Stephen Turbek shows how to save time on site diagramming using either Excel and Visio or Word and Inspiration.

"Use these lazy techniques and spend your time on better and more interesting problems than lining up little boxes!"

Links:

• The Lazy IA's Guide to Making Sitemaps 

Henrik Olsen - February 01, 2006

See also: Site and flow diagramming (6)  Information architecture (15)  Tools (106) 

A study has shown that users judge sites within the first twentieth of a second and that their decision has a lasting impact.

The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the "halo effect". If you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to rate the site more favourably. According to the researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, this is because of "cognitive bias". People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to prove to them that they made a good initial decision.

The study is published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology vol. 25.

Links:

• The article Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye 

Henrik Olsen - January 18, 2006

See also: Research (129)  Credibility, Trust and Privacy (6)  Visual design (19) 

"The eye is the mirror of the soul, and the soul is the mirror of our thoughts." In his introduction to eye-tracking, Matteo Penzo explains how eyetracking works, what the outputs are, and how eye-tracking can introduce quantitative measurement to standard usability evaluation techniques.

Links:

• Introduction to Eyetracking: Seeing Through Your Users' Eyes 

Henrik Olsen - January 15, 2006

See also: Primers (14)  Eye-tracking (14) 

The Q1 2006 issue of GUUUI is a second edition of an article on using Visio for rapid prototyping for the web that was published at GUUUI back in Q3 2002. The new edition includes a new and improved version of the GUUUI Prototyping Tool for Visio 2003.

Links:

• Visio - the interaction designer's nail gun (2nd edition) 

Henrik Olsen - January 15, 2006

See also: GUUUI articles (11)  Prototyping and wireframing (119) 

In usability tests Jensen Harris has observed that help in Microsoft Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts. While novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason thing out and look them up in help.

Jensen suggests that reasons for the varied usage of help include:
- Only experts know the "magic" words to bring up what they're looking for
- Help doesn't help you become familiar with a piece of software - it's designed to troubleshoot, not to teach.
- The process of experimenting with the product is totally removed from opening and reading articles in the help window
- Experts use more of the powerful and involved features, and thus benefit from the help system more.

Links:

• Help Is For Experts 

Henrik Olsen - December 17, 2005

See also: Help (3)  Research (129) 

Jared M. Spool has made his presentation Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of User Happiness available online. Download a MP3 and a PDF, listen to the presentation in its entirety and see all the examples using the presentation handout.

Spool shares practical design strategies from effective web sites and shows:
- How the best teams allocate their resources by focusing on the most important content on the site and how this affects every page
- Proven design techniques, such as persona-based design, to help teams understand what users need from the site
- Why the most effective sites never relaunch, yet manage to always have fresh designs
- How we can utilize the scent of information and how people search for their content to give your site a huge advantage

Links:

• The presentation Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of User Happiness 

Henrik Olsen - December 09, 2005

See also: Audio and video (48)  Navigation (63)  Personas (19)  Talks and presentations (18) 

Much can be done to improve the quality of search results. But according to James Robertson, no amount of tweaking search engines will ensure that the most relevant results always appear at the beginning of the list. This is where "best bets" come in.

Best bets are a hand-created list of key resources for common queries, presented prominently at the beginning of the search results. By analyzing search statistics, we can ensure that the most useful pages are listed right at the top of popular searches.

Links:

• Search engine 'best bets' 

Henrik Olsen - December 06, 2005

See also: Tips and guidelines (95)  Search (27) 

According to Jared Spool, gallery pages - pages listing links to content pages - are the hardest working pages on a web site. They separate those users who find the content they are looking for from the users who don't.

Studies by UIE show that when gallery pages don't contain the information that users will need to make their choice, they have to resort to "pogosticking" - jumping back and forth between the gallery and the content pages hoping they'll eventually hit the content they desire.

UIE also noticed that users expect the most important items to always be listed first in the gallery. If the first few items aren't of interest, they often assume the rest will be even less interesting.

Links:

• Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site 

Henrik Olsen - December 01, 2005

See also: Research (129)  Persuasive design (21)  Sections (8)  Web page design (40)  Navigation (63) 

With this free e-book by Steve Jackson, editor of Conversion Chronicles, you can learn the basics of how to set up measurable goals for web site conversion, how to reach your goals through persuasive design and how to measure success with web site statistic tools.

You have to sign up for their newsletter to get the e-book (they are taking their own medicine and use the book to boost their newsletter conversion and prospect acquisition).

Links:

• The e-book Learn before you spend 

Henrik Olsen - November 22, 2005

See also: Online books (5)  Books (47)  Persuasive design (21)  Web traffic analysis (12) 

The October 2005 newsletter from HFI is a discussion of how beauty can influence users' overall impression of a product and how to measure the product-emotion relationship.

The newsletter mentions a study by M. Hassenzahl where a MP3 application was evaluated with a variety of different visual designs. They study showed that:
- When participants only looked at the MP3 player, the overall rating of the product was based on its perceived beauty and anticipated usability
- When participants were allowed to use the player, the overall rating of the product was more influenced by participants' experience of using the product

The study suggests that the emotional aspects of a design are important in attracting customers in the first place. However, when the product is judged through usage over time, usability is what matters most.

Links:

• Is Beauty the new usability attribute? 

Henrik Olsen - November 16, 2005

See also: Emotional design (10)  Visual design (19)  Usability testing (68)  Research (129)