The document provides guidelines for optimizing the user experience on websites. It discusses designing websites to reduce the user's workload, displaying information in an intuitive and usable format, and accounting for limitations in human working memory. Specific guidelines covered include minimizing download times, providing feedback while users wait, and using terminology familiar to users in help documentation. The overall focus is on designing intuitive and efficient interactions that minimize cognitive burden on users.
Communes, Commonism and Co-ops: Rethinking the university as a hackerspaceJoss Winn
My abstract for the British HCI conference 2015 at the University of Lincoln. I'm on the 'HCI, politics and activism' panel.
In this talk I reflect on the history of hacking and its origins in the 'commune' of the academy (Winn, 2013). I then discuss the role of Copyleft licenses (Stallman, 2010) as "the practical manifestation of a social structure" (Weber, 2004, 85; Winn, 2015); a form of administration for the production of 'commonism' (Dyer-Witheford, 2007; Neary and Winn, 2012). Finally, I argue that the emerging form of 'open co-operative' can be understood as a latent material response to Stallman's original predicament when Venture Capitalism took over his 'Garden of Eden': mutual ownership and control of knowledge production. Significantly, the "crucial innovation" for an emerging form of 'open co-operative' (Bauwens, 2014) is a further adaptation of Copyleft called Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses, or 'Copyfarleft' (Kleiner, 2007), thereby uniting co-operative legal structures with subversive licensing contracts. To what extent can we reconstitute higher education and the idea of the university along the lines of an open co-operative, so that academic science can continue to contribute to the common good? (Winn, 2015) All Power to the Communes!
Some emerging technologies for learning resource centresLis Parcell
Slides to support a workshop for learning resource centre staff as part of Forth Valley College staff development week, 11 February 2015 at the Stirling campus. The session was delivered with Mags McKay of Jisc Scotland.
This short document provides contact information for Melina Mercouri's song "Athína" and lists four email addresses. It appears to be sharing contact or attribution information for the song "Athína" by Melina Mercouri.
The main purpose of the current deliverable D2.2.1 is to hold the current version of the Evaluation Framework and to operationalise it for the LinkedUp challenge judges into a concrete evaluation instrument. This deliverable is not intended as a very elaborated report rather than a summary of the current version of the Evaluation Framework based on the extensive studies in deliverable D2.1 – Evaluation Methods and Metrics. D2.2.1will be reconsidered in the final report of WP2 to demonstrate the development of the Evaluation Framework during the life cycle of the LinkedUp project. For this purpose it is supportive to have the first version of the Evaluation Framework as a tangible outcome and an own entity as conducted in this deliverable.
http://portal.ou.nl/documents/363049/27b00ab7-2c2e-4fda-90a1-6db41e6493ac
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Drachsler, H., Greller, W., Stoyanov, S. (2013). D2.2.1 Evaluation Frameowork. LinkedUp project. Heerlen, The Netherlands.
The bison is a large mammal found in North America and Europe, characterized by its black head fur and light back fur, horns, and humps. It lives outdoors in grasslands, eating plants and shrubs. Young bison are born small and grow horns and humps later. While once numerous, only around 500 wild bison remain today due to hunting.
St. Mark's Libraries is introducing new technologies to better serve its community, including a wiki for collaborative work, iPods for audio and video content, and the Amazon Kindle e-reader. These tools provide access to library databases, study guides, audiobooks, and more to enhance learning resources for both faculty and students. The library is focused on adopting emerging technologies to prepare for the future needs of the community.
The presentation provides an overview of the R&D activities of the Learning Analytics topic at the Open Universiteit in October 2013.
http://portal.ou.nl/documents/363049/789b3323-d55c-4e3e-93ba-a716ade14463
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Drachsler, H., Specht, M. (2013).
Collecting and utilizing assessment informationJennifer Orr
This presentation is from a VSTE 2013 presentation on how to collect assessment data (anecdotal information as well as numerical rankings) easily and work with the data to plan effective instruction for the entire class, small groups, and individual students.
