User experience: Three secrets to simplicity

Many website owners damage their sites by continually adding features and content when they should be simplifying. In this post I reveal why that happens and how to simplify your website.

User experience: Lessons from the O2 failure

I don’t want to start ranting about the debacle that was upgrading via the O2 website, from my iphone to the iphone 3G. However, there are a couple of things we can learn about good site design from their mistakes.

Development: Friendly web addresses

When redesigning boagworld considerable time was spent formatting the sites’ web addresses. In this post I explain why so much time was taken and introduce you to the tools I used.

User experience: Quick and dirty wireframes

I am currently in the process of wireframing an internal project that we are working on at Headscape. It occurred to me that despite the fact that wireframes are a fundamental tool of web design, they are not something I have spoken about before.

User experience: The importance of Undo

An easily available undo function creates a sense of simplicity because it instills in the user the attitude of “what the heck, I can always undo it”.

User experience: Non hierarchical navigation

By bringing together search, tagging and related links in a relatively automated process I really believe that active navigation provides a viable way of dealing with massive websites.

User experience: Dump your information architecture

Do you run a website made up of thousands of pages? If so, then you may want to consider listening to an excellent presentation by Russ Weakley. He proposes an interesting new approach to the information architecture of large sites.

User experience: Statstastic! Jakob loves his stats

I am currently reading Jakob Nielsen’s new book “Prioritizing Web Usability” and would highly recommend it for any user experience designer. The book is packed with some excellent statistics and I thought I would share a few of them with you.

User experience: Tag your pages

You can’t swing a cat at the moment on the web without hitting some form of tagging. From delicious to flickr, tagging is all the rage, but what about tagging the pages on your website?