-Reference Effect

Self-reference effect is particularly important for web writing and can dramatically improve the communication between authors and readers. Things that are connected to our personal concept are remembered better than those which aren’t directly connected to us. For instance, after reading an article users better remember the characters, stories or facts they had personal experience with. In Usability the self-reference effect is usually used in terms of web writing and content presented on a web-site.

Usability Glossary: Terms and Concepts

Eye-Tracking

Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (”where we are looking”) or the motion of an eye relative to the head. eye tracking monitor records every eye movement and highlights the most active areas on the site visually. Eye-tracking studies can help to estimate how comfortable web users are with the web-site they’re browsing through and how quickly they can understand the structure and system behind it. You can find some interesting usability findings from recent eye-tracking study Eyetrack07.

Fold

The fold is defined as the lowest point where a web-site is no longer visible on the screen. The position of the fold is, of course, defined by the screen resolution of your visitor. The region above the fold (also called screenful) describes the region of a page that is visible without scrolling. Since the fold is seen directly without scrolling, it is often considered as the area which guarantees the highest possible ad click rates and revenues. However, Fold area isn’t that important. [Usability.gov]

Foveal viewport (Foveal area)

The fovea, a part of human’s eye, is responsible for sharp central vision, which is necessary in humans for reading, watching television or movies, driving, and any activity where visual detail is of primary importance. Foveal area is a small wide space area where your eyes are aimed at and it is the only area where you can perceive the maximum level of detail. Foveal area is a tight area of about two degrees of visual field or two thumbnails held in front of your eyes. This is the place where you’d like to deliver the most important messages of your visitors.

Foveal viewport is important, because outside of this wide screen area how your visitors see your web-pages change dramatically. Inside this area is the only part of your vision with the maximal resolution – only here no eye scanning is necessary. [Source]

Gloss

Gloss is an automated action that provides hints and summary information on where the link refers to and where it will take the user once it’s clicked. Hints can be provided via title-attribute of links. From the usability point of view users want to have the full control over everything what is happening on a web-site; clear and precise explanations of internal and outgoing links, supported by sound anchor text, can improve the usability of a web-site.

Graceful Degradation (Fault-tolerance)

Graceful Degradation is the property of a web-site to present its content and its basic features even if some of its components (partly or at all) can’t be displayed or used. In practice it means that web-sites display their content in every possible “fault” scenario and can be used in every configuration (browser, plug-ins, connection, OS etc.) the visitor might have. “Power-users” are still offered a full, enhanced version of the page. For instance, it’s typical to offer alternatives for Multimedia-content (for instance image) to ensure that the content can be perceived if images can’t be displayed. [Wikipedia]

Granularity

Granularity is the degree to which a large, usually complex data set or information has been broken down into smaller units.

Hotspot

Hotspots are clickable site areas which change their form or/and outer appearance once they are clicked. This is typical for :focus-effects when a link or any other site element is clicked.

Legibility

Legibility indicates how clear the text is visually.

Minesweeping

Minesweeping stands for user interactions which aim to identify the links on a web-site. In most cases minesweeping is a clear alarm signal for usability problems. Usually minesweeping involves the user rapidly moving the cursor or pointer over a page, watching to see where the cursor or pointer changes to indicate the presence of a link. [Usability.gov]

Mystery-Meat Navigation (MMN)

In Web mystery-meat navigation describes designs in which it is extremely difficult for users to recognize the destinations of navigational hyperlinks — or determine where the hyperlinks are.

Physical consistency

This concept describes the consistent outer appearance of a web-site – e.g. the position of logos, navigation, the use of graphic elements and typography. Physical consistency is essential for better orientation and effective site navigation.

Progressive Enhancement (PE)

Progressive Enhancement is a design strategy in which sites are created in a layered fashion — from the basic functionality for all browsers to the additional, enhanced features for modern browsers. The main advantage of progressive enhancement lies in its “universal usability” — i.e. the fact that it allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection, while also providing those with better bandwidth or more advanced browser software an enhanced version of the page. [Wikipedia]

Readability

Readability describes the degree to which the meaning of text is understandable, based on the complexity of sentences and the difficulty of vocabulary. Indexes for readability usually rank usability by the age or grade level required for someone to be able to readily understand a reading passage. Readability is not legibility. [Usability Glossary]

User-centered design (UCD)

User-centered design is a design philosophy in which users, their needs, interests and behavior define the foundation of web-site in terms of site structure, navigation and obtaining the information. UCD is considered as a standard approach for modern web-applications, particularly due to the rise of user generated content. In Web 2.0 visitors have to be motivated to participate and therefore need conditions optimized for their needs.