The document discusses cloud computing and the challenges of bridging data centers and the cloud. It describes how cloud computing provides benefits like economies of scale, flexibility, and scalability. However, challenges include issues around control, trust, security, availability and data portability between different cloud systems. The document advocates for hybrid cloud and federated cloud solutions that use common standards and APIs to allow interoperability between different cloud systems and resources.
Haim Lecture2 Data And Data Modeling 2ppgMarco Silva
Data can come from various sources like sensors, surveys, or simulations. It can be raw or derived from raw data through processes like smoothing or scaling. Data models and management involve data objects, visualization objects, metadata, retrieval systems, and database management systems. Data comes in different dimensions and structures and is used for presentation, confirmation, exploration, querying, summarizing, and analyzing tasks through simple visualizations like points, lines, charts and graphs. Key data factors include large numbers of parameters and data sets, and multiple data types.
This document does not contain any meaningful information to summarize in 3 sentences or less. It appears to be random characters and does not convey any essential high level ideas or concepts.
YAPC::Asia 2008 Tokyo - Pathtraq - building a computation-centric web serviceKazuho Oku
The talk describes the architecture of Pathtraq, one of Japan's largest web access statistics service, covering from database compression techniques to embedded SQL in perl.
Streamline Results is a proven leader in the Search Engine Marketing field. We have based many of our tactics off of this same guide that you will going over.
It has taught us many things and we hope to pass on the same to you.
If you have any questions visit us at: http://www.streamlineresults.com
Search engines use crawlers to discover web pages by following links and build an index of important words and their locations, then calculate relevance and rank pages to provide answers to user search queries as quickly as possible by leveraging massive data centers to store and process information from billions of indexed web pages.
Search engines crawl billions of webpages to build an index and provide relevant search results. They use links between pages to efficiently discover and index content, storing snippets of text and metadata in vast data centers. Complicated algorithms rank results based on over 100 factors related to relevance and popularity to return the most useful pages for a user's query within seconds. Search engine optimization aims to understand and influence these algorithms.
Search engines crawl billions of webpages to build an index and provide relevant search results. They use links between pages to efficiently discover and index content, storing snippets of text and metadata in vast data centers. Complicated algorithms rank results based on over 100 factors related to relevance and popularity to return the most useful pages for a user's query within seconds. Search engine optimization aims to understand and influence these algorithms through on-page and off-page techniques.
This document outlines the 4 key steps to successful web page design and construction:
1) Planning - Determine goals, users, resources needed
2) Design - Structure pages with navigation, text, media, and visual layout
3) Production - Create content, images, files and test site
4) Maintenance - Update content, track usage, and respond to feedback
• What is Usability?
• Why do our clients care how does it impact their
bottom line?
• What are some rudimentary user behaviors and
usability principles?
• What is most important for an SEO analyst to
know?
Designing Intuitive SharePoint Sites: The Science of "Easy to Use" Marcy Kellar
The document discusses how to make a SharePoint site intuitive by defining three things: the user, the task, and metrics for measuring success. It covers usability best practices like minimizing cognitive load on users and leveraging users' expectations by following design patterns and conventions. Visual design is important for communicating the site's purpose and guiding users through their tasks. Defining specific success metrics up front helps ensure a site is truly easy to use.
Basic points about web usability, and will be content too a small comparative study in two web sites to explain in a practical way who to measure the usability of a site.
Web Usability, Consistency, and Content Development 2015 Code(Her)-Hou-TobolskyWeimin Hou
Usability definitions
How users read Web content
How users’ reading behavior affects Web content development
The importance of Web and link consistency
How to ensure link consistency
Additional Web usability resources
This document provides an overview of a workshop on website and online marketing. The workshop outline includes understanding web terms, website design basics, domain name registration and hosting, promoting and driving traffic to a site, how search engines work, tips for email marketing campaigns, and social media marketing. The document defines common web terms and acronyms. It provides tips on website design best practices like managing images, naming pages, linking and tagging content. It also discusses promoting a website through search engine optimization, cross-linking to other sites, and submitting the site to search engines. Lastly, it gives examples of how companies have used social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube to promote their brand.
The client wanted to create a resource handbook for game developers based on over 90 studies of qualitative research data. Building a wiki would allow structuring the data in a way that captured relationships between insights in an intuitive, searchable format. Goodmind reviewed the research, identified best practices, and organized the findings into an 8-group wiki taxonomy. This revealed relationships between variables and provided an ongoing learning resource for developers.
