From the category archives:

Usability

Why Documentation Is Important

January 11, 2012

When documentation is a recording of a strategic and creative process focused on clearly outlining issues, goals, recommendations and guidelines, and created in a way that empowers collaboration and revisions in the future, it is one of the most important phases of any project.

Read the full article →

The Making of a New Online Museum

November 11, 2011

When the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland approached Fastspot to help solve one of its core challenges, allowing online visitors to browse its collection of works, we jumped at the opportunity. Here is a recap of some of the hurdles, surprises, successes, and failures that we encountered during the course of the project, with [...]

Read the full article →

What Makes a Good Main Navigation?

August 30, 2011

Your website’s main navigation, the primary navigation presented to users who first arrive on your website, should do several things, and do them well.
The main nav should be simple. The language, the organization, the placement, the size of the font—everything—should be simple. This is the most useful element of your site, and much like a [...]

Read the full article →

How to Tackle a Content Audit

June 16, 2011

The following post was written by Fastspot’s User Experience Director, April Osmanof, who has single-handedly wrangled in some of our nastiest cases of content hoarding. Here are her thoughts on the content audit / strategy process.
How to Rein in an Expanse of Web Content
A lot of our clients are longstanding, large institutions and associations. By [...]

Read the full article →

Storytelling is the Catalyst: From Technique to Experience

October 13, 2010

When it comes down to it great storytelling wins. Every time. A great story will trump great effects, great technique, great design, great production, anything else. Really good storytelling gets the viewer or reader emotionally invested, and once you have someone emotionally invested, you have them hooked.
Great storytelling should be the goal with everything we [...]

Read the full article →

If You’re Confused, Chances Are Everybody Else Is, Too.

July 30, 2010

If you have a new idea—a design, an interface, an app, a product—and you start shopping that whatever it is around, pay close attention to people’s reactions. The reason why we sometimes find user testing a necessary and valuable process is because often we have become too familiar with that on which we are working; [...]

Read the full article →

Less is Best

July 26, 2010

If you want, you can make the simplest task the most complicated waste of time imaginable with almost a guaranteed outcome of non-completion. Now why on earth would we choose to do this? Well, there are a few reasons we tend to do this, and hopefully by identifying them early, you can avoid them and [...]

Read the full article →

Don’t Ask Ordinary People What They Think

April 15, 2010

“Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein
Clients often ask me if we test designs. I usually say no. This is different than usability testing, which has its merits. Unless we are testing for very specific things like, “Can you find where the search box is?” or “Where would you [...]

Read the full article →

Have an Opinion, and Don’t Tell Me Everything is Fine

April 14, 2010

I’m not interested in feeling better. When I am at work, I am dealing with problems—my client’s problems, my agency’s problems, somebody’s problem. I always joke that we aren’t designers or programmers, rather we are problem solvers. When I meet with potential clients, they are meeting with us because they think we might be the [...]

Read the full article →

Don’t Expect Your Audience To Do What You Want

January 5, 2010

We are often stuck seeing things from a singular perspective. For example, when I go to J.Crew’s website, they expect that I will start to identify myself based on my gender, the type of clothing I am looking for, the color and size I want, etc. They have organized their information and site navigation to [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries