User Experience, Usability and Usability Testing

Understanding usability is the core to creating innovative design. If you find a way to present information with more clarity, your ability to design improves. I have been trying to focus more on "content" when designing than actual aesthetics. I've been trying to communicate the site's purpose and making everything clear, organized, and easy to find what you are looking for. When I saw UX Mag's site, I was amazed by the layout. I realized that it's a user experience publication and thought to myself "of course!" Then I realized that my design focus wasn't on "content" as much as it was on usability.

Usability Focused Site Design(s)

1. UX Mag: User Experience Publication

I hope I find more examples!

The mistake of ignoring usability
"Violating Design Conventions: Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. Every time you release an apple over Sir Isaac Newton, it will drop on his head. That's good.The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users' expectations, the more they will feel insecure. Oops, maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a tomato and jump a mile into the sky.Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites."This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave. " - no. 8 of the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

Best Practices
No link on the homepage that links to the homepage itself
site search is important

Case Studies
Wired Article "How Would You Redo the Google Interface?"
Design View: Google Redux
Design View: eBay Redux

Resources
UX Mag is a publication dedicated to providing information on user experience
Wide Open column: Digital Web Magazine
Jakob Nielsen: Useit.com
Human Factors International
Association for Computing Machinery
Adaptive Path
Fast and Simple Usability Testing
Criteria for optimal web design (designing for usability)
Who are the best communicators? features advertising best practices from David Ogilvy
User Experience Design Illustrated
30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of

Read More
Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog — Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers’ Experiences
Things to avoid when creating a website
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes
10 Ways to Increase Blog Usability

Don’t do this on your website, it bugs me

Web Designer Profile: Andy Budd

website: http://www.andybudd.com/
company: Clear: Left
org: SkillSwap
Based out of: UK
conference: d'Construct
book: CSS Mastery
talks about: CSS & Web Standards and Accessibility
devoted fan of: Movable Type and Mac OS X


Has a list of Free Designer Resources and his Favorite Sites

Web Design Wire Frame

Site Point: Wire Frame Your Site
A Designer's Wireframe
Web Site Wireframe

What's Up DOCTYPE?

Quick Link: W3C Doctypes

Standards Compliant Doctype from the horse's mouth
W3C's List of Recommended Doc Type Definitions (DTDs)
W3C article "Don't forget to add a doctype" explains the importance of DTDs

When something's wrong, check your doctype
Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!

"if your pages use outdated elements such as the bgcolor attribute in table cells or the target attribute in links, then HTML 4.01 Transitional is likely the best document type for your pages." - Jeffery Zeldman

Doctype Advanced

Beyond DOCTYPE
From Switches to Targets

Related Topics: deprecated HTML

VALIDATE your mark up

validate your HTML and CSS
search: free validation HTML CSS
World Wide Web Consortium (http://validator.w3.org)
Web Design Group (www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/)
CSS: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Tidy: www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
validate yourself too: Invalidation may be the single most damaging form of psychological abuse
HTML Toolbox shows errors

Accessibility

"Although many people automatically think about people with some sort of physical impairment when accessibility is mentioned, the term actually refers to a Web site that is open to all. Even visitors with old equipment, tiny monitors, slow modems, and screen readers can use accessible Web sites.What happens when a designer considers how the page will look to all visitors? The usability level of the site increases, as does visitor satisfaction - and hopefully repeat visitors. You don't have to design an ugly site geared towards the lowest common denominator. Just put some thought into how the site looks in configurations other than your own.If you assume that "everyone" has a huge monitor running at the highest possible resolution or other cutting edge equipment, then you could be locking out well over half of your visitors. Why not invite them in instead?"

Providing text equivalents for non-text elements in the form of an alt or longdesc tag

Resources:
30 days to a more accessible web site
Accessify

CSS vs Tables

"...tables or absolute positioning. That’s so 1999." - A List Apart
Educating your client why css layout instead of a table layout:
"Large and/or nested tables in particular can dramatically slow page display." - Designing for the Web
"Web standards such as HTML 4, XHTML, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) gives you the best of all possible worlds" - Jeffery Zeldman

"The most amazing thing about this tutorial, is that somehow, even though it was completely unrelated, and supposed to be humorous, people STILL managed to get into a tables vs. css debate. YAWNNNNNNNNNN. So tired. So over it. Will someone just buy the domain tablesvscss.com and document all the arguments so we can keep it all in one place and never have to look at it again? I am pro web standards, but at the end of the day, it is such a meaningless thing to be zealous about. People are hungry. " - a comment by anathema on an educational CSS "how to" post

Test Your Site

Test your site in multiple browsers, browser versions, screen resolutions, operating systems, and monitor sizes combinations.
Become familiar with the major assistive technologies used by visitors with disabilities.
Running IE 6 and 7 at the same time

Notes on Usability

This information has been moved to User Experience, Usability and Usability Testing

Reading List

these have been moved to the super long list here:
Reading List for Web Designers and Pop Culture Enthusiasts

center img

W3C SAMPLE :
img class="centeredPIC"
IMG.centeredPIC { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto }



FINAL:

#flkr-cntrPIC{ display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; float: center; padding: 5px; margin-bottom: 8px; border: 1px solid #ccc;}






References:
Web Publishing Secrets - Zeldman [written 10 days before 9/11]
Centering Images is harder than you think [2004/09]
W3C section on centering [lu 2007/01/15]