User Experience Design Blog

Apr 12, 2007 - I enjoy reading Read/WriteWeb, but Richard MacManus recently published a much hyped yet ill-conceived article titled ‘Google – The Ultimate Money Making Machine’. The article had some very interesting points, but the main analysis was simply wrong.

Mar 12, 2007 - Well, February was an extremely busy month, and for the shortest month of the year was packed with quite a few gems from the User Experience community. Here is a re-cap of a few articles and concepts that should not go without mention:

Feb 7, 2007 - An MIT and Harvard study (via Slashdot) unveils that the SiteKey system employed by Bank of America, ING Direct and Yahoo!, among others are likely ineffective at protecting users against fraudulent sites. The SiteKey system is based on assigning an image to a user’s account and presenting it prior to the user entering a password. [...]

Jan 30, 2007 - The latest issue of Usability News from the Software Usability and Research Lab (SURL), has a very interesting study - “Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website” - on web users’ eye gaze patterns while browsing and searching web sites. Findings from the study show that the ‘F’ pattern as described by Jakob [...]

Jan 24, 2007 - In a previous article, ‘4 Principles of Effective Navigation on the Web‘, one of the stated keys is letting users know where they can go. One of the most effective ways to let users know what paths are available to them is to expose subsequent destination points. In other words, bubbling up subsections and pages [...]

Jan 10, 2007 - Imagine that you are in a supermarket buying groceries for dinner. Imagine also that this supermarket does not label what kinds of items can be found in each aisle making it impossible for you to know where to go for the next item on your list. To make things worse, the aisles in the store [...]

Dec 21, 2006 - What if you could measure how perfect your website was? If you could definitively say that your website was 100%, pure perfection, wouldn’t you grasp the chance to test how it fares in the test? Well, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) recently released the results of a study commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting which [...]

Dec 14, 2006 - On Wednesday, TechCrunch and Mashable reported the release of Stumble Video, the latest offering from StumbleUpon. Like the core offering, Stumble Video allows users to surf through categories based on preferences and previous ratings, serving up videos instead of websites into one central video player. Beyond a great idea, the implementation is clean and engaging, [...]

Dec 13, 2006 - On Tuesday, Techcrunch reported that MySpace has semi-officially overtaken Yahoo as having the most page views of any internet property. This revelation was met with moderate fanfare, and other prominent industry blogs like GigaOm and Searchblog did not even go there. There is good reason to take this news with a grain of salt, as [...]

Dec 8, 2006 - On Friday, Techcrunch reported on a rumor that the major television networks were planning a joint effort to create their own video web site that would offer the networks’ own content.... Alas, these plans soon fell apart when individual networks started to take favor with Google-owned YouTube after receiving payoffs. Not only is this a great case-study of game theory, it is also an excellent example of missed opportunities and foregone revenue.