Vigilance (sustained attention)

Vigilance is the ability to sustain attention during prolonged, monotonous tasks such as proofreading a text looking for spelling errors, reminding of appointments, auto-saving word processor documents etc. In modern web-applications vigilance tasks are performed in background, automatically and thus improve the usability of the service. [I-D]

Walk-Up-And-Use Design

A Walk-up-and-use design is self-explanatory and intuitive, so that first-time or one-time users can use it effectively without any prior introduction or training. [I-D]

Wireframe

A wireframe is a basic structure — skeleton — of a site that describes the ideas, concepts and site structure of a web-site. Wireframes can be designed as presentations which explain to the stake holders how the site is designed, which functionality it offers and how users can accomplish their tasks. Wireframes usually don’t have any visual elements or a complete page layouts; they are often first drafts and sketches designers create on paper.

While sipping a cup of organically farmed, artisan-brewed tea, I tap on my gigabit-wireless-connected tablet, to pull up a 3D movie on the razor-thin HDTV hanging on the wall. A media server streams the film via a superspeedy USB connection to a wireless HD transmitter, which then beams it to the TV.

That actor–who was he? My augmented-reality contact lenses pick up the unique eye motion I make when I have a query, which I then enter on a virtual keyboard that appears in the space in front of me. Suddenly my field of vision is covered with a Web page showing a list of the actor’s movies, along with some embedded video clips.

These technologies will come to life in the distant future, right? Future, yes. Distant, no.

Speed and content (much of it video) will be paired consistently across mobile, laptop, desktop, and home-entertainment systems. New ways of using video–including adding 3D depth or artificial visual overlays–will require more speed, storage, and computational power.

In our preview of technologies that are well on their way to reality, we look at the connective tissue of USB 3.0, 802.11ac, and 802.11ad for moving media–especially video–faster; at HTML5 for displaying video and content of all kinds consistently across all our devices; at augmented reality to see how the digital world will stretch into our physical reality by overlaying what we see with graphics and text; and at 3D TV, which will add image depth and believability to the experience of watching TV.

USB3

USB may be one of the least-sexy technologies built into present-day computers and mobile devices, but speed it up tenfold, and it begins to sizzle. Cut most of the other cables to your computer, and the standard ignites. Bring in the potential of uncompressed video transfer, and you have a raging fire.

Any task that involves transferring data between your PC and a peripheral device–scanning, printing, or transferring files, among others–will be far faster with USB 3.0. In many cases, the transfer will be complete before you realize it has started.

The 3.0 revision of USB, dubbed SuperSpeed by the folks who control testing and licensing at the USB Implementors Forum (USB-IF), is on track to deliver more than 3.2 gigabits per second (gbps) of actual throughput. That transfer rate will make USB 3.0 five to ten times faster than other standard desktop peripheral standards, except some flavors of DisplayPort and the increasingly out-of-favor eSATA.

In addition, USB 3.0 can shoot full-speed data in both directions at the same time, an upgrade from 2.0′s “half duplex” (one direction at a time) rates. USB 3.0 jacks will accept 1.0 and 2.0 plug ends for backward compatibility, but 3.0 cables will work only with 3.0 jacks.

This technology could be a game-changer for device connectivity. A modern desktop computer today may include jacks to accommodate ethernet, USB 2.0, FireWire 400 or 800 (IEEE 1394a or 1394b) or both, DVI or DisplayPort or both, and–on some–eSATA. USB 3.0 could eliminate all of these except ethernet. In their place, a computer may have several USB 3.0 ports, delivering data to monitors, retrieving it from scanners, and exchanging it with hard drives. The improved speed comes at a good time, as much-faster flash memory drives are in the pipeline.

USB 3.0 is fast enough to allow uncompressed 1080p video (currently our highest-definition video format) at 60 frames per second, says Jeff Ravencraft, president and chair of the USB-IF. That would enable a camcorder to forgo video compression hardware and patent licensing fees for MPEG-4. The user could either stream video live from a simple camcorder (with no video processing required) or store it on an internal drive for later rapid transfer; neither of these methods is feasible today without heavy compression. Citing 3.0′s versatility, some analysts see the standard as a possible complement–or even alternative–to the consumer HDMI connection found on today’s Blu-ray players.

