User Testing for Web Accessibility
If you live in a major city, chances are, your buses, trains, and trams are accessible to people with physical disabilities and special needs. Your elevators and sidewalks, too. What about your website?
According to Forbes Magazine, people with disabilities represent the largest minority group there is — a $1 trillion market worldwide.
Getting Users to Sign Up: Factors in Design and Content
Conversions can be tricky to accomplish on any website. A conversion could mean more sales, more registered users or simply more engaged users. Having a great product and delivering value to the user are obviously the factors to focus on when you want to increase your conversion rate. But a conversion rate can also be increased with smart design and strong content.
Improving Usability with Fitts’ Law
Back in 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts published an article the detailed his theory on human mechanics as it pertained to aimed movement. It was Fitts’ observation that the action of pointing to or tapping an target object could be measured and predicted mathematically.
Fitts stated that the size of the target object along with its distance from the starting location could be directly measured, allowing him to model the ease at which a person could perform the same action with a different target object.
How Cognitive Biases Shape User Experience
Everyone develops opinions regarding how things should look, how things should behave, and what things should be called. These cognitive biases make up the filter between what actually exists, and what we perceive to be true.
The field of experience design attempts to realize a user’s cognitive biases, or opinions, and rationalizes design decisions that make use of those biases.
Usability Testing With Card Sorting
Information architecture is a big component of web design. What order should elements go in? Is there a visual hierarchy that must be followed? What should go where? Is the current navigational structure the most efficient? These are just some questions that a designer faces.
Human Behavior Theories That Can be Applied to Web Design
Humans are logical creatures, and as surprising as this might be, when we visit a website our minds make a series of decisions that affect the actions we take. The ability to reason enables us to form judgments, reach conclusions and make decisions. If, on the web, we weren’t able to think on the spot and then take action, we would trap ourselves in crippling situations of mindless clicking.
Behavioral psychology is an advancing field, and we web ninjas need to understand something about psychology in order to make usable websites. If we understand human needs and emotions — how we interpret what we see and how we choose to act — then we will better understand our site users. We’ll be able to choose and create meaningful layouts, typography and colors.
Privacy and the User Experience
The privacy issue is an often-neglected aspect of designing user experiences. All too often in today’s information-driven society, we who work on the web sacrifice privacy and submit our users to violation or intrusion. In this article, we’ll discuss certain privacy-related concerns — in particular, how asking for too much information can degrade the overall user experience.
