Check out this interview on mobile app usability:

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2099266/jakob-nielsen-usability-mobile-sites-apps

Nielsen gives good tips on making a mobile app for your company.

I want to add my thoughts on short copy, however. You want to keep text concise, but not ambiguous. Titles and explanations should not be able to be misinterpreted. In your editing, keep things crystal clear.

Also, the suggestion about hiring a usability team to test your app is crucial.

I recommend small businesses who are developing apps to read this article along with the App Makeover article (especially under the subhead “One Bad Screen=Millions Lost”), and other news in Nielsen’s Alertbox.

So everyone’s heard — Consumer Reports says that the new iPhone is badly designed causing weak signals and dropped calls. As a left-handed person, I was shocked that lefties were told they were holding the phone wrong. Jobs cleaned it up soon after, but here is a good example of poor usability. This blunder cost Apple a decrease in stock price, bad PR and some annoyed customers. The negative media attention seems to have outweighed the phone’s many good features.

RANT: Web sites and interfaces in general should clearly and easily draw people to where they want to go. Offer people too many choices, and they can’t make a decision.

Perfect case in point: Even though I love my HTC Droid Eris, there are little annoying things about the interface. Sometimes I wonder if the programmers and designers ever tried to use the phone. Let’s say you want to use the GPS feature and get directions to go to a destination. In the menu there are three feasible options — Navigator, Navigation, and Maps. Now the first two choices seem more likely, but already I’m annoyed that the phone is making me feel stupid for not knowing the difference between Navigation and Navigator. By the way you can get text directions through the Maps option. Choosing Navigation, you also get text directions, but voice turn-by-turn directions are only through Navigator.

Then if you’d like to change your Home screen, would you choose Setup or Settings? Only a tech savvy person would know to choose Settings. Setup would be for when you are first setting up your phone. Then why is it a menu option next to Settings?

The clock feature is also exasperating. How do you edit the city shown on the clock? You don’t. You must create a new clock for a new city and then delete the old one.

The list goes on and on. With each new phone I am forced to learn new things that aren’t even in the manual. I had to Google a couple of things, thank goodness the phone has internet access. Anyway, the point is, test your applications, interfaces, web sites please. Don’t be lazy, cater to the users. They will thank you in the end.

Does your business cater to young people?

Do children primarily use your website?

Have you tested your website‘s usability on your target market… children?

Children and toddlers, even, are using the internet on a regular basis. A website that targets these young people will need special design considerations, but it will also present challenges in user experience. What this means is that young kids have special needs and challenges that need to be taken into consideration when designing a website for them. These include:

Eye-hand coordination

Non-readers or new readers

Ability to click mouse buttons

Ability to use keyboard

You may want to consider:

Having audio or video instructions

Not placing important navigation below the fold

Not using complicated functionality when simplicity will do

Not recreating standard design conventions, this could be confusing

Check out an article in UX Matters that Heather Nam recently published entitled Designing User Experiences for Children. She lists a useful list of suggested design conventions when designing for children.

Don’t scare away potential customers because they don’t trust you. An SSL certificate says: “We’re legit.” “We value your privacy.” “Your online transaction is safe and secure.” When customers see that little golden padlock in their browser, they know they are protected.

What is an SSL Certificate?

It’s a certificate that verifies your online identity and encrypts sensitive information that is sent through your website. It should contain information like: your domain name, certificate holder’s name, issue date, issuer name, and possibly details about your business like organization name and location.

Check out this video for an explanation:

Why would you need an SSL Certificate?

You have an online store
Your website has a login to a confidential area
You need to transmit sensitive customer/business information
You need to ensure privacy
You want to gain trust

There are countless companies offering SSL certificates. Verisign claims up to an 87% increase in transactions when businesses use Verisign Extended Validation SSL. GoDaddy is another option. Shop around and see what is best for your small business needs and budget.

First of all, why is this so important? What’s so wrong with click here and see more?

Effective website links draw the eye and spark interest. They encourage clicking because people want more. Click here is an oft overused link term which is nondescript and uninteresting. No one will click anywhere without a good reason. Get a $10 discount for commenting on this blog would entice more clicking ; )  If you want a “sticky” website that offers findable information, you need to write effective links.