The new USB flavor could also turn computers into real charging stations. Whereas USB 2.0 can produce 100 milliamperes (mA) of trickle charge for each port, USB 3.0 ups that quantity to 150mA per device. USB 2.0 tops out at 500mA for a hub; the maximum for USB 3.0 is 900mA.

With mobile phones moving to support USB as the standard plug for charging and syncing (the movement is well underway in Europe and Asia), and with U.S. carriers having recently committed to doing the same, the increased amperage of USB 3.0 might let you do away with wall warts (AC adapters) of all kinds.

In light of the increased importance and use of USB in its 3.0 version, future desktop computers may very well have two internal hubs, with several ports easily accessible in the front to act as a charging station. Each hub could have up to six ports and support the full amperage. Meanwhile, laptop machines could multiply USB ports for better charging and access on the road. (Apple’s Mac Mini already includes five USB 2.0 ports on its back.)

The higher speed of 3.0 will accelerate data transfers, of course, moving more than 20GB of data per minute. This will make performing backups (and maintaining offsite backups) of increasingly large collections of images, movies, and downloaded media a much easier job.

Possible new applications for the technology include on-the-fly syncs and downloads (as described in the case study above). The USB-IF’s Ravencraft notes that customers could download movies at the gas pump at of a filling station. “With high-speed USB [2.0], you couldn’t have people waiting in line at 15 minutes a crack to download a movie,” Ravencraft says.

Manufacturers are poised to take advantage of USB 3.0, and analysts predict mass adoption of the standard on computers within a couple of years. The format will be popular in mobile devices and consumer electronics, as well. Ravencraft says that manufacturers currently sell more than 2 billion devices with built-in USB each year, so there’s plenty of potential for getting the new standard out fast.

Video Streaming Over Wi-Fi

Wired ethernet has consistently achieved higher data speeds than Wi-Fi, but wireless standards groups are constantly trying to figure out ways to help Wi-Fi catch up. By 2012, two new protocols–802.11ac and 802.11ad–should be handling over-the-air data transmission at 1 gbps or faster.

As a result, future users can have multiple high-definition video streams and gaming streams active across a house and within a room. Central media servers, Blu-ray players, and other set-top boxes can sit anywhere in the home, streaming content to end devices in any location. For example, an HD video display, plugged in with just a power cord, can stand across the room from a Blu-ray player, satellite receiver, or computer–no need for expensive, unsightly cables.

The 802.11ac and 802.11ad standards should be well suited for home use, though their applications will certainly extend far beyond the home. The names reflect the internal method of numbering that the engineering group IEEE uses: 802 for networking, 11 for wireless, and one or more letters in sequence for specific task groups (that’s how we got 802.11a, b, g, h, n, and others).

The 802.11ac standard will update 802.11n, the latest and greatest of a decade’s worth of wireless local area networking (WLAN) technology that began with 802.11b. With 802.11ac, wireless networking performance will leap from a theoretical top speed of 600 mbps to a nominal maximum of more than 1 gbps. In practice, the net data carried by 802.11ac will be likely be between 300 mbps and 400 mbps–more than enough capacity to carry multiple compressed video streams over a single channel simultaneously. Or users may assign individual streams running on unique frequencies to a number of separate channels. Like 802.11n, 802.11ac will use many antennas for receiving and sending data wirelessly.

The 802.11ac flavor still won’t have the capacity to carry lossless high-definition video (video that retains the full fidelity and quality of the raw source), however. Today, lossless video is common over wired connections after decompression or decoding of a data stream from a satellite, cable, or disc. The right hardware will be able to take the 802.11ac compressed data stream and send it directly to a decoder in an HDTV set; some HD sets already have this capability today. But when uncompressed video has to stream at a rate faster than 1 gbps, a speedier format must be used.

That’s where 802.11ad comes in. It abandons the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands of the spectrum (where today’s Wi-Fi works) to the newly available 60GHz spectrum. Because the 60GHz spectrum has an ocean of frequencies available in most countries–including in the United States–you’ll be able to use multiple distinct channels to carry more than 1 gbps of uncompressed video each.

