How to do an Expert Review

The basic idea to walk through most of the common tasks and identify potential stumbling blocks. But, instead of pointing out only the negative (which is usually easy to do!), Expert Reviews from Atlantic BT  go one step further and call out specific features that work particularly well.

Issues are identified with a list of heuristics (i.e. good design principles) and the reviewer’s own expertise. Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics is a good starting point for developing your own list. Each heuristic is backed up with research. For example, we know from cognitive psychology that people can only store a limited amount of information in working memory. Therefore, web pages should be designed to minimize or eliminate the need for a user to remember information from one page to another.

When conducting a review, it is important to remember “The Evaluator Effect”. Research has shown that when multiple usability specialists look at a website (or any product), they often identify different issues. To minimize this problem, it is important to involve multiple usability specialists in this process. It always necessary to include an experienced usability specialist if a junior-level usability specialist is involved.

How to Format an Expert Review

An Expert Review should be easy to scan and fun to read. There is no reason to create a long, boring list of usability problems if nobody is going to read them. At Atlantic BT, we create a bulleted list and use a three dot severity system:

The green dot is used for positive findings. The red dot is used for must-fix severe usability problems. And the yellow dot is for less severe problems and nice-to-haves. If it’s a big site or there are a lot of problems, introduce a 4th dot (orange). For a lot of our clients with smaller sites, we have found that our three dot system works very well.

Don’t Forget Recommendations!

An Expert Review is not complete unless each item is actionable. Therefore, each issue should have recommendations on how to resolve it. The recommendations presented in the Expert Review should not be final, because a multi-disciplinary design team (including marketing and design) will also have potential solutions.

When to do an Expert Review

Since a website or product’s users are constantly changing, it’s necessary to constantly check-in to make sure their needs are being met. An Expert Review should always be done before site redesign efforts and any user research (e.g. usability testing or surveys). If major issues are discovered in an Expert Review, further user research on the existing design is often unnecessary and not cost-effective.

There was a problem. HTML structured the page but didn’t fill it with copy or images. Each time I learned one skill two more that needed learning popped up. Web development challenge in these early days centered on finding people willing to help for a reasonable amount of money or learning how to DIY (do it yourself). We’ve come a way since 1999, but some things don’t change. Anyone can have a website only a few will understand how to make money online.

You Get What You Pay For And Web Development Costs Are Going Up
In 1999 presence was the challenge. In 2012 presence is assumed. Once everyone has an Internet marketing presence competition moves from presence and engineering to the battle for hearts, minds and advocacy.

Fighting for hearts, minds and advocacy requires different skills. Internet marketing may be the most engineering-like marketing thanks to a sea of behavior and heuristic information, but cutting clutter to make strangers love your company, brand or product is as much business therapy as business.

As web development business therapist we see common mistakes such as:

• Search For Silver Bullets
• Know Thyself To Know Others
• Barking Dog Marketing
• Cathedral vs. Bazaar

Stop Silver Bullet Search
We believe in the quick fix even when life teaches otherwise. The search for silver bullets is distracting and bleeds our most valuable asset – TIME. Reject quick fixes and instant millions. People do win the lottery, but their winning never improves your odds. “Win the lottery” isn’t an effective Internet marketing plan. Anyone who tries to sell you a silver bullet or lottery ticket should be avoided. Creating greatness is HARD and requires sweat, tears and treasure.

Know Thyself To Know Others
Thinking Like An Internet Marketer values the web for what it can and can not accomplish. No web site makes a company’s communication more organized or clear. The web is a huge guassian blur making pointed and sharp ideas, potentially dull and confusing. How would you rate your knowledge of your company’s character on a ten point scale? If you answer anything below a 8 then you have introspective work to do. If your company, brand or product is blowing from pillar to post then, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, “There is no there, there.” Know yourself BEFORE you create any site, blog, social media or email campaign. Compare each effort in some meaningful and measurable way to your company’s core values.