Building Serious Games for Medical Intervention and TrainingBrock Dubbels
This document provides an overview of the G-ScalE game development lab at McMaster University led by Brock R. Dubbels. It discusses using games to improve reading comprehension, sustained engagement, cooperative learning and more. It also touches on applying games to math, science, dance and other subjects. The document outlines elements of game design like roles, rules and imagery/visualization. It emphasizes the need for serious games to provide quantifiable evidence that they are achieving desired outcomes.
The document discusses two major considerations for conducting usability testing: 1) Ensuring the best testing method is used, which is typically testing representative participants on representative tasks and collecting data on success, speed and satisfaction; and 2) Ensuring an iterative approach is used by testing the website after each set of changes and conducting multiple iterations for continued improvements.
This document provides information about website usability. It discusses key usability concepts like affordances, signifiers, mental models, and the ten usability heuristics. It also covers best practices for designing websites with users in mind, such as using clear navigation, limiting distractions, and making important information easily visible without requiring excessive scrolling. The document emphasizes that usability testing is important to evaluate designs from the user's perspective.
The document introduces a workshop on big data tools and MongoDB, discusses how MediaGlu uses big data for advertising by tracking user paths across different channels, and outlines an agenda covering MongoDB fundamentals, running MongoDB, and labs on shell commands, aggregation, replication, and sharding.
This document discusses user stories and how they can help software development teams understand user needs better than traditional requirements specifications. It provides examples of proper user stories, outlines key principles of writing effective stories, and explains how stories evolve through collaborative conversations between business stakeholders and developers. The document cautions that while documents are not abandoned, less documentation is preferable to reduce overhead and allow stories to change shape based on feedback.
Intranet 2.0 - Integrating Enterprise 2.0 into your corporate intranetJames Dellow
Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges; The technology building blocks: Blogs, RSS,
tags, search and wikis; Implementation approaches: Nature or nurture? Pulling it all together and getting started.
This presentation was made as a workshop at Intranet '07 on 20th September, 2007 in Sydney, Australia. Note: This version of the presentation pack contains only key slides and omits additional reading materials provided.
Adaptation of my IA 7/ UX 1 deck for an InnovationLab talk at Stabilo International, Heroldsberg on 10/17/2012.
Credits & image credits within the presentation.
The document discusses strategies for making help documentation more popular and useful to users. It outlines questions asked to understand user behavior, research methods used including collecting feedback, and key findings. The findings suggest help needs to be engaging without sacrificing accuracy, and should support both learning and quick troubleshooting scenarios. The document also provides examples of more interactive and visually engaging help content strategies like FAQs, multimedia, collaboration features, and dynamically updating based on user usage data and feedback.
UiPath Community Day Kraków: Devs4Devs ConferenceUiPathCommunity
We are honored to launch and host this event for our UiPath Polish Community, with the help of our partners - Proservartner!
We certainly hope we have managed to spike your interest in the subjects to be presented and the incredible networking opportunities at hand, too!
