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Menu Design: Checklist of 15 UX Guidelines to Help Users

What customer experience excellence looks like

Less content marketing, more quality content

Nielsen Group: Audience-Based Navigation: 5 Reasons to Avoid It

Location/Navigation: You Are Here and 404 error pages

Is content marketing just the same old marketing?

New marketing survey: It’s the trust, stupid

Flat Design: Its Origins, Its Problems, and Why Flat 2.0 Is Better for Users

Nielsen Group: Preventing user errors

McGover: Increasingly, we are also finding that traditional hero shot imagery actually reduces people’s trust in a website. Deceptive advertising has been used for so long that more and more people are not simply becoming immune to it—they are becoming allergic to it.

McGovern: For too long people have placed blind trust in organizations and brands, which has only led to manipulation and abuse. Blind trust is gone. And gone with it are the traditional models of advertising, marketing and communication. Today, we trust in use. Social media is not me and my brands. It’s me and my friends.

Nielsen: Writing headings

Is the Internet hurting productivity?: Management practice often heaps more complexity and awful, unusable systems on top of frustrated, overwhelmed employees

Nielsen Norman Group: Great Summaries on About Us Pages Engage Users and Build Trust

Nielsen Norman Group: Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable

McGovern Trends and Great Design Companies outperform S & P by 219%

The Roots of Minimalism in Web Design

Image-Focused Design: Is Bigger Better? (large background images)

About pages: Dos and Don’ts

Killing Off the Global Navigation: One Trend to Avoid

Nielsen Group: As organizations grow more physically distant from their customers it has never been more important to get closer to them online.

Nielsen Norman Group: The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters

The Millennial generation is defining the Web experience

Nielsen Norman Group: Why You Can’t See Changes

Simplicity Must be Mantra of New Digital Workplace

Nielsen: Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?

Nielsen Norman Group: Designing help pop-up boxes

Advertising and marketing are broken: how do we fix them? More relevant. More useful. Simpler, quieter, with a focus on quality and honesty

Jakob Nielsen: Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable

An FAQ’s User Experience Deconstructed, Improving User Experience

Nielsen: A link is a promise

Site search is rarely enough (your vocabulary and your user’s vacabular probably talk past each other – FAQs still deliver great value

McGovern: FAQs are the dinosaurs of web navigation

Redesigning Your Website? Don’t Ditch Your Old Design So Soon

The Future of Marketing/the Web is to be useful

The new Buckness U. Website: Breaking Web Design Conventions = Breaking the User Experience

Your content is a promise to your customers

McGovern: Focus on what matters to your customers

McGovern: Focus on customer convenience and effort &ndash that’s rarely what matters most to you

Jakob Nielsen: links to related content at end of articles helpful with related keywords

MGovern: We need flexible, adaptable, nimble structures today. Ones that are constantly evolving based on feedback from the environment. And the environment has changed. The environment is now the customer, not the organization. It used to be that customers lived in a world of organizations. Now, organizations must live in a world of customers.

Do you really want to do content fake marketing?

Software that is not user-friendly is costing your employees time resulting in lost productivity

Gerry McGovern: Organization site search is not working. If it is not findable does it exist? If the product can’t be found, does the product exist? If the feature can’t be found, does the feature exist? Management focus must shift away from the production of stuff to the findability and use of stuff.

The role of content in self-service design—there isn’t always a simple solution for a complex task

The changing nature of search behavior

5 Tips to Get Donations on Nonprofit and Charity Websites

Hover Navigation is Driving Your Readers Away. On the iPd, there is no hover over the navigation but rather just taps so people can’t see the navigation menus.

Interestingly, About.com has decided to stop using blog software to keep their pages more dynamic and interesting. Will this impact the use of CMS on websites?

Accordions Are Not Always the Answer for Complex Content on Desktops: Longer pages can benefit users. Accordions shorten pages and reduce scrolling, but they increase the interaction cost by requiring people to decide on topic headings.

People think ‘products’ when trying to solve problems online

Putting People’s Needs First
Peter Drucker once said that all organizations are basically the same, whether they be armies, churches, non-profits or commercial organizations. It’s certainly true that in working in web consulting for almost twenty years, I keep seeing the same problems coming up again and again in non-profits, intranets, commercial websites, government websites, etc. These time-honored, constantly recurring issues can be summarized as follows:
—Content that doesn’t address customer tasks but rather focuses on unnecessary context and/or on organizational needs.

—Distributed publishing that results in poor or no editorial oversight and a constant flow of silo-based, organization-focused content.

—Websites that get worse over time because, while they have processes to publish new content, they rarely have processes to remove old and out-of-date content.
read article

If you’re ripping your customers off, you can’t expect to design an experience to engage them. Nielsen Group: Direct Access vs. Sequential Access: Definition

Nielsen Group: determine page length by relevance of information, not by arbitrary measurements

Jerry McGovern: why practical trumps beauty every time

Nielsen Group: user testing

Competitive Usability Evaluations: Learning from Your Competition

Jakob Nielsen: Avoid Category Names That Suck

Jakob Nielsen: Responsive design is a tool, not a cure-all. It does not ensure a usable experience across all devices (smart phones can get slowed down by large HTML files)

Jakob Nielsen: email subject lines

Give users text label below an icon

Flat versus deep hierarchies, hospital websites

Self-Service Website Design – Speed, Convenience and Simplicity
Self-service design is absolutely obsessed with speed, convenience and simplicity. Online, speed doesn’t kill. Complexity kills.
read Gerry McGovern’s article: The movement towards service

Designing a better slider/carousel
Jakob Nielsen on how to make these user-friendly

If we have learned anything from the Obamacare website, it is that success is based on customer outcomes (can they choose the right insurance easily and quickly) rather than we launched the website on time and on budget: Changing the Website Launch and Leave culture

Separate Mobile Website Vs. Responsive Website

25 Things you might not know about the web on its 25th birthday

The complexity-simplicity trade off – productivity increases when websites/software are more user-friendly.