Barking Dog Marketing
Do you walk toward or run away from a barking dog? Barking at visitors has the same impact. Greatness, transparency and honesty are more sustainable and profitable than any short term bark. Barking may improve sales or conversions for a short time, but damage to brand, positioning and long term profits and advocacy may be significant and long lasting. Every day and action matters in the battle for hearts, minds and advocacy. Read Dov Seidman’s great book HOW: Why we do anything means everything. Seidman explains why values and processes are the only things any business truly own.

Cathedrals vs. Bazaars
Internet marketers build sand castles. Whatever we create will be gone soon. Building sand castles requires different attributes than constructing Renaissance cathedrals meant to last a hundred years. Thinking like an Internet marketer means organizing work around:

• Speed
• Data
• Creative Use Of Convention (don’t recreate what visitors expect)
• Team
•  The Magic 11% (see 1:10:89 Rule)
• Listening and Leading

Speed, passion and wrecking what needs ruination means errors, bumps and mistakes happen. If mistakes drive you crazy don’t become an Internet marketer. Mistakes are a part of the cost of being relevant in a constantly shifting space such as Internet marketing. Perfection isn’t a sustainable Internet marketing strategy. Speed, being data-centric and listening more than you talk work better. Understanding the difference between creating sand castles and accepting input from the bazaar instead of laying stones to live for a hundred years is why “Thinking Like An Internet Marketer” requires a paradigm shift. Perfectionism is too expensive for sand castle builders working in the world’s largest bazaar dodging silver bullets and barking dogs.

It’s no secret, I love beer. When I’m not talking about web design, I’m talking about beer and my homebrewing hobby. So naturally, this is where my “water cooler discussions” usually end up. What I’ve found from these conversations is that I have a lot of co-workers that love beer too. If you weren’t aware, we have 3 homebrewers, 1 ex-commercial-brewer, and about 25 or more avid beer fans in our office.

Fanboys aside, designing a beer and the process of brewing is similar to the planning and developing of a website. Both industries have a handful of key ingredients and important factors:

1. The concept or idea
2. The purpose and end-goals
3. The foundation
4. The experience
5. The consumers and keeping them coming back

When these factors come together in harmony, we’re left with a product that makes both the brewer (or web designer and client) and the consumer equally happy. And, on the other end, if these factors don’t jive, we’re left with a sad product that doesn’t sell.

Photo by e_walk on Flickr

The Concept or Idea

In order to craft a great beer, you first need a solid idea. What kind of beer are people drinking? How saturated is the market? What kind of beer do I want to make? These are just some of the questions any product design phase. They’re necessary because they help you focus on your concept. Going too broad too soon could result in failure. So, we focus on what will work for now. Once we build up a following, then we can begin to introduce all those other ideas or recipes floating around in our head.

So, I’ve done my research and I’ve found that most people in Raleigh seem to like pale ales. There’s already a few local breweries that make this style. But, there’s room for competition since the demand is so high. Now that we have a style chosen for our flagship, it’s time to plan and test the recipe. We find some friends, invite them over, and have them taste our latest batch of beer. We might even submit our idea to a panel of experts looking for feedback. In the homebrew world, this panel of experts are judges at a local competition. Regardless, every person along the way helps us formalize our concept–making it stronger.

Then, we need a catchy name. The name needs to say it all. And, most of the time, it needs to not have been used before. We’ll call our pale ale “Crabtree Pale Ale.” This name not only suggests the hoppy and dry finish we’re going for, but it means something to my local market too. I can already picture the label.

The Planning and End-Goals

Fully understanding the purpose of your concept can help you derive your end-goals. And, properly planning this execution is vital to success. This would be like understanding and formulating your recipe to suit a particular beer category. What flavor, aroma, and texture components are necessary to the style? What ingredients are used to achieve this complexity? And, most importantly, what can we do to keep this product on or under budget without sacrificing quality?

We’re making a pale ale, so we need a final beer that is relatively clean, moderately hoppy or bitter, and maybe a touch citrusy. The final product should also be pale and clear. There’s a few malts that we can choose from to create the flavors we want, as well as, a whole-host of American hops that will fit the profile.

