Web Usability

The Dangers of “You Are Not Your User”

Mattias — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:10:56 +0000

“You are not your user” is one of the fundamental principles of UX. The benefits of this simple principle has been well argued for [52 Weeks of UX: You Are Not Your User], but few people realize that if you misunderstand it, you are in danger of hurting your users, your design, your product and ultimately [...]

iPad makes me a little iSad

Mattias — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:00:03 +0000

The iPad is out of the bag and it turned out to be… a zoomed-in iPhone. Which is not iBad, it’s just a little iSad. By building on one of the most successful devices of the last decade, iPad already got basically everything that makes the iPhone a great device (and a great success): awesome [...]

How to Write Excellent Online Instructions

Mattias — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 23:08:59 +0000

Online instructions can be a lot of things – tutorials, FAQs, troubleshooting manuals or user guides. Depending on the quality, they can be lifesavers or sources of major frustrations. These tips will help you write instructions that provides a better user experience for your users, which will save both them and you a lot of [...]

Microsoft on Split Testing

Mattias — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:33:20 +0000

After posting about Split Testing a few weeks ago, I found some very nice material about the implementation of Split Testing from the folks at Microsoft’s Experiment Platform. Be sure to check out the slides for a quick and excellent overview with good examples (a lot of interesting stuff about user feedback in there) and [...]

Using AutoComplete to Your Advantage

Mattias — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:54:37 +0000

AutoComplete is a really clever little feature that makes automatic suggestions based on previous entries in text fields of web forms. It has excellent browser support, being enabled by default in almost all modern browsers (including even *gasp* IE6+, yay!) . And best of all, it requires almost no effort on your part to make [...]