Jakob Nielsen recently conducted a study (First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye) based on their findings that web users typically scan a web page in an F-pattern. They tested 80 users understandings of the first 11 characters of 20 different website links. The most effective links followed these guidelines (excerpt):

• Use plain language
• Use specific terminology
• Follow conventions for naming common features
• Front-load user- and action-oriented terms

(Read the study summary here. You can also learn more by signing up for their Writing for the Web course at the Web Usability Conference. If you do any writing for the web for your small business, this is a must-do.)

Notice the F-pattern? People generally read the first few lines in a list and read less as they go down.

I did a quick little test on my own website. Here’s a truncated list of a few of my links:

• Learn more
• See example
• View Resume
• Contact Min
• contact us
• Web Design
• Web Design
• SEO/SEM & I
• Dynamic, In
• Web Analyti
• E-mail Mark

Not  too bad. Areas to work on: (1) Learn More and See Example are too generic. (2) And the two links starting with Web Design are two different links, but you can’t tell because they’re truncated. Other than that most links use plain language, are specific, or use action words at the beginning. So I’ll go back a tweak a few of my links.

HOMEWORK: Scan your website‘s links (especially ones that are in list format). Without reading the context, can you predict where they’ll take you? Let me know how you make out!

Do you have a logo for your small business? Great! Have you crafted a logo style guide? Sometimes people outside your company need to use your logo. And a style guide is a brief document that will help to protect the use of your logo. After you’ve paid all that money for a well-designed logo, you don’t want somebody changing up the colors, stretching it, or putting their own initials on it!

I’ve listed some important elements that should be included in your logo style guide below. If you think of others, please share them with our community!

• Size: such as smallest size it can be printed at
• Surrounding white space: least amount of white space around the logo — usually determined in proportion to your logo
• Colors: for example, specific Pantone colors you use
• Background: provide examples of the logo on permitted background colors, or specify what is allowed
• Fonts: permitted fonts that can be used in conjunction with logo
• Options: give optional logos for people to choose from

So you’ve spent lots of time and money designing your small business website, and you’ve just launched it for the public to see. But wait! Do you know you could be ignoring a large percentage of the population and thus reducing the market audience you are targeting?

You might take for granted that some users cannot use a mouse.

When designing your website, you should design web content in an accessible format (not as an afterthought), keeping in mind people who have:

• Visual impairments (Blind, Color blind, Senior citizens)
• Hearing impairments
• Physically disabilities
• Learning disabilities
• English as a second language
• Slower internet connections
• Access to Internet content on multiple platforms (mobile phones, etc)

You will reap several business benefits by following web site accessibility standards:

• Improve the searchability of your website.
• Increase usability and help to improve web conversions.
• Increase information access to more people using assistive technologies and adaptive technologies.
• Accessibile web design is required by law in some places, so your business brand will benefit by complying with accessibility standards.

9 Accessibility Mistakes to Avoid When Designing a Website:

1. All your links read: “Click Here.” This could be confusing to visitors using screen readers and other assistive technologies. Instead, use a descriptive link that gives useful clues about where you’ll take them once they click.
2. You use tables to layout your web pages. Instead, use tables for organizing ‘tabular data’ (for charts and such) to eliminate confusing and repetitive table tags. Opt for CSS to layout and style your web content.
3. Your pages use extremely small type (because “it looks cool”) that can’t be resized in the browser. People with sight disabilities may need larger text in their browser. If your design breaks or doesn’t allow that, they will have to leave your website.
4. Color is used as an integral design or navigation element. That would confuse those who are color blind (take the color blind test). And remember some monitors don’t display colors accurately.
5. You’ve got light grey text on a white background or dark grey type on a black background (because it’s “so Web 2.0″). This makes reading a difficult and painstaking process. You need to use a bit more contrast for users with challenged vision. You don’t have to completely sacrifice design for functionality, but do keep this in mind. And do allow users to make their own decisions about how they browse your page.
6. All description, title and alt tags have been left blank so people must guess what your page and images are all about. Make sure your web designer goes that extra step, labeling and describing the contents of your page. This may mean that you, the business owner, must provide content for the designer to input.
7. There are no captions on any video or audio recordings, and no transcripts are provided for the deaf. Physically challenged users might miss out on this quality web content. So don’t leave anyone out, and make sure to offer alternative versions of your audio/visual content.
8. There are no descriptive tags in web forms explaining how to fill them out. Close your eyes and imagine filling out an online form. Where do you start, what should you type, in what format? To ensure that you recieve high quality form submissions (or recieve submissions at all), try including descriptive form tags. You web designer should also insert any instructions (like “enter year with four digits: 2010″) before the form fields, not after.
9. You used an online validator, but didn’t do any web content accessibility testing on actual users with disabilities. An online validator is a good place to start. But it is not a good substitute for a person. Testing your page on a group of people who have disabilities will give you most invaluable feedback about your site.