It’s no coincidence that planning and end-goals are so closely related to the concept. What you’ll find is that there’s a lot of reliance on, or blending of, each of these steps. This is necessary to achieve the best product possible. This is also why it’s important to have all the moving parts under one roof.

The Foundation

Arguably, the most important ingredient in beer is water. In fact, beer is comprised mostly of water. Therefore, water quality naturally plays the biggest part. Many brewers treat their water to achieve the profile appropriate for the beer style. Whether we want hard or soft water, it is much like choosing the right code base, e.g., .Net or PHP. Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. Water can accentuate hop flavor or malt flavors. It can affect the efficiency of our mash (similar to making tea with grain). And, if you’re like me, this complicated chemistry gives you a headache, much like the programming languages and networking/hosting required for making a website.

The quality and balance of your code and HTML is much like water in brewing. Bad code can really ruin a website, and chlorine can ruin a beer. Gross.

The Experience

The overall experience, or taste of the beer, is crafted in part by the water quality, as well as, the ingredients and techniques used during the brewing process. In web design, this crafting is done by our User Experience (UX) Designers. They’re major players throughout the entire life-cycle of the project. Everything that is done passes through their UX filter. Their chief concern is always how the end-user will experience and use the website. For beer, if a flavor component is off, the consumer will reject it because it doesn’t taste right or it is too hard to drink.

This “experience layer” in brewing has many moving parts. There’s the malt, the hops, the pH balance of the water, and the temperature control (at each step). And, if the style requests, a spice or adjunct may be in the mix.

Malt brings sweetness and potential alcohol. Hops brings bitterness or balance (it also preserves the beer). Chemicals in the water accentuate each of these flavors as well as improve the efficiency of the process. But, temperature control can easily become the biggest player in the result of the final product. I can add the right amount of hops, but if I mash too cool, then I won’t have enough residual sweetness to balance the beer. I’ll be left with a harsh, thin, liquid. Been there before.

This is much like adding lots of eye-candy, frills, and information to your site, only to find that you didn’t pay attention to what the users (not you) are looking for from your website. If the frills don’t help the experience, then don’t add them. And, like-wise, if all the moving parts parts (designers, developers, marketing, and UX) don’t come together in perfect harmony, something might break.

The experience is a double-edged sword. It’s all about balancing the frills and ingredients to achieve the perfect experience.

The Consumer and Keeping Them Coming Back

You may have noticed that I left one key ingredient out of my beer analogy so far. That is yeast. Yeast is our consumer. And, so is the actual consumer. But, to be fair, yeast is the first organism consuming our beer.

During the entire process, you’re attempting to make a sugary water extract, called wort, that will be like a Candy Land for these tiny single-celled creatures. Unfortunately, though, it’s not as simple as that. If you mash the malt too high, you’ll be left with an un-fermentable extract. Essentially, you’ve made a beer with too much sweetness. Or, a website with too many frills and not enough digestible substance. This could be too much content or, conversely, too much JavaScript fanciness hiding the lack of precision. We want those yeast cells to consume and multiply. We want them to have families that consume the beer too.

Another potential problem is not adding the right amount of yeast. This would be comparable to hitting the market without proper marketing. What happens? The fermentation happens too slow resulting in off-flavors. And, possibly, you end up with a stuck fermentation. In the product world, this is slow growing and painful return on investment. Or worse, no growth at all.

There’s lots of ways to keep the fermentation going, or entice the consumer. We could control the temperature, making sure it’s appropriate for growth. We could use the appropriate yeast and pitch the perfect amount of it. This is similar to choosing the right target audience and controlling the amount of marketing. During the products life, how much marketing are you investing into your product?

Or, if the style allows, stick the beer in the corner and allow it to open ferment at what ever temperature it gets in the room during the day. This would be like viral marketing–letting the consumer run with it! But, then again, it all comes back to the initial concept: what style or what am I selling? And, how do you market the product appropriately?

