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How User-Friendly Is Your Site?
demogirl.com — The Queen of Screencasts from DemoGirl.com shares valuable information on making your website more user-friendly. She shows the best and worst features of the user interface from her vast experience of evaluating and testing countless startup sites (over 500 screencasts and counting!). This is a valuable resource for all startups and any website.
Paisano- 787 diggs
- digg it
- Sundress, on 03/27/2008, -12/+3Wish I had the time/money to make my site more user-friendly. :(
- Kurlumbenus, on 03/27/2008, -0/+13Or talent.
- theOster, on 03/27/2008, -1/+4HA ha!
- Kurlumbenus, on 03/27/2008, -0/+13Or talent.
- bpnet, on 03/27/2008, -3/+12Good insights, it's so easy to overlook or take for granted the obvious or little things in layout planning.
- mesarah, on 03/27/2008, -11/+1nice article!
- Kurlumbenus, on 03/27/2008, -0/+2***** comment!
- debuggercll, on 03/27/2008, -0/+8VERY NICE ARTICLE A+++ WOULD POST LAME COMMENT AGAIN!!!!!
- borez, on 03/27/2008, -1/+7Dugg for the obvious... which isn't always that obvious.
- MellerTime, on 03/27/2008, -5/+1Because she's hot? That was enough reason for me to digg it...
- mrwells, on 03/27/2008, -2/+14I had to leave as soon as I realized the linked site was, in fact, not user friendly.
- mlindle, on 03/27/2008, -4/+2Site was not user friendly...
- Kurlumbenus, on 03/27/2008, -1/+3comment was not original.
- dave122, on 03/27/2008, -3/+1I really hope people don't take her advice on usability too seriously, not that it's neccesarily bad.
'don't make me think' is my bible :D- Kurlumbenus, on 03/27/2008, -0/+4We can tell.
- IHaveIssues, on 03/27/2008, -3/+17Very amateurish delivery.
- gluecode, on 03/27/2008, -0/+20One of the main reasons MySpace makes you go back to the homepage to sign out is to increase the traffic to the home page. They make most of the ad revenue from ads on the home page. The other reason is bad design.
- boing11, on 03/27/2008, -4/+26Who the hell is this girl to be some "authority" on usability on websites?
It just seemed like one person's preference ... personally it doesn't bother me at all for twitter to have their "help" link down on their footer - in fact, the footer is the first place I'd think to look for something like that.
Move along ... nothing to see here.- RexDixon, on 03/27/2008, -5/+1How many screencasts have you done in the last year? Exactly.
- aladrin, on 03/27/2008, -1/+3I agree that I also expect to see the help link there, or on a menu/list-of-links somewhere on the page. That doesn't mean it shouldn't also be prominent on the page that you intend to snare new users with.
She missed saying the one thing that mattered: Every page should have a purpose. You should KNOW what the purpose is. And you should design the page to suit that purpose. - mateusap, on 03/27/2008, -4/+1you gotta see that twitter does not only aims in nerds like people from digg but the average joe as she mentioned.
- thinkart, on 03/28/2008, -0/+1how many bloggers are "authorities" on anything? the web is a beautiful thing because anyone can have a voice--even you who knock people who share their valid opinions.
- jamesbreeze1, on 03/29/2008, -0/+0So why did so many people digg the post? At least she is raising the profile of usability. Not enough people take it seriously!
- MAGZine, on 04/22/2008, -6/+3Her job is to sign up and look around and change her password? I do that for fun.
This person is a joke. Users will address usability issues if needed. - jjive, on 03/27/2008, -5/+2Please critique my site.
http://www.thissiteisnotuserfriendly.com
I know...damn you godaddy suggestions. - capstinence, on 03/27/2008, -6/+7While I agree it was amateur hour and half of what she complained about made me say, "So what?" (i.e. the Twitter Help link), I do agree with her point about clicking something to sign-in. NetFlix makes me click a button to get to a sign-in page. Bugs the hell out of me.
It was excruciating listening to a valley girl try and discuss UI design, though. Like, Twitter should, like, totally put their help somewhere totally different, mkay? - gadgetboy32, on 03/27/2008, -1/+4So 1990
- bejayel, on 03/27/2008, -7/+3this is *****. Make sites harder to use to weed out the retards on the webz. If everyone followed that standard, the internet would be a smarter place.
- RexDixon, on 03/27/2008, -5/+3Molly I guess the "valleygirl" in you came out. :) Hey, what she had to say makes a lot of sense. To the last comment by @bejayel - if you weed out the retards - well that would just be you and your D&D buddies using your site! How popular will that be? Exactly.
- malademental, on 03/27/2008, -3/+0-____- that sucks! Follow w3c standards, and very important : don't use flash!
http://stallman.org is really user friendly! - Kanaka, on 03/27/2008, -3/+2I recently did a module on this for my course and she's pretty much right about everything. A personal pet peeve of mine is sites with black backgrounds and tiny white texts
- CoconutMix, on 03/27/2008, -1/+2More sites and less Molly in the sideshow.
- OhSn4p, on 03/27/2008, -0/+5is she some kind of guru... she talks about herself as she is..... so bloody annoying voice and pretty much everything else.
- Earlofnecromium, on 03/27/2008, -0/+3boring
- davidwasman, on 03/27/2008, -1/+2"Lyke omg lyke everyone was totally asking me why I didn't lyke focus on their site...ok, lyke..."
*shoots her* - sadGuru, on 03/27/2008, -3/+1She's pretty. Dont care about userfriendlywhatever....
- gasin, on 03/28/2008, -2/+6what the ***** is this? Usability 101. Design education for the rest of us.
Most web companies are aware of these issues and come up with a plan on how to solve these issues and work with teams who know more than this...- tony23, on 03/28/2008, -0/+3If only that were true...
- AppleMacStud, on 03/28/2008, -6/+1The best example of a user friendly site is http://www.apple.com and http://www.macworld.com
- slovencek, on 03/28/2008, -0/+0Why? Because it opens fine in Safari :)
- boodog, on 03/28/2008, -3/+3WoW the digg community is a clueless one and its obvious not many here run Internet startups. This post is spam clear and simple! She talks about usability in regards to Twitter and MySpace a little, but most of her time is talking about some random unknown startup that thanks to all these diggs just received a ton of free promotion.
Good job for those startuppers, but Digg community sharpen up!- boing11, on 03/28/2008, -0/+1I was thinking the exact same thing. I can't believe this spam got dugg to the front page.
- mralucas, on 03/28/2008, -0/+3OK she complains about other sites putting things in the right place but yet her video link go's to a HTML page with the video and no way to return back to her site to that i say practice what you preach
- Bviper, on 03/28/2008, -0/+4Says the one with 67 separate topic categories...
- morningchai, on 03/28/2008, -0/+1*yawwwn*
Is she done yet? - thedogfatherx, on 03/28/2008, -0/+1I agree. I think a lot of companies online might spend to much time on technology and forget about the simple things such as easy navigation.
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