Usability pot-pourri

2 articles about usability, a handy tool, a few quotes and a funny movie.

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.

This article is about compatibility, faceted search, split testing, Read elsewhere, Usability.