Unfortunately, the millimeter-long waves that make up 60GHz signals penetrate walls and furniture poorly, and oxygen readily absorbs the waves’ energy. So 802.11ad is best suited for moving data across short distances between devices in the same room. Apart from supporting fast video transfers, 802.11ad will permit you to move files or sync data between devices at speeds approaching that of USB 3.0–and 1000 times faster than Bluetooth 2.

The 802.11ad spec is one of three competing ideas for using the 60GHz band of the spectrum. The Wireless HD trade group, a consortium of consumer electronics firms, is focusing on video use of the 60GHz band, while the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) is looking at networking and consumer uses. Membership in the various groups overlaps, making an interoperable and perhaps unified spec possible. Though 802.11ad doesn’t specifically address video, it will be a generic technology that can accommodate many kinds of data. At a minimum, each group will work to prevent interference with one another’s purposes.

The combination of 802.11ac and 802.11ad, coupled with USB 3.0, will allow you to position clusters of computer equipment and entertainment hardware around your home. USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet might connect devices located in a cabinet or on a desk; 802.11ac will link clusters across a home; and 802.11ad will carry data to mobile devices, displays, and other gear within a room.

Allen Huotari, the technical leader at Cisco Consumer Products (which now includes Linksys products and ships millions of Wi-Fi and ethernet devices each year) says that the change in home networks won’t result from “any one single technology in the home, but rather a pairing of technologies or a trio of technologies–wired and/or wireless–for the backbone and the wireless on the edges.”

This means fewer wires and cables, better speeds, and higher-quality video playback than anything possible today. By 2012, both specifications should be readily available.

3D TV

When television makers introduced HDTVs, it was inevitable that they would figure out a way to render the technology obsolete not long after everyone bought a set. And they have. The next wave in home viewing is 3DTV–a 2D picture with some stereoscopic depth.

As 3D filmmaking and film projection technology have improved, Hollywood has begun building a (still small) library of depth-enhanced movies. The potential to synthesize 2D movies into 3D could feed demand, however–the way colorizing technology increased interest in black-and-white films in some circles in the 1980s. For movies based on computer animation–such as Toy Story 3D, a newly rendered version of the first two movies in the series–it’s already happening.

The promise of 3D is a more immersive, more true-to-life experience, and substantively different from almost anything you’ve watched before. In commercial theaters, 3D projection typically involves superimposing polarized or distinctly colored images on each frame and then having viewers wear so-called “passive” glasses that reveal different images to each eye. The brain synthesizes the two images into a generally convincing notion of depth.

In contrast, 3D at home will almost certainly rely on alternating left and right views for successive frames. HDTVs that operate at 120Hz (that is, 120 cycles of refresh per second) are broadly available, so the ability to alternate left and right eye images far faster than the human eye can follow already exists. Fundamental industry standards are in place to allow such recording, says Alfred Poor, an analyst with GigaOm and the author of the Web site HDTV Almanac.

Viewing 3DTV displays will require “active” glasses that use rapidly firing shutters to alternate the view into each eye. Active glasses are expensive today, but their price will drop as 3D rolls out. Meanwhile, designers are in the development phase of producing a 3D set that doesn’t require the glasses.

Sony and Panasonic have announced plans to produce 3D-capable displays, and Panasonic recently demonstrated a large-screen version that the company expects to ship in 2010. As happened when HDTVs rolled out, premium 3DTVs will appear first, followed by progressively more-affordable models.

Creating and distributing enough 3D content to feed consumers’ interest may be more of an challenge. Poor noted that filmmakers are currently making or adapting only a handful of features each year for 3D. But techniques to create “synthetic 3D” versions of existing films (using various tracking, focus, and pattern cues for splitting images) could fill the gap.

Existing terrestrial cable and IPTV networks should be able to distribute 3D content. The bandwidth that such networks use to deliver typical HD broadcasts will be adequate for delivering 3D video once the networks upgrade to newer video compression techniques. Satellite may face a more difficult road, since such systems already use the best levels of compression.

For physical media playback, Blu-ray can store the data needed, and 3D Blu-ray players are already on the drawing board. No fundamental changes in Blu-ray will be necessary, so the trade group that created the standard is focusing compatibility–such as ensuring that a 2D TV can play a 3D disc.

Standards issues might not end up being very troublesome, so long as the 3DTVs are flexible enough. An industry group is working on setting some general parameters, much as digital TV was broken up into 480, 720, and 1080 formats, along with progressive and interlaced versions. A 3DTV may need to support multiple formats, but all will involve alternating images and a pair of shutter-based glasses.

