• Deciding when graphics will help (and when they won’t)
  How can you use graphics to enhance the user experience? And when should you just leave well enough alone. Great article with excellent examples.
   
• Patterns for the Color Blind
  A website with tips and design patterns to make sure your website is accessable for color blind users.
  Is that really important? Absolutely. 8% of white males is color blind.
   
• Hub pages: the secret weapon of SEO copywriting
  Link related articles together. It’s handy for your visitors and Google absolutely loves it.

Quotes

• Customers can’t always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what’s wrong. (Carly Fiorina)
   
• Watching people try to carry out top tasks is a harsh lesson. You would be amazed at the amount of times they fail or give up or get the wrong answer, thinking it’s the right one. (Gerry McGovern, in If your customer falls in the forest of your website)
  In other words: user tests aren’t optional, they’re compulsory.
   
• Design for cavemen and their literal-minded and limited-capacity brains. After all, your paying customers are only one step out of the cave. (Jakob Nielsen, in Short-term memory and web usability)
   
• Content is king. But the bitter truth is that you probably have limited ability when it comes to good copywriting. (Eric Karjaluoto, in The Content Delusion)
   
• The only reason people use target=”_blank” is because of fear. (Dieter Orens)
   
• It’s no secret that Flash is a blight on the Internet and should be killed with fire. (TJ Luoma)
   
• A webwriter is a storyteller who gives away the plot in the first line. (Unknown)
  

Tools

• E-mail testing
  Handy tool to check what your mailings and newsletters look like in different mailclients.

Great cartoon

• How a web design goes straight to hell

Articles

• Usability Testing Versus Expert Reviews
  When should you do user testing and when an expert review?  9 usability experts share their experiences. If you only read 1 article out of all our suggestions, read this one.
• Links are New Yorkers (Writing great web links)
  Gerry McGovern is right most of the time. And he’s always right when he talks about links. Links should be signposts that show the user the shortest way to fulfilling his task. We agree.
• Moderating with Multiple Personalities: 3 Roles for Facilitating Usability Tests
  Good article by Jared Spool on the qualities a good user test moderator should have. He or she should be a flight attendant, sportscaster and scientist all in one. Sounds like a strange combination? Maybe, but it’s true…
• Designing with Data
  Interesting article on the role of statistical analysis in the design process.

Quote

• “OMG! What Have I Done?” – Tim Berners-Lee’s reaction after getting a Twitter-account. (Well, according to Jared Spool. ) 

Want to comment on this article? Read this first

• 10 Comment Habits I Hate
  None of these annoying habits are of course yours, dear reader. Not one.

Good reads

• Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters
  If you have a lot of products, services or events on offer on your website, this is an absolute must-read. Faceted search may sound a bit technical but it really isn’t. eBay and Amazon have already been using it for years, allowing users to filter results via a number of criteria.
   
• How To Increase Site Performance Through A/B Split Testing
  A really good introduction to A/B testing or split testing, a method in which two random groups of website visitors are served different pages to test the performance of the different page versions.

Handy tool

• Spoon Browser Sandbox
  Web-based tool that allows you to run any recent browser (IE8/IE7/IE6, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera) without actually having to install it on your PC. The only thing you have to install is a single plug-in.

Quotes

• “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Nigel Hawthorne
• “Effective writing for the web is 80 percent planning/thinking and 20 percent writing.”  Kris Mausser
• “What the f*ck is user ‘experience’ design anyway? I have hundreds of user experiences every day. Most of them are horrible.” Karl Gilis

Movie

• South park: The Website review meeting
  “It’s only a bug if the user finds it and complains about it.” Cartman, of course.

Focus!

A few quotes by Peterson:

• “Amateurs often end up with pictures that have too many points of interest. The resulting lack of direction and subsequent confusion alienates the eye, forcing it to move on, seeking satisfaction elsewhere.”
• “Without order you have chaos. With chaos comes stress. With stress comes the inability to perform well.”

Very true. For photographs and for websites.

Bad web pages have too many focus points. Visitors don’t know where to look. They’re confused and go back to Google to find someone else who’s got what you’re selling.

I can’t begin to tell you how often we see people during user tests who simply don’t know where to look on a webpage. Overcrowded pages drown out the important information in such a way that people effectively do not see it.

Less is more

For a travel brochure Peterson was told to take a picture that said ‘Amsterdam and the Netherlands’.

• 1st attempt (top left)
  Flowers, bicycles, a canal and pigeons (Peterson fed the pingeons to make sure they stayed put). Result: too many focus points. Messy.
• 2nd attempt (top right)
  No more pigeons. Trying to clean up the background by way of a passing tram. Result: still too busy.
• 3rd attempt (bottom)
  A radically different point of view, focussing on the basics: tulips, bicycles and the calming water in the background. Result: a beautiful photograph with maximum impact.

Focus. That’s what every website needs, from the homepage to the detail page. Focus on the things that matter.

Just like Google focuses on the search feature on the homepage, despite the multitude of other tools they have.

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