Check out our proposed agenda below 👇👇
08:30 ☕ Welcome coffee (30')
09:00 Opening note/ Intro to UiPath Community (10')
Cristina Vidu, Global Manager, Marketing Community @UiPath
Dawid Kot, Digital Transformation Lead @Proservartner
09:10 Cloud migration - Proservartner & DOVISTA case study (30')
Marcin Drozdowski, Automation CoE Manager @DOVISTA
Pawel Kamiński, RPA developer @DOVISTA
Mikolaj Zielinski, UiPath MVP, Senior Solutions Engineer @Proservartner
09:40 From bottlenecks to breakthroughs: Citizen Development in action (25')
Pawel Poplawski, Director, Improvement and Automation @McCormick & Company
Michał Cieślak, Senior Manager, Automation Programs @McCormick & Company
10:05 Next-level bots: API integration in UiPath Studio (30')
Mikolaj Zielinski, UiPath MVP, Senior Solutions Engineer @Proservartner
10:35 ☕ Coffee Break (15')
10:50 Document Understanding with my RPA Companion (45')
Ewa Gruszka, Enterprise Sales Specialist, AI & ML @UiPath
11:35 Power up your Robots: GenAI and GPT in REFramework (45')
Krzysztof Karaszewski, Global RPA Product Manager
12:20 🍕 Lunch Break (1hr)
13:20 From Concept to Quality: UiPath Test Suite for AI-powered Knowledge Bots (30')
Kamil Miśko, UiPath MVP, Senior RPA Developer @Zurich Insurance
13:50 Communications Mining - focus on AI capabilities (30')
Thomasz Wierzbicki, Business Analyst @Office Samurai
14:20 Polish MVP panel: Insights on MVP award achievements and career profiling
Scaling Connections in PostgreSQL Postgres Bangalore(PGBLR) Meetup-2 - MydbopsMydbops
This presentation, delivered at the Postgres Bangalore (PGBLR) Meetup-2 on June 29th, 2024, dives deep into connection pooling for PostgreSQL databases. Aakash M, a PostgreSQL Tech Lead at Mydbops, explores the challenges of managing numerous connections and explains how connection pooling optimizes performance and resource utilization.
Key Takeaways:
* Understand why connection pooling is essential for high-traffic applications
* Explore various connection poolers available for PostgreSQL, including pgbouncer
* Learn the configuration options and functionalities of pgbouncer
* Discover best practices for monitoring and troubleshooting connection pooling setups
* Gain insights into real-world use cases and considerations for production environments
This presentation is ideal for:
* Database administrators (DBAs)
* Developers working with PostgreSQL
* DevOps engineers
* Anyone interested in optimizing PostgreSQL performance
Contact info@mydbops.com for PostgreSQL Managed, Consulting and Remote DBA Services
GDG Cloud Southlake #34: Neatsun Ziv: Automating AppsecJames Anderson
The lecture titled "Automating AppSec" delves into the critical challenges associated with manual application security (AppSec) processes and outlines strategic approaches for incorporating automation to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. The lecture is structured to highlight the inherent difficulties in traditional AppSec practices, emphasizing the labor-intensive triage of issues, the complexity of identifying responsible owners for security flaws, and the challenges of implementing security checks within CI/CD pipelines. Furthermore, it provides actionable insights on automating these processes to not only mitigate these pains but also to enable a more proactive and scalable security posture within development cycles.
The Pains of Manual AppSec:
This section will explore the time-consuming and error-prone nature of manually triaging security issues, including the difficulty of prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their actual risk to the organization. It will also discuss the challenges in determining ownership for remediation tasks, a process often complicated by cross-functional teams and microservices architectures. Additionally, the inefficiencies of manual checks within CI/CD gates will be examined, highlighting how they can delay deployments and introduce security risks.
Automating CI/CD Gates:
Here, the focus shifts to the automation of security within the CI/CD pipelines. The lecture will cover methods to seamlessly integrate security tools that automatically scan for vulnerabilities as part of the build process, thereby ensuring that security is a core component of the development lifecycle. Strategies for configuring automated gates that can block or flag builds based on the severity of detected issues will be discussed, ensuring that only secure code progresses through the pipeline.
Triaging Issues with Automation:
This segment addresses how automation can be leveraged to intelligently triage and prioritize security issues. It will cover technologies and methodologies for automatically assessing the context and potential impact of vulnerabilities, facilitating quicker and more accurate decision-making. The use of automated alerting and reporting mechanisms to ensure the right stakeholders are informed in a timely manner will also be discussed.
Identifying Ownership Automatically:
Automating the process of identifying who owns the responsibility for fixing specific security issues is critical for efficient remediation. This part of the lecture will explore tools and practices for mapping vulnerabilities to code owners, leveraging version control and project management tools.
Three Tips to Scale the Shift Left Program:
Finally, the lecture will offer three practical tips for organizations looking to scale their Shift Left security programs. These will include recommendations on fostering a security culture within development teams, employing DevSecOps principles to integrate security throughout the development
7 Most Powerful Solar Storms in the History of Earth.pdfEnterprise Wired
Solar Storms (Geo Magnetic Storms) are the motion of accelerated charged particles in the solar environment with high velocities due to the coronal mass ejection (CME).