Poor expects that 3DTV will be but a minor upgrade to existing HDTV sets. The upgraded sets will need a modified display controller that alternates images 60 per second for each eye, as well as an infrared or wireless transmitter to send synchronization information to the 3D glasses.

“Augmented Reality” in Mobile Devices

In Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash, “gargoyles” are freelance intelligence gatherers who have wired themselves to see (through goggles that annotate all of their experiences) a permanent overlay of data on top of the physical world. In less immersive fashion, we may all become gargoyles as “augmented reality” becomes an everyday experience.

Augmented reality is a catchall term for overlaying what we see with computer-generated contextual data or visual substitutions. The point of the technology is to enhance our ability to interact with things around us by providing us with information immediately relevant to those things.

At work, you might walk around the office and see the name and department of each person you pass painted on them–along with a graphical indicator showing what tasks you owe them or they owe you. Though many case scenarios involve “heads-up” displays embedded in windshields or inside eyeglasses, the augmented reality we have today exists primarily on the “heads-down” screens of smartphones.

Several companies have released programs that overlay position- and context-based data onto a continuous video camera feed. The data comes from various radios and sensors built into modern smartphones, including GPS radios (for identifying position by satellite data), accelerometers (for measuring changes in speed and orientation), and magnetometers (for finding position relative to magnetic north).

In an application called Nearest Places, the names and locations of subway stops, parks, museums, restaurants, and other places of interest are shown on top of an iPhone’s video feed. As you walk or turn, the information changes to overlay your surroundings.

“Smartphones and the related apps are the trailblazers for augmented reality,” says Babak Parviz, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in nanotechnology. “In the short to medium term, my guess is that they will dominate the field.”

Other prototype applications display information dropped at particular coordinates as 3D models that the user can walk around, or as animations whose details update in 3D relative to the user’s position. But the technology for those apps isn’t ripe yet; handhelds require a more-precise positioning mechanism in order to handle that kind of data insertion. Fortunately, each smartphone generation seems to include more and better sensors.

In other realms, augmented reality may serve to provide not just additional information, but enhanced vision. One day, infrared cameras mounted on the front of a car will illuminate a far-away object represented as a bright-as-day image on an in-windshield display. Radar signals and wireless receivers will detect and display cars that are out of sight; and one piece of glass will host GPS and traffic reporting.

Leaping past displays, Parviz and his team are working on ways to put the display directly on the eyeball. They’re trying to develop a technology for embedding video circuitry into wearable contact lenses. While wearing such contact lenses, you would see a continuous, context-based data feed overlaid on your field of vision.

Before Parviz’s lenses become a reality, augmented reality is likely to become a routine navigation and interaction aid on mobile devices. In addition, game developers may use the technology to overlay complete digital game environments over the reality that gamers see around them.

HTML5

Hulk VI was great, but w  hat should you watch this evening? Before heading off to work in the morning, you click to some trailers on a movie Website, but you don’t have time to watch many. So you use your mobile phone to snap a picture of the 2D barcode on one of the videos; the phone’s browser then takes you to the same site. On the commuter train to the office, you watch the previews over a 4G cell phone connection. A few of the movies have associated games that you try out on your phone, too.

Remember when every Website had a badge that read “optimized for Netscape Navigator” or “requires Internet Explorer 4″? In the old days, people made Web pages that worked best with–or only with–certain browsers. To some extent, they still do.

The new flavor of the HTML–the standard program for writing Web pages–is called HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language version 5); and HTML5 aims to put that practice to bed for good.

Specifically, HTML5 may do away with the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins. It will allow designers to create Websites that work essentially the same on every browser–whether on a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device–and it will give users a better, faster, richer Web experience.

Instead of leaving each browser maker to rely on a combination of its in-house technology and third-party plug-ins for multimedia, HTML5 requires that the browser have built-in methods for audio, video, and 2D graphics display. Patent and licensing issues cloud the question of which audio and video formats will achieve universal support, but companies have plenty of motivation to work out those details.

In turn, Website designers and Web app developers won’t have to deal with multiple incompatible formats and workarounds in their efforts to create the same user experience in every browser.

