This post is a follow-up to to my previous post on validating web forms. In that post I gave you tips on helping users recover from validation problems. In this post I give you tips on avoiding the problems in the first place. You can write a whole book on this subject (and many have) [...]
When designing web forms, you should always consider the flow. By flow I mean the sequence of thoughts and interactions that takes place when your user is completing the form.
In this post I’m going to tell you about a time when I got it wrong because I didn’t consider the flow properly.
Once upon a time…
Several [...]
It’s a question that many organisations ask on contact forms, registration forms and checkout processes – How did you hear about us?.
But asking this will cost you in lost conversions and the data you gather is probably inaccurate. In this post I explain why you should avoid asking people how they heard about you on [...]
“It’s in the 16th century building on The High Street” she said. This was my mum trying to explain where the local copy and print shop was.
I couldn’t tell a 16th century building from an 18th century one. The High Street in my home town is full of old buildings, so I couldn’t even guess.
After [...]
Many organisations limit the success of their websites, purely because their branding guidelines do not provide enough colours for designers to utilise. In this post I’ll show you how a limited colour palette can affect the success of a website.
Good calls-to-action
I recently wrote an article for UX Booth about Good call-to-action buttons. In it I [...]
Tags: e-commerce, navigation
Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.
Joel [...]
Tags: rants
In this post I’ll give you a few tips about validating web forms. Your form validation can make the difference between a user completing your form or abandoning it altogether.
It’s not a complete list of advice, so feel free to add your own tips in the comments section.
Tell them something’s wrong
You need to begin by [...]
So you’ve got a lovely website where your customers can get all sorts of useful information. But sometimes they just want to call you or email you with a question. The approach you take to being contacted can have a big effect on customers’ perceptions of your organisation. In this post, I discuss contact details [...]
Tags: forms, navigation, web writing
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are a very popular way of providing the answer to users’ questions. In this post I give you some tips to help you provide a better user experience with your FAQs.
Do you even need them?
All too often FAQs are used as an attempt to patch up flaws in bad content. Before [...]
Tags: web writing
Your website is just a series of inter-linked pages, but some of those pages are very different from others. In this post, I’m going to talk about pathway (or gateway) pages.
I want to help you to identify pathway pages and explain some considerations you should make by discussing real examples.
So what’s a pathway page then?
Pathway [...]
Tags: navigation, web writing
I recently wrote an article for UXBooth about call-to-action buttons. In the article, I discuss the following factors:
Prioritisation
Language
Positioning
Colour
Size
Restraint
You’ll need to read the article on the UXBooth website if you want to get access to those pearls of wisdom.
Tags: e-commerce, forms, navigation, shameless self-publicity
I thought it would be fun to write 10 tips for people who write 10 tips articles. The title is a bit of a joke, but hopefully you’ll find the tips themselves quite useful. So here goes.
1. Stick to what you know
Your post will be a lot more interesting if you actually know the subject [...]
Tags: web writing
Nobody likes filling out web forms, so a good form is one that can be completed quickly and easily. One feature that helps people do this, is the address finder that pre-populates the address fields using a postcode. If you do it well, adding an address finder will improve the user experience of your forms.
Positioning [...]
Tags: forms, quick tips
What’s the difference between usability and user experience? For me, user experience is the experience someone has when using a design. Usability is the extent to which the design provides a good user experience. Usability is often misunderstood to mean ‘ease of use’. It’s much more than this though.
User experience design
I was reading an article [...]
The usability of a website is relative to the audience that it was designed for. A website that is designed well for its primary audience will not necessarily provide a great user experience for everyone that tries to use it.
It’s important to identify your target user if you’re going to make a site that works [...]
I'm a freelance usability consultant.
I'm based in Scotland, in between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But I work all over the place.
