Drawing on the recent work of Jonathan and Lisa Price and Nick Usborne, the research of usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen, and our own experience, we have compiled this list of 25 tips for writing online. This is the bread and butter stuff that everyone writing for websites and e-newsletters should know.
Are you ready for the New Ruthless User? More importantly, is your website ready? If you’re not sure, read on.
In Jakob Nielsen’s list of Top 10 Web Design Mistakes of 2005, Flash is number 3, which he regards as “a personal failure” after his usability work with Macromedia, the company that produces Flash.
Much of the focus on LMS’s tends to revolve around how they function from the perspective of the LMS manager or training administrator. There’s another view of the LMS—one that’s not nearly so talked about: the learner’s view of the LMS. A little usability testing of your LMS can help you gain a lot of insight into how your LMS performs for the learner.
World Usability Day is a good opportunity to offer a friendly reminder of the value of usability testing.
A recent article in USA Today* cited a Harris Interactive study in which about 85% of those polled said they had become so frustrated with the customer support for a technology product that “they ended up swearing, shouting, experiencing chest pains, crying, or smashing things. Slightly more than half said not being able to get a live person on the phone was their greatest frustration.… Seven out of 10 people polled said representatives weren’t trained adequately.”
As 3M’s key advocate for usability and user interface design, Kathryn Bohlke has built the User Information and Usability Group within 3M’s IT group. Her mission is to improve usability and UI design for both applications and websites. Fredrickson’s John Wooden sat down with Kathy recently to talk about building an awareness of the role of usability and managing the usability function within one of the world’s largest manufacturing companies.
Review of Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. Jonathan Price and Lisa Price. Indianapolis, 2002. New Riders. [ISBN: 0-73357-1151-8. 507 pages. $40.00 (softcover)].
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are everywhere on the web, used on all kinds of sites and in all kinds of contexts. From their humble beginnings in the early days of Internet newsgroups, FAQs have become a standard way of providing end users with important information.
But there’s a problem: users don’t like FAQs, at least not the way they are presented on many web sites.