You probably speak a different language to that of your customers. It might be a subtle difference but it probably does exist. Your website will have a better chance of serving your customers if you’re aware of it. In this post I’ll discuss how the use of the word complications caused a lot of confusion. [...]
When you look through your own website, you do so with complete knowledge of how it works. So it’s often difficult to spot problems with it. Through usability testing you can uncover issues with your designs that you may never have realised on your own. In this post I’m going to point out an issue [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
Tags: forms
I'm a freelance usability consultant.
I'm based in Scotland, in between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But I work all over the place.
