Honest Insights In User Experience Design

As web users, you are all aware of the horrid things that web designers, developers and advertisers put you through. These are the top 3 things that they need to stop doing!

3. Post-Roll Advertisements

When watching a video, your users are invested (one can hope) and you’d like them to come away from that experience with a positive attitude. Nothing spoils a great video like a post-roll ad the second it’s finished playing. Most of the time, you can’t pause or mute them and they force you to close the window which means: “bye bye potential conversion”. Continue Reading

When it comes to hosting your website, there are three main options available to you: Dedicated Hosting (A physical computer just for you.), A Virtual Private Server (Where many dedicated-style servers are emulated in software and exist on one physical machine.), or Shared Hosting (Where many websites share one server, the server’s settings and its horsepower.)

Dedicated hosting is obviously the most powerful option, but it’s not affordable for smaller projects and can require regular maintenance. Shared hosting on the other hand, is typically better for a small site or blog. The price of shared hosting is usually very affordable, but it comes with a few conditions. How severe these conditions are is what separates the good hosts from the bad.

Below are what I believe are the top 5 most important things to consider when choosing a shared hosting provider. Continue Reading

A couple months ago I wrote about the importance of using social media. This post will show some of the new and current trends in social media, specifically facebook and twitter. Sure, it’s great to throw an icon in the footer of your site to attract followers, but what about actually using social media to provide dynamic content or increase conversions!? The examples below can provide value to your site and your users.

Facebook- Badges
Facebook offers some really cool & simple badges including fan badges, customizable profile badges and photo badges.

Twitter  – Buttons
Pretty basic but these little guys look pretty good. Continue Reading

IE6 is bad for user experience. Set your users free, drop IE6 support and encourage them to upgrade to a modern browser, it will take more than Google to make this happen. In my last post I covered briefly the IE exploit that hit some large companies, notably Google. I also talked about Google’s decision to drop support for IE6 on March 1st for the Google Doc’s Suite and Google Sites. Covered in this post are the benefits of dropping IE6 to you as a website owner, why putting IE6 to rest would mean a better user experience for all, and more reasons to stop supporting the browser.

Why this is beneficial to you as a website owner

When it all boils down, dropping IE6 support saves you time, and that saves you money. In addition your designers will have more freedom in their design and interaction, your developers will be less stressed and frustrated not having to spend hours debugging for IE6. In addition to saving you time, money and making your team more happy, you now have more modern development options available to you, allowing you to enhance your user’s experience. As I have mentioned before, the web is an ever changing environment, new technologies are created everyday. Some stick around and others don’t, but those that do typically rely on modern browser technology and future focussed; they look ahead and not back. As an added bonus you are also helping your users improve their experience and security on the web, the more people that drop support for IE6, the quicker the transition to modern browsers will be. Continue Reading

A webpage usually has some sort of order the designer tries to guide the user through. There are plenty of ways and elements involved in getting the user to read through the content, but I’ll focus on some pretty simple and standard ways to create contrast in order to push the message of the site and hopefully accomplish the company’s goals.

Contrast through Color

Color is probably the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about contrast. Especially important with typography, color contrast creates a visual distinction between elements and dictates what is “important” to read and what is “more important” to read.

Sure, the word “VIRGIN” will grab your attention, but there’s no doubt that hot pink stands out beautifully on that pure white.

You can’t get more contrast than black and white. A quick glance at the site and it’s very clear what the message is.

The color contrast created with the background makes the foreground content area well framed and easy to read.
Continue Reading