Web Usability Blog

Glad to see that Jakob Nielsen has recently restated his position about how many users you need to test with in usability studies - the answer being 5.

We were testing a site the other day for a major retailer that didn't have many of the features that are now considered pretty standard for ecommerce sites. It was not clear what they sold, it had busy cluttered pages, you had to register, there was no persistent basket and much else.

Responsive design seems like a brilliant solution for coping with the rise in mobile users but what are its pros and cons, and what has to be considered to make it effective?

I had an interesting telephone conversation with one of our clients recently about benchmarking their web site. They are a major government organisation and are redeveloping their website. They wanted to benchmark the site before and after the redevelopment. The main driver for the benchmarking seems to be to justify the expenditure on the redevelopment.

We have recently being doing some work with a number of university sites. We have been usability testing their sites and doing attitudinal research with users to understand better their goals and circumstances.

When I stepped off the tarmac in Athens after an easyJet flight from London, my baggage allowance contained neither bathers nor beach reading. I was here at the invitation of Stelios himself. The entrepreneur founder of the easyGroup of companies had asked us to gather user evidence about his newest web based holiday business. easyCruise offers cruises to Stelios's ancestral home, Greece; and consequently is perhaps also the company closest to his heart.

It's interesting to see that 'Target', a large US retail operator, has just agreed to pay $6 million and make its Web site more accessible to the visually impaired by next year, to settle a class-action dispute with the National Federation of the Blind.

If Gordon Brown wants to save some money in the public sector I have a suggestion for him. We have been working for public sector organisations for over 10 years and what is very obvious is they have very little organisational memory. I don't know how long the average web manager stays in their post, but I would be very surprised if it is more than 5 years. And when they leave, very little of what they have learnt from user research stays in the organisation. A particularly bad example of this was when a client, for whom we had done a lot of work, asked us to undertake a project and I had to point out we had done the exact same piece of work 3 years earlier and simply sent them the report again.

Last night I was trying to book a hotel room from one of the UK's leading budget chains for my daughter going off to look at universities. I wanted to pay for the room in advance as she does not have a credit card. So I found the right hotel and then went through the check out process and got to the card payment stage and then thought 'but you pay on arrival not when you book with this hotel chain so can I pay in advance?' I finally found an FAQ link, (small, grey and not where I expected it, and it takes you out of the booking process - not a good idea!) which said I could pay in advance (but "only on some occasions", what does that mean?), but nowhere could I see how to do this. I, therefore, left the site and booked a room with a competitor where I could obviously pay for the room in advance.

To make a webpage accessible to all, it is necessary that users can 'tab' through the different elements of the page. We have recently added a couple of flash videos to our new website. As part of our aim, we wanted to make this flash video accessible. Once the flash element is active, you can use the keyboard to control everything - volume bar, seek bar, turn on/off subtitles, make it full screen etc. We had no problem accessing the video on IE browsers. But we got stuck when using other browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome and trying to access the flash video by tabbing on the page.