This is an especially valuable advance for mobile devices, as their browsers today typically have only limited multimedia support. The iPhone’s Safari browser, for example, doesn’t handle Adobe Flash–even though Flash is a prime method of delivering video content across platforms and browsers.

“It’ll take a couple of years to roll out, but if all the browser companies are supporting video display with no JavaScript [for compatibility handling], just the video tag and no plug-in, then there’s no downside to using a mobile device,” says Jeffrey Zeldman, a Web designer and leading Web standards guru. “Less and less expert users will have better and better experiences.”

Makers of operating systems and browsers appear to be falling into line behind HTML5. Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, and WebKit (the development package that underlies many mobile and desktop programs), among others, are all moving toward HTML5 support.

For its part, Microsoft says that Internet Explorer 8 will support only parts of HTML5. But Microsoft may not want to risk having its Internet Explorer browser lose more market share by resisting HTML5 in the face of consensus among the other OS and browser makers.

HTML5 is now completing its last march toward a final draft and official support by the World Wide Web Consortium.

On one hand, many Web designers don’t understand information architecture’s role within Web design. Designers think that information architects are the people who keep trying to organize everything. On the other hand, many information architects underestimate the Web designer’s role within a project. Information architects think they should write the site specification and that designers should code it.

One consequence of this misunderstanding is that information architecture and Web design are often considered mutually exclusive. Information architecture involves organizing, structuring and labeling; Web design involves technical development and visual design. In turn, Web designers have been led to believe that they’re restricted to doing what they’ve always done and should leave the information architecture to the information architects. This does not have to happen.

While it’s true that everything in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web cannot be learned in a day, there are several information architecture techniques that Web designers can easily learn and apply to all of their projects. This involves looking at information architecture as an extension of Web design. This perspective has several advantages:

* It virtually eliminates the “us vs. them” ideology, which usually ends up hurting both disciplines.
* It doesn’t place boundaries around the roles. Instead, it treats the roles as a continuum.
* It allows Web designers to realize that they know more about information architecture than they think.
* It helps Web designers transition from that role to an information architecture role more easily.

To put this idea into practice, we’ll look at three common Web design tasks (navigation, layout and code) and extend them into the realm of information architecture.

Navigation

Let’s start with navigation, one of the most loved and hated aspects of Web design. As individual pages are added to the site, it’s very difficult for a Web designer to resist immediately grouping those pages into categories that make sense–to the designer. The problem with this, as many of you know, is that the visitor often doesn’t share the same mental model of the site content and may not realize that what they’re looking for is not in the current area that they’re browsing.

As a preliminary exercise, it’s perfectly fine to group the pages into categories in order to develop a navigation scheme. But after this exercise, you should ask some potential users of the site to do a card sort. A card sort is an exercise used to find out how people group things, and what names they give those groups. It’s as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Write down the names of all your pages on pieces of paper.
2. Ask the participant to group them, creating subgroups if necessary.
3. Ask the participant to name the groups.

After moderating several card sorts, patterns will begin to emerge that will help you to find a dominant organization scheme.

Here’s how to make the extension. After you know what content your site will contain, do a card sort with at least several potential users of the site. Afterwards, you’ll have what information architects call a taxonomy, a hierarchical classification scheme. This taxonomy will prove extremely valuable when deciding on your navigation labels and the site maps for your site.

Layout

Next, let’s look at layouts, which have long been an important aspect of Web design. The prominence of the layout has led many Web designers to become very proficient at moving page sections around in Photoshop. Circa 1996, this was sufficient for most projects, and still is to some degree. But for multi-national sites with large and diverse user bases, Web designers need to develop more than just a page layout. They need to develop a page schematic or wireframe.

Wireframes describe the contents of the page through the use of a grayscale block-level diagram. They can range in level of detail, but typically show the location of content, images, navigation and other functionality on the page. It sounds a lot like laying out a page in Photoshop at first, but because it’s inherently focused on information rather than visual design, it’s a valuable tool for examining the relationships between information, content and groups of content.

Here’s how to make the extension. Before you start designing a layout in Photoshop, create a wireframe using software such as Visio or OmniGraffle. You’ll find that it will help you to think more analytically about the content before deciding what color it should be.

So now you have your navigation and site map, enhanced after performing several card sorts with users. You also have your layout and visual design, greatly assisted through the use of wireframes. All done, right? Well, it wouldn’t be a Web site unless we built it, now, would it?