Recommended Reading:

• Website Accessibility Under Title II of the ADA
• Understanding Disabilities When Designing a Website
• Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities: 75 Best Practices for Design of Websites and Intranets, Based on Usability Studies with People Who Use Assistive Technology
• Web Usability Accessibility and Usability Resources

Resources:

• Web Site Accessibility Tools, Checklist & Guidelines
• Test URL in Online Checker
• List of Screen Readers

If you’ve ever taken a long road trip, you’ve noticed that highway signs remain consistent across the country. Signs are the same color choices, typically the same typeface, same large readable text, with similar abbreviations. This helps you as a driver to quickly recognize and assimilate where you are and make split second decisions on where you are going.

Consistent navigation helps guide your visitors, avoiding frustration and abandonment.

As people use the internet, they are “travelling” at lightning speed, scanning images and information very
quickly. So your website must have clear and consistent navigation in order to facilitate seamless web experiences.

Experts on web usability say that a good, consistent navigation system should answer these three questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where have I been?
3. Where can I go?

Just as highway signs let you know: (1) you are on Route 95, (2) you are passing Philadelphia, and (3) you are headed South and can go to Delaware or Baltimore, web navigation gives you visual cues to keep you informed, guided, and not lost. Quickly. Go to another country, and a road trip should not seem all that foreign to you. Similarly, jumping from website to website, you should know what page you’re on, in what section, and what other sections you can navigate to from any page to get to your destination.

Links should stand out and be consistent and legible. Your web designer should use server side includes to form navigation so that it’s consistent on every page. That also makes it easy to make site-wide changes in minutes.  And make sure your navigation is readable and searchable by search engines.

Is this scenario familiar? It’s the bottom of the sixth, and bases are loaded. But once again the team just can’t seem to get any runs. The crowd lets out a collective sigh. Tracking your web analytics software can be just as disappointing. Your SEO, link building, and Pay Per Click Advertising efforts have increased the number of visits to your site. But these visitors are disappearing like sand in a sieve.

Experienced designers know they should be focusing on web site conversions — not just counting the visits, but making the visits count. We will discuss just three of the many ways you can improve your web site conversions and increase the success of your site.

First of all, your web site should have definite objectives. There are informational sites, e-commerce sites, blogs, etc. Your goals should be specific and quantifiable, for instance: to receive e-mails, online inquiries, phone calls, etc. Meeting your objectives means the you have attracted your ideal web site visitor and they have answered your call to action, completing the sale or becoming a lead. How do we do that?

1. Offer clear, consistent navigation.

Your navigation should be descriptive, and lead people to where they think they should end up. This is about THEM, not you. Web visitors scan a page very quickly looking for keywords they’ve thought up in their own brains. So your menu items should include words and phrases your visitors would be expecting, not cute, kitschy titles or what you want to force feed them. Then each click of the mouse needs to take people from a more general to a more specific place — getting them closer to their objective. If someone isn’t finding what they are searching for, they will become bored or frustrated and give up. And you’ve lost a web conversion.

2. Focus on benefits & problem solving.

I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Web copy is just as important as the content of any marketing piece. Your web content must focus on the visitor’s needs, interests, problems. Talk about specific ways in which your business will meet these needs and solve these problems. Now, you’ve got a listening ear, and now you’re on your way to getting a web conversion. Writing on the web must take into account many factors such as audience, purpose, search engines, etc. So small business owners need to spend time, effort and money on quality web copy. And please spell check!!!

3. Tell people what to do.

This is where your call to actions comes in. Think back to your site objectives. Each page should have clear directions about where visitors should go. And it’s gotta be big and bold and extremely clear to web site visitors. Do some informal web site testing: ask a couple of friends or colleagues to sit down and use your site. Look for signs of confusion or hesitation, and frantic clicking of the browser’s Back Button. These are all signs that you may need to call-out your call to action.

These were just three of the dozens of ways you can improve web site conversions. Contact an experienced web designer or a usability expert to increase your web conversions. And start turning those hits to home-runs.