Scrapple gets reviewed. Is the mind mapping, note-taking, colour-coding replacement for paper and pen worth the digital switch? Read and find out.
Tag Archives | Usability
15 ways to improve your home page
Your home page has to do an awful lot with very little space and in a very short time. So, here are 15 tips and points of view on making it work well.
Best of the web: marketing
Six links to thought-provoking articles and videos on marketing from across the web. This is what inspired us this week.
Ask better questions: business lessons from designers
As an entrepreneur I spend a lot of my time optimising. Better copy at Articulate, new features for Turbine, better processes, staff training etc. This is necessary and important. But real breakthroughs come when you stop trying to optimise what you’re already doing and start doing something altogether. Sometimes you have to work on the [...]
Readability analysis in Google search
Writing copy that is easy to read, understand and remember is good for business. It respects your readers and increases your impact. But it also improves your SEO. You can see how Google assesses different site’s readability using advanced search. In the reading level results filter, select ‘annotate results with reading levels’. You can then [...]
Short words are (still) best
Research and experience show that short words are better than long words for improving comprehension, recall, engagement and credibility.
Real-world A/B testing proves that shorter copy converts better
I discovered Google Content Experiments a couple of weeks ago. If, like me, you’re already using Google Analytics and tracking conversion rates, it’s incredibly easy to set up A/B tests. Hypothesis I wanted to test a common hypothesis about short copy. For example, Jakob Nielsen’s research says that visitors read about 20% of the text on [...]
Tiny epic usability fail
Today I spent 45 minutes helping my father-in-law fix a problem that had been caused by a kludgy bit of UI design in Windows 7. It has so many options and buttons and ways to do things that it’s really easy for a naive user to do something that appears logical but actually causes real [...]
Interview with Microsoft’s head of web design
I am passionate about website usability. Good copy is an important part of that but not everything. So I asked John Allwright, head of web design and development at Microsoft UK, and John Harris, a user experience evangelist there, to talk about what makes websites good. Full disclosure: my company, Articulate Marketing, does a lot [...]
Is PowerPoint really that bad?
I’ve just finished reading Don Norman’s spirited and well-argued defence of PowerPoint. In his view it is not PowerPoint that corrupts but bad arguments, bad speeches and poor preparation. He takes issue with Edward Tufte‘s arguments against PowerPoint (e.g. here in a Wired article: PowerPoint is evil): Finally, let me review Tufte’s complaint about the [...]