Code

Yes, we’ve reached that point where we need to start coding. What could information architecture possibly add at this point? Well, if you’re a standards-savvy Web designer, it can add a whole lot.

As a Web designer with a keen understanding of Web standards, you know how to create a Web site using W3C compliant HTML and CSS. You also understand the importance of HTML that is semantically structured; that is, using h1 elements for headers, p elements for paragraphs, etc. Finally, you know that semantics can survive across multiple layers of development–from HTML to CSS to the visual design. What you may not know is that just by applying this knowledge, you’re already thinking much like an information architect.

Many of the usability issues I discover nowadays can be very subtle indeed, difficult to describe even, let alone write guidelines for, but I’ve collected together a list of 10 of the most common usability issues I find so that you can see how your site measures up.

1. No Search Results Found

It can be difficult to “test” the search engine on your site, you enter “apples” and find apples… there.. done. But frequently when I actually try to work out what customers are searching for I end up with the dreaded “No Results Found” page. I would argue that there is no excuse for ever showing no results no matter how odd the search. Go to your web site and really use the search engine for once and see if it ever returns no
results.

Some suggestions

• Given that people are using the search engine, you can assume that people are looking for something
  so why not at least show the last 5 things searched for, or the 5 most popular products or pages?
• Does your internal search engine know what to do with synonyms? Will it find the same items for “ipod”
  and “i-pod”? If not you need to do some work.
• At a presentation a long time ago by the tech guys from BBC search, they showed how they’d implement
  what they call “Best Bets”. It was a great if simple idea in which they’d identified items they’d expect
  people to want if they typed a certain word into a certain section of the web site at a certain time.
  These “best bets” were returned along with the usual search results.
• Make sure you have at your disposal the list of search terms used on your site that returned no search
  results and do something about that.

2. Somewhere To Go Next

When designing web sites, it’s tempting to think of them as a tree structure, with categories being branches or departments and the individual pages being the leaves, but it’s not. The visitors to your web site rarely use it as you designed it, often landing on a page deep in the site missing the home page altogether. Often the page a visitor will not contain the information they need but because this page has been designed as a destination (or leaf) rather than as a step in a journey and have nowhere to go next. It’s then tempting to assume that your site navigation will encourage visitors to explore further, but some recent recent research found that many web users are “navigation blind”, passing as little heed to site navigation as they do banner ads. Having somewhere to go next also usefully avoids the reduction in sales in what Jared Spool amusingly calls “The Back Button of Death”.

Some suggestions

• Create landing pages that meet your customers needs rather than arguing with colleagues about who
  has most prominence on your home page.
• Don’t assume that your site navigation will be used. Think about the linkages between your content
  rather than the categories.
• Design and author the relationships or the “journey” rather than the structure of your site.
• As an exercise, look at your site without the main navigation. Is it still navigable?
• Add extra inline links where appropriate. No content is an island.

3. Facetted Search Results

Search results and product listing pages are often arbitrarily chunked into say 10 or 20 items? It may return 3 or 4 hundred matches or more, too many results to read really. One of the easiest ways you can improve your site is to add search filters or “facets” to your search engine so that when people search, the attributes of the items found can be used to easily further drill down on what they are looking for. The example below from the Delia Smith web site shows how a search for “chicken” can
be easily further filtered using the “Also found in” links at the right hand side.

4. Default Actions

On many sites you have a main task you are trying to achieve, whether it’s finding a present for someone or buying a train ticket. All these sites break down these tasks into separate screens but often fail to make it clear what THE ONE THING you should do on a particular page. Amazon do a great job of designing buttons that are the “Default Action”. There are other buttons on the page, but it is always obvious which is the button you should click next to achieve your task. The Amazon screen below has lots of things I could do (Change quantities, add gift wrapping etc.) but the “Place your order” button really stands out well. Now go to your web site
and see if it is visually clear what you want your visitors to do.

5. The 1, 2, 3 of Design Purpose

So many sites fail on this one. You’d be amazed but often, the owners of a web site haven’t actually even decided what the purpose of their web site is, they have a web site because everyone else has one or because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Given the way we all use the web, I reckon you probably have roughly 3 milliseconds to convince someone that your web site is where they should be. This is how I break down
that precious moment for a first time visitor…

1. Am I in the right place? Does your company name or strap line peripherally assure people that they
   are in the right place? Are the images used helpful?
2. Am I convinced by this site? Does what’s on screen or deeper in the site, reinforce the customers
   credibility of your company as they explore what you have to offer? Visitors are looking to be convinced so are you
   doing all you have to convince them?
3. What should I do now? What is the ONE THING you people to do? Is it to call you, or to buy something
   or to sign up or to remember you or what? Tell them to do that thing. Make it clear how to do that thing. Make
   the design focus on doing that one thing.