Final Product

Once the yeast has done it’s thing, you’ve got a tasty beverage waiting for you in the icebox. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the product you’ve created. And, if you venture beyond the hobby, maybe it’ll make you lots of money one day. Cheers!

By the way, what’s your favorite beer?

This weekend, I came across a tumblelog called “Never said about restaurant websites“. In Raleigh, we have a lot of great locally owned and operated restaurants. Many of them, unfortunately, either don’t have a web presence or are, well, doing it wrong. While it’s fine to think about what you want to put on your website, it’s more important to think about what people will expect on your website. When it comes to restaurant websites, people expect to find hours of operation, location, and a menu. All of those could fit on a couple of web pages (and the menu should not be a PDF).

The Good, Bad & the Ugly

To illustrate my points, I went on an Internet safari where I visited some of the websites of my favorite restaurants.

Good: Everything I need, at the top of the page

While this site used Flash and it took a little bit to load, everything I needed was right at the top of the page, clearly visible. Well done!

Bad: Difficult to find (and read) the Hours of Operation

A restaurant’s hours need to be very visible. My eyes shouldn’t have to wander to the bottom of the website and then adjust to read light-gray text with strange formatting.

Ugly

On the left, the address (without the link to the map) and phone number are clearly visible (I removed pieces of their contact information). But, unfortunately the site is difficult to look at. The menu is available as a PDF file, and the header requires Java, which I haven’t needed to install on my computer yet. I can’t find the hours anywhere except in the Menu.

Does every business need a web presence?

Unless you’re operating in secrecy, the answer is yes. Most businesses that don’t have a web presence either are doing fine without one, and/or are intimidated by the large investment of a website. In reality, just one or two well-designed web pages will often suffice when one of your customers thinks “what is their phone number again?” or “I wonder if they’re open” and tries Google unsuccessfully. Then, your customer has to resort to the phone book. Or, if they’re like me, the online phone book. Phone books, in any form factor, are not an ingredient of a healthy user experience.

The user experience extends off the screen. Proper signage, well-lit parking lots, ramps for the handicapped, and a useful voicemail message are also very important. For the established single building restaurant, barber shop, or tailor shop, a web presence might not seem like a priority. For some, they might not even want to attract new customers. But a great user experience is also important for established customers. And now, more than ever, the Web (including the Mobile Web) is part of that.

Clearly defining your user’s goals at the beginning of a project and sticking to them throughout the design and development processes will help ensure that the final product is something your visitors will actually want to use, and hopefully use again and again.

Stories

Your goals can be very straight forward, such as “encourage the user become a registered member” or somewhat more abstract like “delight the user so they spread the word about us.”

In our work here at Atlantic BT we’ve been writing user stories to help guide our project’s along.  User stories are a great tool because our clients, their users, and our team members can easily contribute to them, and they’re written in plain English so everyone can understand them.

Here’s an example from a recent project:

“As a potential customer, I’ve been asked to a seminar at the company headquarters. How do I get there, and who do I contact if I need assistance?”

Seem simple, right?  We’ve gone and defined the user (a potential customer) and their needs (directions and contact information).  Our UX and design team know that including a “Company Locations” page with driving directions on the website is a must.  Our programming team knows that they need to add a space in Email invitations for a contact person for seminars and events.

Here’s another, from a different client

“I am a doctor and I need to order a prescription and have it shipped to a customer or my clinic”

This one’s a more complicated, but it really helps define what our programming staff has ahead of them, and what sort of user experience interactions will have to be mapped out. This sort of simple story-telling helps prevent a lot of rework near the end of the project.

In Practice

See those four green buttons? So do their customers.

In one of our recent projects, Johnston Health, we worked together to define four very important user goals ahead of time and made them very prominent navigation items on the home page.

1. “I’m an area resident and I need to find a physician.”
2. “I’m a medical professional in Johnston County and need to find work.”
3. “I’m an existing customer and need to pay a bill, and would like to do it online.”
4. “I’m a friend/family member of someone staying at a Johnston Health facility and would like to send them a card.”

