System feedback is a vital part of any good user experience. When you select, drag, swipe or enter something, you generally expect to see some kind of response. If you don’t, you’re left wondering whether your action had any effect. But while any feedback is usually better than none, many systems simply report action from “the developer’s point of view”—and that’s not always helpful or even meaningful to users. In cases like this, it may be more helpful to offer feedback that tells users just [...]

 

Although I’ve had no time to write a new article for A Better UX this month, here’s a piece I wrote for Thomson Reuters, published earlier this month. It’s pretty high-level stuff compared to articles on this blog, intended to give small businesses with limited resources a few tips to help assess and improve the general usability of their website, but I figured it was worth mentioning here. So here it is… “Fresh Eyes for Your Firm’s Website” I’ll post a new article here in [...]

 

So you’ve documented the new or revised functional requirements for your website or app. The obvious next step is to base a test plan on those requirements to ensure the code behaves as expected. Assuming users use it the way you hope they will. But what if they don’t? Is it possible that they may attempt to use the system in ways you hadn’t anticipated? And if so, how does the system react—if at all? If you’re serious about functional testing, it’s important to ensure [...]

 

If a visitor to your website follows a broken link and gets the dreaded HTTP 404 message, what does that say to them about your website—and your business? Arriving at that error page creates frustration for the user and can diminish trust in your brand. After all, if your company can’t keep a simple link functioning, what else could go wrong? Locating Broken Links Evidence of broken links should be easy to find in your website’s error logs, so hopefully you’ll know if 404 errors [...]

 

By now, hopefully your business is developing a great mobile user experience for your website visitors. By 2015, it’s expected that more web content will be accessed on mobile devices than on desktop computers. So if you’re not already catering for mobile, don’t wait another minute. The recent rapid growth in mobile web usage has already surpassed the expectations of many, so it’s entirely possible that your audience will be mostly browsing, researching, and purchasing on mobile devices even earlier than 2015. So, how’s your [...]

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