CategoryNavigation

November 11, 2013 — If customers can’t find a product, they can’t buy it. Therefore we invested eight months conducting a large-scale usability research study on the product-finding experience. We set out to explore how users navigate, find and select products on e-commerce websites. Throughout the test sessions, the subjects would abandon websites because they were unable to find the products they were looking for. All of these usability issues have been distilled into 79 concise guidelines in a report titled “Homepage & Category Usability.” In this article, we’ll go over seven of the guidelines. Read more…

September 11, 2013 — Over the past few months Jon Rundle has been involved in launching two large institutional websites with complex navigation systems on which maintaining simplicity becomes increasingly difficult as content requirements grow and tiers of navigation are added. In this article, Jon will illustrate the techniques involved in implementing responsive navigation on a large website. Read more…

August 29, 2013 — As usual, we have to put ourselves in the users’ shoes: What do we want them to see first? How will your message be best communicated? We have to ask these questions before we start designing, because the layout will shape the rest of the design. The following websites have some quite unusual layouts. They aren’t necessarily perfect; still, browse through them, and maybe your creative genius will be sparked. Read more…

July 11, 2013 — When people visit your website, you want it to stand out from the crowd, to be memorable. It is a reflection of the person or organization behind it. You want people to come back and use your website or get in touch with you. It has to be innovative yet functional. Ask yourself, what would make life easier for your user? Read more…

June 21, 2013 — Following is a list of 13 beliefs on the value of user experience strategy, design, and designers, one for every year that Robert has been in the web industry at the time he wrote it in 2012. Read more…

May 14, 2013 — Large organizations may still want to adopt server-side device detection in some form to deliver a great UX to everyone who accesses their websites. While RWD and PE strategies can be adopted by companies, a hybrid client- and server-side approach is the most likely to deliver a great service to desktop, tablet and mobile users alike. Read more…

May 6, 2013 — The Web has always been a weird, borderless, flexible medium. In the last couple of years, we’ve started to realize that designing for this medium is fundamentally different from the design work we’ve done previously. People keep saying that the Web has changed. But has it really? Let’s take a look at all of the things that have actually changed. Read more…

May 3, 2013 — Infinite scroll promised to provide users with a better experience. However, the good is often accompanied by the bad and the ugly. Once we understand the strengths and weaknesses of infinite scrolling, we can begin to use it to empower our interfaces. Read more…

April 9, 2013 — In this article, Ariel Salminen is pleased to introduce Responsive Nav, a free and open-source JavaScript plugin. A solution that doesn’t require a big library and is released under the MIT License, so you can use it in all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. The solution is not one size fits all, nor is it meant to be. But for those who are looking for a solution that does one thing well, it’s definitely a good choice. Read more…

March 27, 2013 — A persistent primary navigation bar shows top-level pages, allowing users to move between sections. However, there is one class of website for which this traditional form of navigation falls short. It is what Paul Boag refers to as a “mega-site”. Read more…