The site has other user goals in mind (volunteering, fundraising, services) but by highlighting the most common user tasks and giving them some prime real estate space, they can please a lot of users right away.

The satisfied user has now been left with a good impression about the website, and a good impression about their business.

Not one to panic, I quickly turned to the internet to solve my problems.

Here's how it started out - a good mobile experience.

I fired up my mobile device in an attempt to find an affordable hotel room. Why slip and slide in the snow when my family and I can order pizza and wait warmly while it all passes by?

The hotel finding experience started off well enough – I went to a name brand discount travel website and found they had a mobile-formatted home page. This allowed me to quickly search for and find a hotel room nearby. The site’s layout was great and the menu options helped me narrow things down quickly and efficiently.  It let me view features, reviews, and see estimated prices of the hotels I was considering. This is the sort of top-notch mobile user experience we all want, especially when a blizzard is coming.

Then, when I went to purchase the hotel room, I received what mobile web users have come to dread – the mobile-to-desktop hand-off.

We’ve all experienced it. It’s that one link tap that, without any warning or context, takes you straight to a traditional full-width desktop website. Now I’m sliding, re-sizing, tilting, and zooming the screen to find the links and buttons I’m looking for.

Sure, my iPod Touch browser handles it in stride, but if I was using my pay-as-you-go-low-tech phone browser, things would have been a great deal more painful, if not impossible.

When the hand-off occurs, users are left with a different looking site not optimized for their device

This story has a happy ending.  I was able to book the hotel room at a reasonable price and ensure my family was happy and warm while we waited for the snow to pass – but I was left with a bad vibe about the travel company.  Not because I had to use a non-mobile website to reserve the room (not everyone had a budget for a dedicated mobile site) but because I was, without warning, passed off to a non-mobile website right as I was able to complete the transaction. Right when I was pulling out my wallet.

Why tease your users with a great initial experience and then bring in someone else to close the sale?  And why do it right before I put my credit card information in?  Why push confusion before the conversion?

This is why great online experience are often the result of user testing an entire process, not just an initial screen or menu design. Shocking layout and interaction transitions should not be part of your plan. Why leave your users out in the cold?

We’re strive to make this User Experience process part of each and every project we work on.

With markers and paper, we can rapidly sketch through several layout possibilities.

Why Wireframe?

One critical user experience technique is wireframes. We make wireframe mockups of our sites before our designers lay color to pixel because it allows us to explore ideas quickly, keeping the good ones and leaving behind those that won’t work. These wireframes act like blueprints for the complex interactions and flows for the website users.

This idea exploration leads to our client’s customers finding what they’re looking for, or looking to do, as quickly as is possible.  This speed for the user is very important.  In fact, our client’s customers demand it.

There are two wireframing tools we’re very fond of here.

1. Markers

Simple sketching with paper, markers and highlighters.  It’s a method that can’t be beat for its speed and efficiency at communicating ideas.  Think of it like the first draft of a great story — rough around the edges, but you have a fair idea as to what’s going on.

With a little labeling, the sketch becomes a powerful tool.

Several AtlanticBT staffers recently attended a day-long seminar put on by the Triangle Usability Professionals Association where the techniques of interface sketching were explored. We learned about using different marker shades, along with highlighters, to imply depth, focus, and interactivity.

It was great for all involved, and we knew we had to make it a formal part of our project process.

As an exercise, we took a look at our own Portfolio page and sketched out some possible upgrades to it.  The sketching allowed us to explore several ideas without spending any unnecessary development time.

2. Balsamiq Mockups

Wireframing with Balsamiq Mockups quickly provides clear direction.

Sketching is great – but at some point it becomes necessary to get those ideas onto screen so we can share them with our clients and internal team.  That’s where we turn to a prototyping tool like Balsamiq Mockups.

Balsamiq Mockups maintains the sort of low-detail “focus-on-the-feature” feel of sketching, but in a digital format.  It’s easy to use and easy to make changes when client and user feedback starts rolling in.  Balsamiq’s interface allows the user to add common website elements like text, links, buttons, and layout elements to the page with drag-n-drop ease.

