Canon Support’s designers require users to understand the difference between a “keyword” and a “category” to read their FAQs.

In ‘97, we wrote the infamous article, “Why On-Site Searching Stinks.” How are we feeling on this topic seven years later? Jared shares our current thinking.

A big tip of the hat to David Poteet and all the smart folks at New City Media for winning the contract to redesign Virginia Tech’s web site.

User Interface Engineering is a think tank exploring user experience, design, and the usability of technology. Our long-term mission is to improve the quality of people’s lives by eliminating all the frustration that comes from the introduction of technology. We figure that’s likely to take a hundred years or so.

Does your homepage get too much attention from the design team or other parts of your organization? We find that is often the case. With a little help from The Long Tail, Josh finds ample evidence to suggest that other parts of your site might be more worthy of attention.

UIEtips 11/30/05: Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site

In this week’s UIEtips, I talk about how hard galleries have to work to help users succeed, with examples from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

By observing users in usability tests, we’ve seen that there is a specific moment where designers have the best chance of enticing a user to pay attention to a promotion or advertisement: the seducible moment.

As we’ve watched users search for their desired content, we’ve realized there are patterns to the pages we see. We’ve started to catalogue these patterns and have concluded there are essentially 8 types of pages a user can run into, which Jared describes here.

We’ve been using a cool graphic design site, called Design Outpost for our graphical needs.

Within minutes of the UIE Roadshow 2006 Tour announcement, we’d received our first registration and they haven’t stopped coming in. This is a new phenomenon for us.