Category Archives: Usability

“Less is more”

In most cases this simple fact is true. Recently I watched someone who surfed my blog and that was a real eye opener. He had trouble to see what’s the content and what’s just additional stuff like “about me”, “archives”, etc. That was really frustrating for him as a visitor and shameful for me, since I thought until then I was using a reasonable template which makes the page easy to read.

You can read about usability testing at many places e.g. in Krug’s excellent book “Don’t make me think“, but to see usability testing actually live was amazing. And this was not even a planned and well prepared test. It was simply looking over the shoulder of a colleague while he was trying to use my page.

As a first step towards a better usability / readability of my blog I reduced the amount of columns by one with a clear separation between the content and the additional stuff. This is not a huge change, but hopefully a quick win.

After this experience I wished we would do more usability testing when developing software. Let me know what you think.

http://quince.infragistics.com/

Gut: Die Idee eines Katalogs für UI Patterns an sich ist gut, auch einige der Beispiele sind gut.
Aber: Das Design des Katalogs selbst ist aber eher fragwürdig (hm… Silverlight…weniger ist oft mehr…). Außerdem würde ein Blick über den Microsoft-Tellerrand gut tun… Vielleicht entwickelt sich das ja noch. Nachdem man sich registriert hat kann man schließlich eigene UI Patterns hinzufügen.