Balsamiq allows us to take our sketches, refine and annotate them, and then share them with our clients to ensure that they’re getting exactly what they’re looking for as far with their site’s features navigation.

An Ounce of Prevention

The wireframing process provides three great benefits:

1. It saves everyone time and effort by answering a lot of project questions before designers and developers get started on their work.
2. It prevents unnecessary rework later in the project.
3. It lets us explore how the user will interact with the website beforehand in a way that non-visual methods sometimes miss, and does it in a way that is fast and easy for everyone involved to give feedback on.

1. Users Have No Patience

Regardless of what the product is, users will get frustrated easily if they have to wait a long time for a response to an action. Nobody likes a loading screen in a video game. While loading screens can be minimized in multiple ways, it is hard to eliminate them altogether since they use disc-based media. Developers try to keep the user entertained by playing background music, customizing the loading icon/progress bar, or displaying information such as history or facts during the load time. EA Sports FIFA 09′s loading screen has the user play against the goalie in a practice environment while the game loads.

For Web usability, this means that new pages must display within 1 second for users to feel like they’re navigating freely; any slower and they feel held back by the computer and don’t click as readily.

Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox, October 5, 2009

On the web, loading screens are most associated with Flash. Flash applications almost always have loading screens. If something takes more than 1 second to react, most users will get frustrated and leave. Even the simplest of things such as a hover element should not have a delay. Bandwidth is becoming less of an issue these days and websites should be able to make the user feel as if they are in total control.

2. It’s All About the Experience

Even the elderly could not resist the Nintendo Wii (source: BBC)

Why do people play video games? Simple: They want to have fun and enjoy the action, however that is defined. Modern games increasingly try to engage the user by making the games contain a strong storyline and mirror elements you would find in the cinema, such as recent popular games like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Uncharted 2. Since these games are attempting to be more realistic, it is no surprise that the video game industry is overtaking the movie industry. Instead of watching great movies, you get to feel like you are in one, with full control of the characters. The creative interaction is the key rather than just eye candy. The Nintendo Wii became popular among traditional and non-traditional gamers due to its unique interaction, even though its graphics were inferior to other gaming consoles.

On the web, the experience is what keeps users coming back. E-commerce websites are particularly focused on the experience because they want potential customers to feel like they are shopping safely and securely. Users browse the web for information. It is how the website presents this information and, more importantly, how it gets the user to that information that makes the experience worthwhile. Amazon and eBay have been pioneers in the e-commerce world and their strong returning customer base proves that they know what they are doing.

3. Progressive Enhancement is Good

This generation of video games are now available with HD audio and video. If you own a system capable of high definition like Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, you can take advantage of high quality graphics and sound. Not only can games look more crisp and realistic with vibrant colors, they can also produce uncompressed multiple channel audio that makes you feel like you are in the game – literally! For those who don’t have an HDTV or a modern surround sound system these systems will simply downgrade those features and play the game as normal. The games will always function the same and sound the same – it’ll just be in a lower resolution and with only 2 channels of audio. No harm done to them. Progressive enhancement in action.

Websites are starting to show progressive enhancement as well with the use of CSS. Web designers try to reward users who browse with modern browsers (i.e. Firefox and Safari) with a beneficial experience that users of IE cannot have, without detracting from the functionality. Designers are using RGBa values, which allow them to include an added alpha channel to the element. This is a powerful tool to have in your designer toolbox because it allows you flexibility and control in overlaying graphic elements and to incorporate opacity variances into the design.

CSS Document
.element {
     color: #fff;
     color: rgba(255,255,255,.5) /* for modern browsers */
}

The example above declares a standard CSS rule for the text color. Older browsers who do not support CSS 3 will only recognize the first line and ignore the rest. The more modern browsers, however, will read the second rule and therefore ignore the first rule. The same concept applies to the CSS 3 border radius property and the CSS 3 opacity property (alpha channel on the entire box element). Andy Clarke uses transitioning properties on his website that are only functional in Safari. These properties, which make the DVD and disc animate on hover, can provide some unique design interactions. Taking these concepts and applying them into websites gives users a unique experience and at the same time doesn’t take away the essence of the design entirely for those who use, well… IE.

