evolt.org - IA/Usability

How Visual Design Can Impact your Bottom Line

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 08:35:55 -0500

How do you know if you should invest more time and money into creating a killer design? This case study examines how the look and feel of the site can impact your overall conversion rate which can provide justification for a little more investment. View the old site, compare it to the new site and review the conversion metrics that shows the before and after conversion rates.

Can WCAG 2.0 be simpler?

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 05:44:32 -0600

The new WCAG 2.0 standard draft sparked a hot discussion around web accessibility and the standard direction. The main issue is how to make it simpler and easier to understand for web developer community. The author investigates some WCAG 2.0 success criteria and explains, why they should be solved by improving technology of user agents.

Navigation - our visitors' travel guide

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 05:53:43 -0500

Your site navigation is what helps the visitors to find your content. Don't make it a technical portfolio but a helper tool. This article shows how the simplicity of real life navigational helpers can be applied to the web.

Understanding Color and Accessibility

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:25:50 -0500

We all know that color can make or break a site. But beyond eye candy appeal, color choices also impact usability and accessibility. This can impact up to 1 in 12 people, roughly 8% of a site's potential audience. The solution is not to use only boring colors or do only simple designs. In contrast, by understanding better the relationship between color and accessibility, the designer can make inspired and creative choices for the multi-device Internet.

Dynamic Elements - cloak and dagger web design

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:34:28 -0500

Dynamic elements make web pages more fun, more interactive and allow us to make pages more usable - if we have CSS, Javascript and a mouse at our disposal. This article discusses some uses of dynamic page elements with accessibility and usability in mind and shows where they fail and what to do to make them better.

Writing effective link text

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:37:12 -0500

Hypertext links are what connects web pages together and are at the very core of the Internet. As they're so important it's essential that your link text is effectively written and displayed - find out how.

Learning to let go

Tue, 18 May 2004 18:44:50 -0500

Accessibility and Usability are discussed a lot more lately than the last few years. Many rumours and half truths about accessibility and the law make non technical colleagues come up to us with questions about accessiibility. Most developers make the mistake of considering accessibility a technological problem, which is only partly the case. We do not need new technology, as old browsers are here to stay, we need to rethink the design of the products we make, we need to learn to let go.

The best web development tool - ever

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 12:51:51 -0600

What is the best tool to develop web products? Is there one that helps us create faster, more efficient and clean without costing a lot of money? Yes, there is, and you have been using it for ages.

I am USER, hear me roar!

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:13:17 -0600

You want them, you need them - Users. Hear from one of them what you might do wrong and what you can do to make up for that.

Stephen Hawking and Me - Flash MX Accessibility

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 05:40:50 -0600

The purpose of the article is to share my experience with Flash accessibility and offer the readers tips to make it work. Hearing your site can be quite unnerving, especially when the voice of Stephen Hawking reads it. There's also a Flash accessibility gotcha that I explain. It's not a breakthrough-code article, but should be helpful to those that want to make their Flash more accessible.

Practical Persona Creation

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 12:48:45 -0600

Don't know what a persona is? Want an interesting and fairly easy way to help you get to know and advocate for your users? Practical Persona Creation is a simple overview, with a few real world examples, of how to create and use personas as well as some ideas to get you started learning about personas and thinking about your user when you design and build Web sites.

Gorilla Usability

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 12:51:17 -0600

Not everyone has time to conduct a formal usability study, or the money to invest in a full blown usability initiative, and frankly, lots of times that might not be the best option anyway. Sometimes a designer or developer needs that one-on-one, maker-to-user interface. Gorilla Usability will show you some ways to get to know your users in a real world, out-from-behind-the-glass kind of way.

Designing your pages for search engines

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 13:01:25 -0600

Search engine optimization is becoming a key part of what it means to be a web developer. Getting your clients traffic ain't easy - but a little thought at the design stage will make things much easier in the long run.

Courtesy titles and webform design recommendations

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 09:28:53 -0600

Courtesy Titles. Their use, misuse and guidelines for flexible international website design

Information Architecture for Everyone

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 08:04:23 -0600

The purpose of this article is to help you define information architecture so that you can recognize when it is you are wearing an IA hat, as well as provide you some tips, basics and resources to help you build the most well architected sites possible. So let's get started.