Usability is not just about flashy animations...

I was browsing the IKEA web site in order to find a suitable carpet for my living room. For this task you need two basic information:

1. the size of the carpet
2. the picture of the carpet's texture

Typically, the previews show the carpet's texture but in the IKEA's web site they do not include the size that it is shown when clicking on the item's preview.

This is a very simple case of usability issue that can be easily solved. It is not about the appearance of the web site but just about what information is relevant and useful for navigating the site.

If the web site is an e-commerce portal, then this issues can result into a loss of revenue due to the increasing customer's abandon rate (i.e. the user visit the site, tries to make a purchase, but the task is boring or too difficult, or just it does not find the necessary information to make the purchase).

If you want to check whether your site have usability problem you can ask help to a usability consulting company such as SimpleUI with which I am currently collaborating.

Context-unawareness...

I uninstalled the Yahoo! toolbar from Firefox. Don't you notice something strange?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Slowing down de web...

Thanks to Google Analytics, the web is slowing down...


When you click on a link and the web page doesn't load fast, or does not finish to load, then look at the bottom of your browser (you must activate the Status Bar) and you will find:





While very useful, this service could cause undesired slowdown in loading pages. Worse enough, if you put the script at the beginning of the page, the page won't load until Google Analytics has recorded the information.

So please, put it at the end of the page! :-)