4. Minimize Learning Curve by Including Tutorials

Instruction booklets are becoming less used these days for video games. Developers are now putting tutorials into the game and having the user learn as they progress. Most typical games will have the first level or so of the game be the learning grounds for the rest of the game. This is becoming a de facto standard in the industry. During this time, users will be prompted with basic controls and developers will design the level to make sure the the controls are used properly before permitting users to continue the game. These learning tools help minimize frustration and also get the user prepared. What better way to learn than to actually try. Reading instructions is not as effective.

Websites need to be careful about introducing new objects or applications to the user. If you suspect a user will have to think about how to use a particular part of your website, you will have a problem. Users will need assistance with it – whether it is simple instructions or a video tutorial.

5. Keep the Interface as Simple as Possible

In-game menu. Better watch your back! (source: Game Trailers)

Interfaces are extremely important in grabbing the user’s attention. Video games are coming up with some creative ways of designing their interface. While being creative, they still function the same and are easy to navigate. Nobody wants to be confused about where they are or how to get out of the location they are in. Navigation should be carefully thought out. Dead Space uses an intuitive in-game menu where your menu pops up in front of you while you are playing the game. There is no interruption from action as you still have control of your character. Madden NFL 10 uses a simple menu system that zooms to different parts of the stadium in the background based on the navigation section you have chosen.

Websites must remain simple to use, or users will get frustrated and leave. The UI needs to make sense and be engaging at all times. Breadcrumbs are important for sites that are large, preventing users from feeling lost.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Hans Hofmann

6. Don’t Rely on Graphics Alone

Great graphics, but unusable controls, make this game hard to recommend

Those who remember Grand Theft Auto 3 can agree that it was not the most beautiful looking game around at the time of it’s launch. That said, they will also agree that it was the best game to play at the time and it was a huge hit. Graphics can’t do it alone. The experience also needs to be great. GTA3 was impressive because it had an engaging storyline, incredible controls, and was a blast to play. A game with pure eye candy and no functionality will not last long in this industry.

On the web, functionality needs to be priority over design. Once a site functions properly, then you can apply the interface to it. Just like a chair, it needs to function before it looks great, otherwise it is useless. Plan out your websites carefully and make sure that you are considering all aspects exhaustively. Just like video games, a website can be popular if it functions and is enjoyable but will be useless if it’s just eye candy.

So, what are your thoughts on video games and web usability? Do you have any other comparisons? We’d like to hear from you!

Web Accessibility in General

Accessibility is an incredibly important aspect of web design. A company, organization, or individual who wants to have a website needs to consider having accessible content. In some fields like government and education to name a couple, they are required by law to have accessible websites.

So what does it mean to be accessible? Accessible to what? Accessibility is about making your content independent on a person’s abilities or disabilities. Regardless of a person’s physical or mental condition, they should be able to access your sites content.

Disabilities are categorized into four main areas:

• Visual
• Hearing
• Motor
• Cognitive

Accessibility Tool for Designers

WebAIM offers a tool called WAVE that evaluates a web page for accessibility issues. Not only do I use this tool personally on all of my projects, but I highly recommend it to others who have a concern for making their sites web accessible.

You can evaluate your website with WAVE one of two ways:

1. Download and install the Firefox WAVE toolbar.
2. Go to WAVE’s website

WAVE offers you a lot of tools to use at your disposal. You can check for errors, look at the structure and order of your site, see a text-only version, disable styles, and much more.

What is nice about checking for errors is that it visually shows you where the errors (if any) are coming from. This can make your design and development process much more efficient as you can pinpoint particular areas of concern.

There is not a greater feeling than to see WAVE give you the thumbs up and the green light on your design. Designers and developers should always be thinking about accessibility in their projects.

I encourage you to try this tool and avoid eliminating a valuable audience.