Go to your site and see if you can visually and conceptually recognize the 1, 2, 3 in your design.

6. Chocolate Box Syndrome

Human beings put things in categories, we can’t help it, but categories are also where lots of problems arise. For example, imagine that a web site, like life, was a box of chocolates and categorized thus…

• Soft centres
• Hard centres
• Ones that nobody likes

I wouldn’t want to choose which category to click, but in general I have a very clear idea of which type of chocolate I’d like. Whether or not you should categorize chocolates like this or not is something you’d need to test using card-sorting techniques with your customers but the usability of these categories can be significantly improved by showing some of the items in it.

So, the above example might be changed to look like this…

• Soft centres (23)
• Hard centres (4)
• Ones that nobody likes(4)

..which at least gives us some clue as to what the arbitrary categories contain in terms of
numbers. But it may be better served by showing it’s contents with a fuller description, like
this…

• Soft centres (dark chocolate orange creme, strawberry creme, coffee truffle more
• Hard centres (butterscotch toffee, hazelnut crunch, caramel more
• Ones that nobody likes ( turkish delight, crystallized ginger, praline more

Given that I prefer dark chocolate over milk, I am able to be encouraged into clicking, maybe going straight to the item I’d like (the “dark chocolate orange”) and not wonder if the caramel is one of those nice gooey ones. When a category, such as “Soft Centre” reveals some of its contents, it helps us to better understand the parameters of the category. And given, in most cases, we’d like to know what we are going to get before we get it, because a category (or link) reveals some of it’s contents we are more likely to be tempted into clicking it. Now visit your site and assess whether the categories you use “reveal their contents” or not.

7. The Anxiety Test (why, why, why?)

This is a really easy test to run. It helps if you drink way too much strong coffee first. All you have to do is use your site and imagine worrying nervously and endlessly about every element on every page. For example, in the registration process, you could imagine worrying…

• Why do they want my address? Will they send me junk mail though the post?
• Will you sell my address?
• I wonder if you’ll call round when I haven’t tidied up a bit?
• What if I’m moving house next week? Can I change it later?
• Is this my credit card address or where I’m living now? Will this checkout process break?
• I don’t know my post code yet, does this matter?
• Is “rd” OK or should I type “road”
• Do I really have to fill all these address fields?

Particularly for form items, where possible, it is reasonable to tell people what the implications of giving up some information are, why you need it and in what format you’d ideally like it. This puts people at ease with your site because it…

• calms anxieties and makes people more likely to buy
• reduces the errors people tend to make, creating a better experience
• sets expectations and helps to build trust

8. 404 Page Not Found

This is a simple test too. Add some random characters at the end of your URL and hit return and see what you get. What can you say? Sometimes people will link to you and get the URL completely wrong. It happens. Why not accept that it’s going to happen and design for it. Don’t think of your 404 page as simply an error page, think of it as a page from which people should be able to get to the page they really wanted.

9. Newsletter Honesty

This test is related to both The Anxiety Test and The Chocolate Box Syndrome. Many sites offer the option to sign up for an email newsletter without telling the visitor…

• What the newsletter contains
• How frequent the newsletters are
• What you are going to do with their email address
  Given that most people are precious about their email In Tray. Does your site?
• Show examples of previous newsletters so that people can assess whether or not it is the type of thing
  they’d like to receive. If not why not?
• Is it honest about how often you send out the newsletter? Is it once a day, week, season?
• Do you state clearly what you will do with their email address?

10. Page Titles

I still occasionally find sites where every page share the same title. Not the title as it appear inside the window, but in the window bar. It’s not as common a mistake as it used to be but it’s still happening. Page titles are hugely important to the usability of your customers browser bookmarks but also hugely important with regards to how Google works and how people find you. So, perform the test of …What does your site look like in Google search results? For many people this is the one chance you
have to convince them that your site is worth visiting. They don’t get to see your lovely new design, they don’t get to experience how usable your site is; all they see of your site is the blue, black and green of Google and the titles you have created.