There Is No Page One on Google Anymore
As an internet marketer, it means that you can no longer reliably predict where your search results will be when someone does a search. Maybe you show up, maybe you don’t. It’s no longer about keywords and getting optimized for that phrase. Position reports are meaningless and not worth the paper they’re printed on.

Jacob Nielsien: people use mobile devices, tablets and desktops differently—is horizontal scrolling appropriate for your desktop users?

Break Grammar Rules on Websites for Clarity

Nielsen: Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful

Jakob Nielsen: Fixing bad navigation

Responsive-Design Intranets with Smart Content Prioritization

Nielsen: Talking with Participants During a Usability Test

Google is rearranging the search results that they display to YOU, based upon your history, and what they know of you personally.

You can’t even reliably see if you’re showing up on the search engines, because doing the search from your own computer has your own history built into it, and well, it’s a biased search. You’ve polluted your own data.

By the way, logging out doesn’t really help either. Don’t forget you have your browser history too, as well as all the searches you’ve done from your IP address, even if you go incognito on Chrome.

This means that there is no page one of Google any more, because you and I and everyone else has their own personal history of likes, dislikes, favorites, and so on. Google is going to give each of us different results from each other, every time we do a search. As marketers, it also means we have to create great content on every subject, and cannot predictably determine the results we’ll get from that content. read the article

Avoid these navigation mistakes in website design from the Nielsen Group. Four Dangerous Navigation Approaches that Can Increase Cognitive Strain

Tips for writing for your web visitors: well written, objective copy helps build customer loyalty. To engage users, website copy must speak to readers and not at them. Include words people can relate to, and avoid jargon, business speak, and feature-driven language.

Jackob Nielsen: Flexible Usability Testing

Mobile: Native Apps, Web Apps, and Hybrid Apps

Why do organizations hate their content management system?
....It is still true—to a frightening degree—that technology is bought for its own sake. It is bought because it fits into already existing IT systems. It is bought because of some new, cool features. It is bought because it ticks each of the many boxes in an enormous, unwieldy "kitchen sink" Request For Proposals. It is bought because there is a belief that technology is transformative in and of itself. Too often, management naively believes that new tools only will improve practices but I find that is rarely the case....Information overload or content bloat is often a hallmark of content management systems. One of the key selling points is often that you can distribute publishing throughout the organization. But distributed publishing is often a disastrous strategy as it allows content amateurs to flood the environment with low quality content.... The Web has turned millions of organizations into accidental publishers, whose strategy has often been to buy technology to deal with this. But that’s no strategy. Strategy begins with a purpose. What is the true benefit to us—and more importantly—to our customers?
read Gerry McGovern’s full article

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Design must also be concerned with how a website works
The fact that GOV.UK has won a top design award shows that the benefits of functional web design are finally being recognized... Design is not just how it looks. Design must also be concerned with how it works. For things to work on the Web they must be findable....it’s simple, direct... Web design must be judged by its ability to help people do things. Thankfully, we are beginning to see more and more of this outcome-based design thinking emerging. It’s exciting times. The Web is finally leaving behind the world of print and TV and developing its own design approach.
read article: The functional heart of web design

Jakob Nielsen: Writing better usability Reports
For usability testing to be valuable, study findings must clearly identify issues and help the team move toward design solutions. Website Reading: It (Sometimes) Does Happen
When web content helps users focus on sections of interest, users switch from scanning to actually reading the copy.
read article

University Websites: Top 10 Design Guidelines

A good SEO specialist/consultant won’t make promises they know they can’t keep
A promise like "I’ll always get you ranked on page 1, position 1 in Google."
A promise like "You’ll never drop in search engine rankings or traffic."
A promise like "I’ll buy you buttloads of links and that’ ll keep you in the top of search results."
A promise like "We’ll write up lots of articles and submit them everywhere!"

read article

Nielsen: Turn User Goals into Task Scenarios for Usability Testing

When is the User Interface too fast?

12 Outdated Web Features That Need to Disappear in 2014: Flash intros, photo carousel, large hero images, stock images, autoplay videos, automated popups, sidebars...

When you add complexity to a website you often add complexity to the navigation: simplifying menus and links

Is SEO Dead?

When you get those emails soliciting for SEO Services
Read article: The Good, the Bad, and the SEO Ugly

Instructional Overlays and Coach Marks for Mobile Apps

Al’s Radon Relief provides residential radon mitigation & radon testing in middle Tennessee including Springfield, Pleasant View, Clarksville, Ashland City, Nashville TN and Cheatham County, Robertson County, Montgomery County, Davidson County Tennessee

Seniors as Web Users

In the Big Bang of Big Data...we need a much greater focus on supporting and helping rather than telling and selling
...."This is the age of the customer, not the age of content. Those who will succeed will relentlessly focus on helping customers complete tasks and be successful. In the Big Bang of Big Data, we need far more customer service professionals and far less content producers. We need more information architects and professionals who understand online customer behavior. We need a much greater focus on supporting and helping rather than telling and selling."