Category: Web
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 1: Design vs. Science
Research-based design is a noble and widely-admired approach to building good products, especially in the web design field. Like a great many other user experience design firms, at Behavior we conduct research whenever possible, to whatever degree our clients’ budgets and timelines will allow. Our projects frequently involve usability testing (both lab-based and informal), card-sorting…
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Be Evil?
What if Sergei Brin and Larry Page were actually evil? What if they were in reality sinister villains planning to take over the world, like Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom? If so, they’re certainly going about it with great efficiency, controlling all of the instruments we use to function in the information age: web search,…
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When Links Lie
It’s always been perfectly acceptable to me to have an underlined text link in the center of a large graphic, suggesting that the user should click the text link when, in reality, the user can click anywhere on the entire image to the exact same effect. In other words, the text link is something of…
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I am large, I contain multitudes.
Emily Dickinson’s totally awesome MySpace page In which half-baked connections are made between American poetry and Internet social networking. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is like an 19th-century personal homepage, in which the poet constructs his profile/identity with the stuff he sees in his neighbors, peers, family, friends, and countrymen. He gives shout-outs to his…
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The View From the Other Side of the Microscope
Photo by Liz Danzico The AIGA is currently in the throes of a major web site redesign. Liz Danzico, the AIGA’s Experience Strategy Director, invited me and about 7 other design industry types to attend a card-sorting exercise to help their design team understand how the AIGA’s users think about the types of content and…
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Reaching Higher Ground with Google Maps
The ever-excellent Google Maps mashup Google Pedometer has recently added an “elevation” feature, allowing you not only to see how far you walked, ran, cycled, or drove, but also to see how far up and down you went along the way. You simply click the “elevation” link and it displays a scrolling iframe with your…
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Dell Rips off Large Businesses
On the left is a nicely-configured Dell Latitude D620 laptop as you’d see it in Dell’s Medium & Large Business store. On the right is the exact same computer if configured in the Small Business store: Not only does the Small Business store offer a significantly lower price to begin with, but they also automatically…
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Not all Web Sites are Blogs
He has a web site, but he’s not a blogger. It may sound obvious to point that out, but I keep reading news stories and commentaries that discuss, for example, how “blogging” is making traditional media obsolete or something… when in fact they really mean to say “the web” is revolutionizing media and communications. Next…
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Social Networks are Brands
Six Apart, maker of MoveableType and TypePad, has apparently been recalibrating their product development away from targeting professional web developers like me and towards the massive “teen/tween” market. TypePad was the first step in this direction, but now they’ve been working on a new social networking app called Vox which is obviously designed to enter…
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The Vicious Cycle of Web Redesign
Do we really need to keep all this stuff? Can we throw some stuff away before we move in? When we pack our belongings to move to a new apartment or house, we often take stock of our posessions and choose to throw a lot of useless stuff away. We lighten our load so that…