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Ziff-Davis' DevHead has a
special section on
Web usability and
CNet's Builder.com often runs stories
about Web usability.
Recommended:
navigation
design,
stages in the Web design
process,
websites for kids
"Web pages that suck" is a series of critiques of poor Web design. The examples are wonderful(ly bad) and I find myself in agreement with the author's analysis about 95 percent of the time. Probably the highest scoring other Web site in terms of agreeing with me. (This site has proven so popular that an extended version has been published on dead trees.)
The Web
Architect column in Web
Review Magazine is written by two folks who not only have plenty
of practical Web experience but also understand many of the more
fundamental concepts that determine what will work.
Recommended:
Designing Tables of Contents,
A-Z lists
as supplementary navigation aides,
Web
architecture (page design vs. site design), semi-regulated
intranets, push, frames, metaphor, continuous
change
Web Review also used to run a good column on Web usability, called Usability
Matters, but no new columns have been posted for quite some time.
Recommended:
stress
testing a site
Steve Outing's "Stop The
Presses" (great name!) is a column on interactive newspapers. Yes,
newspapers are very conservative (they won't admit that dead trees are a
poor medium for classified ads), but they do understand useful
content.
Recommended:
Ethics
of integrating editorial content and e-commerce (continued in a second column),
the best
Web service gives users the least information (review of the
book Data
Smog),
using print
media to promote online media,
WebTV
compared with videotex, mailing
lists
About.com (originally known under the more interesting name The Mining
Company) has special sections with weekly columns
and "finds" from across the Web.
Includes: Web design,
intranet design,
online advertising (I don't
believe Web ads work but they are interesting to read about),
graphic design,
the "Internet industry",
technical writing, and HTML.
Recommended:
centralized
vs. decentralized control of intranet design, accessibility
Usability labs with good websites: IBM, Lotus Notes
Mark Bernstein's
HypertextNOW column
often has interesting observations about the relation between hypertext
theory and the Web.
While I don't agree with all his designs, Bernstein is one of the few other
people on the Web with more than ten years' hypertext experience, so his
arguments are always worth thinking about.
Recommended:
Akscyn's
law (why fast link traversal is essential),
showing
links,
advertising
anchors,
recurrence
(returning to a previously visited node),
3D
views
Special issue of the International
Journal of Human-Computer Studies about Web usability (1997)
Recommended:
How people revisit
Web pages (about 60 percent of the pages a user visits have already
been seen by that user in the past)
and
Information-abundant
Web sites
Frank Halasz' "seven issues in hypertext, revisited" from 1991 is a classic: Halasz summarized decades of hypertext research and experience with early systems to come up with seven major issues that will need to be resolved if large-scale hypertexts (like the Web, hint) are to be successful. A more recent talk by Randy Trigg (also from Xerox PARC) revisits several of Halasz' fundamental issues in light of the Web.
The ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Web, SIGWEB, is a group of researchers interested in the theory of online information. Most of the work is not immediately applicable to Web design, given the primitive nature of current browsers. Instead, it forms the foundation for the next generation of the Web, and nobody should be allowed to touch the specs of IE without familiarizing themselves with this body of work.
The fourth conference in the series was sponsored by AT&T Labs in New Jersey on June 5, 1998. The third conference was held on June 12, 1997 in Denver, Colorado, sponsored by U S WEST Communications. The second conference, hosted by Microsoft, focused on empirical results and had several good papers (even though it is striking how relatively few aspects of Web usability have been studied with real data).
Other workshops: differences between Web browsing and net-enabled applications (April 1998), time and the Web (mainly about response time delays; June 1997), hypermedia usability and the Web (May, 1996), HCI and the Web (April 1996), hypermedia research and the Web (March 1996), and electronic information seeking (October 1995).
The leading professional conference on user interface issues is the annual ACM CHI (computer-human interaction) conference. CHI 2000 will take place April 1-6, 2000 in The Hague in The Netherlands. The CHI 98 Proceedings collected the best current research papers in human-computer interaction in a single volume.
I recommend the Usability Professionals' Association's annual conferences for hands-on information on improving usability.
Scientific American had a feature story on the low productivity of
computer users and how usability might improve the situation.
FEED Magazine had a debate in September 1996 on "Beyond the
Desktop", where several user interface experts discussed various
next-generation interface issues like 3D and large navigation spaces.