Over at the Boxes and Arrows LinkedIn discussion group, Carrie asked: What is a good success rate for a usability test task? We just conducted user testing on a site map. So we have success rate percentages for each task. They range from 9% – 51% success (in up to 3 tries). Obviously there are [...]

I often start a phone conversation with “Hi, this is Jared.” However, I never start an in-person conversation that way. It would just be weird to walk up to someone, look into their eyes, shake their hands, and say, “Hi, this is Jared.” More likely, I’d say “I’m Jared” or even just “Jared” with a [...]

The other day, I listened to a fascinating interview that John Jantsch conducted with Vanessa Fox, author of Marketing In The Age of Google. Listening to her, I got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining [...]

“On a web site, the design is represented by two separate yet equally important components. The content users and the links they use. These are their stories.” Doink-Doink. Ok, really it’s just the story of the links. (We’ll talk about the content later, I promise.) About 10 years ago, we started looking at how users [...]

Last month we held a UIE Virtual Seminar where I presented my talk,
Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. As always, we had a
number of excellent questions from the live audience that we
couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so, with a little help from
Adam Churchill, I recorded this podcast and cover a number of those
remaining questions.

Back on August 6,  we brought you part 1 of Daniel Tunkelang’s article on Front End Concerns When Implementing Faceted Search. Daniel discussed where and when to present facets and organizing facets and facet values.   In today’s UIEtips, we continue with part 2. In this article, Daniel explores specific aspects of faceted search interfaces that raise front-end usability concerns [...]

There’s lots to say about Search and how to best design for it. Folks often reach out to our own Jared Spool for his thoughts and sage advice on Search. Want to know what he has to say? Jared will be presenting at our July 9 UIE Virtual Seminar – Search, Scent, and the Happiness [...]

Last week we re-published part 1 of Producing Great Search Results. As I mentioned last week, producing a great search results page takes a ton of hard design work. It’s critical to study the users’ goals and needs, and watch how the user interacts with the results the engine produces. In almost every instance, Search is not the user’s end [...]

Our May 7 UIE Virtual Seminar is right around the corner.  If you are struggling with how to organize a vast amount of information for your users, then you’re not going to want to miss this UIE Virtual Seminar. UIE Virtual Seminar New Ways to Think about Taxonomy: The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization [...]

My article, Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs, is one of the most controversial I’ve written in recent years. People either agree completely or think I’ve gone off the deep end. When people disagree, it’s often because they think I’m suggesting that we stop putting breadcrumbs in our designs. I’m not suggesting this at all. I’ve defined [...]