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.

Hello all! I’m very pleased to announce Mindspring Design’s first live, free webinar. Here are the details:

9 Steps to Building a Successful Small Business Website
November 25, 2009 @ 2:00 PM EST
Enter Webinar Room Here | Sign Up Below
Dial In (International): 702-473-3463
Atendee Passcode: 646377

On the agenda….

1. The webinar is scheduled to last 30-40 minutes.
2. We will cover what small business owners need to consider before they even consult with a web designer.
3. We will discuss the main steps small-business owners often overlook.
4. We will talk about what we can learn from a few case studies.
5. And you will leave with an actionable plan to get your business website started or even updated.

You can sign up below. After the webinar, I will post a recording of the webinar. And I will also be doing a review of the free, online webinar software called Dimdim that I will be using. It is supposed to be a free alternative to WebEx, so we’ll see how that goes!

Sign Up for the Webinar Here:

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!