|
Insight, Information and Inspiration on women's careers, business, technology and the Industry.
|
|
|
I often talk on the subject of website usability and the importance of designing your web pages with your user in mind.
In the blink of an eye, web surfers make their judgments…they instantly judge your website’s “visual appeal.” If your website is appealing they will look further, if it is appealing and easy to navigate and read…you will have the chance to build trust with your reader and only then can you influence them to take the action that you want …whether it is to click on your ad, call you for a consultation, or just simply come back.
Here are some tools that will help you evaluate and analyze how users use your site so you can improve your website’s design and usabilty.
 ClickTale records your visitors’ every action as they browse your website and allows you to watch movies to understand visitor behavior and gain valuable insights and improve your website’s usability.
Price: You can track 100 page visits/week (~400 page visits/month) for free. If you need to track more pages, check out clicktale website for price plans.
 ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks of your website pages, showing you hot and cold click zones. The hot zones tell you the most clicked on areas on the page and the cold zones tell you which areas on the page are being ignored.
This is an open source software that equires Javascript on the client side to track clicks, PHP and GD library (image library that should be installed with your PHP) on the server to log clicks and generate the heatmap.
Price: FREE
 Clickdensity is another great tool that offers different kinds of reports based on your user behavior on your website:
- Heat maps reports show the most clicked areas on the page
- Hover maps reports show you the statistics on your users hovering over the links but not clicking on them.
- A/B Tests allow you to change page elements to test usability and improve user experience.
Price: You can track one page for up to 5,000 clicks for free. If you need to track more pages, check out clickdensity website for price plans.
Because I work for Barnes & Noble.com, I constantly have an eye on the world of books, especially as it pertains to the online experience. Recently I ran across an interesting site called Big Universe that allows you to create your own children’s picture books. You can design your own layout, write free-form text, and choose from a surprisingly large (and beautiful) selection of imagery to put it all together. Then you can self publish your finished product on the site. It also allows you to connect with other aspiring children’s authors and other people in the publishing world.
The pool of artwork you can use seems to be quite extensive. Here are some sample pages from a few books that I found on the site:
When Pigs Fly
|
Is a Worry Worrying You?
|
Migrating Animals of the Water
|
Nana Star
|
Continue Reading “Create, Self Publish, and Sell Children’s Picture Books”
 Many of us are still clamoring on the Web 2.0 bandwagon while other interaction designers are plowing ahead to tackle new ways to share and interact with data. Sure, wikis and folksonomies are awesome, but information challenges are piling up, and a designer’s work is never done. In fact, that’s what makes our line of work so darn interesting—not to mention valuable to companies.
A while back after attending the Future of Web Design conference, I blogged about what Web 3.0 might look like. While my speculations were high level, a recent article entitled User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload in Read Write Web showcases information challenges that are starting to rear their ugly yet beautiful heads.
Each scenario in the post includes a description of the interface, a hint at new information challenges, and a clip from YouTube to show off the technology. Below are examples of the types of interfaces and new design challenges that are ahead.
Giant touch screens
Touch screens assume, well, touch. So how do users interact when items are out of reach?
Desktops that mimic the ordered chaos of a physical desktop
If we’re mimicking physical space, a pile of documents should get displaced or should react as another document collides with it. How do we allow users to create both tidy and untidy piles?
Thought-controlled menus
A thought-controlled interface might be hard to imagine, though we already have thought-controlled artificial limbs that react solely to nerves controlled by your brain, so why not an interface?
3-D gaming
The article shows the impact moving from 2-D to 3-D can have on even the simplest gaming interfaces.
Very cool stuff. Check out the full article: User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload
Recently someone asked a great question on the Interaction Design Association’s discussion list: What music do you listen to while you design? Over the next few days, designers of all ages chimed in. Though some said they like it quiet and others commented that they were usually stuck listening to the sales guy’s phone calls, there was a strong, recurring theme: While we’re working with our ear buds in, we designers have background noise we don’t have to pay attention to to understand.
For example, many people said they listen to classical, jazz, electronic, and world music in other languages (like the Plutomayo series). Others said they let their iPod shuffle through very familiar songs. New music was off limits to most (though some people cited online college radio stations known for new indie music). To be fair, there was a punk streak, a little NPR, and a handful of nods to Rammstein. A wise soul acknowledged it’s nice to break from designing and play a little acoustic guitar. Even though hip-hop soars in the charts, it was mentioned only as a side note that people turn to when they’re in a certain mood.
One after another, people piped up about their favorite spots online to get endless streams of custom music on demand. Here are some cyber-music suggestions that came up in that discussion that I wanted to share with the Webgrrls community to keep you designing to the beat.
This site has canned channels or lets you build your own. They even have an Irish channel for St. Patrick’s Day. One cool feature is that you can put in an artist and it will tell you what radio stations play them.
The best feature on finetune is their widget that lets you put play lists on your blog. They say that “it’s the soundtrack for your life and anyone can tune in.”
Continue Reading “Online Music to Help You Design”
Blog-well has put together a great list of over 100 resources to help web developers…where to find snippets of code, sites that automate processes, cheat sheets, lessons, & useful tools.
Below are my favorites from each category:
Code
Snipplr
Collection of code snippets - JavaScript, HTML, PHP, CSS, Ruby, Objective C
AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript Libraries
An extensive list with over 60 Ajax, Javascript and DHTML Libraries - with detailed descriptions.
AJAX Javascript Solutions for Professional Coding
Over 90 useful AJAX-based techniques you should always have ready to hand
Open Source Directory
An archive of the Web’s best Open Source software, applications and references.
Best Solutions for Images
30 scripts of impressive slideshows, lightboxes and galleries you can use for effective presentations of your images.
Cool Online Tools
Continue Reading “100+ Resources for Web Developers”
Next Page »
|
|
|