Transcript: Details of description part II: Describing images in practice - T...BookNet Canada
This presentation explores the practical application of image description techniques. Familiar guidelines will be demonstrated in practice, and descriptions will be developed “live”! If you have learned a lot about the theory of image description techniques but want to feel more confident putting them into practice, this is the presentation for you. There will be useful, actionable information for everyone, whether you are working with authors, colleagues, alone, or leveraging AI as a collaborator.
Link to presentation recording and slides: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/details-of-description-part-ii-describing-images-in-practice/
Presented by BookNet Canada on June 25, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Are you interested in dipping your toes in the cloud native observability waters, but as an engineer you are not sure where to get started with tracing problems through your microservices and application landscapes on Kubernetes? Then this is the session for you, where we take you on your first steps in an active open-source project that offers a buffet of languages, challenges, and opportunities for getting started with telemetry data.
The project is called openTelemetry, but before diving into the specifics, we’ll start with de-mystifying key concepts and terms such as observability, telemetry, instrumentation, cardinality, percentile to lay a foundation. After understanding the nuts and bolts of observability and distributed traces, we’ll explore the openTelemetry community; its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), repositories, and how to become not only an end-user, but possibly a contributor.We will wrap up with an overview of the components in this project, such as the Collector, the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP), its APIs, and its SDKs.
Attendees will leave with an understanding of key observability concepts, become grounded in distributed tracing terminology, be aware of the components of openTelemetry, and know how to take their first steps to an open-source contribution!
Key Takeaways: Open source, vendor neutral instrumentation is an exciting new reality as the industry standardizes on openTelemetry for observability. OpenTelemetry is on a mission to enable effective observability by making high-quality, portable telemetry ubiquitous. The world of observability and monitoring today has a steep learning curve and in order to achieve ubiquity, the project would benefit from growing our contributor community.
Blockchain technology is transforming industries and reshaping the way we conduct business, manage data, and secure transactions. Whether you're new to blockchain or looking to deepen your knowledge, our guidebook, "Blockchain for Dummies", is your ultimate resource.
MYIR Product Brochure - A Global Provider of Embedded SOMs & SolutionsLinda Zhang
This brochure gives introduction of MYIR Electronics company and MYIR's products and services.
MYIR Electronics Limited (MYIR for short), established in 2011, is a global provider of embedded System-On-Modules (SOMs) and
comprehensive solutions based on various architectures such as ARM, FPGA, RISC-V, and AI. We cater to customers' needs for large-scale production, offering customized design, industry-specific application solutions, and one-stop OEM services.
MYIR, recognized as a national high-tech enterprise, is also listed among the "Specialized
and Special new" Enterprises in Shenzhen, China. Our core belief is that "Our success stems from our customers' success" and embraces the philosophy
of "Make Your Idea Real, then My Idea Realizing!"
Performance Budgets for the Real World by Tammy EvertsScyllaDB
Performance budgets have been around for more than ten years. Over those years, we’ve learned a lot about what works, what doesn’t, and what we need to improve. In this session, Tammy revisits old assumptions about performance budgets and offers some new best practices. Topics include:
• Understanding performance budgets vs. performance goals
• Aligning budgets with user experience
• Pros and cons of Core Web Vitals
• How to stay on top of your budgets to fight regressions
In this follow-up session on knowledge and prompt engineering, we will explore structured prompting, chain of thought prompting, iterative prompting, prompt optimization, emotional language prompts, and the inclusion of user signals and industry-specific data to enhance LLM performance.
Join EIS Founder & CEO Seth Earley and special guest Nick Usborne, Copywriter, Trainer, and Speaker, as they delve into these methodologies to improve AI-driven knowledge processes for employees and customers alike.
How Social Media Hackers Help You to See Your Wife's Message.pdfHackersList
In the modern digital era, social media platforms have become integral to our daily lives. These platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat, offer countless ways to connect, share, and communicate.
How RPA Help in the Transportation and Logistics Industry.pptxSynapseIndia
Revolutionize your transportation processes with our cutting-edge RPA software. Automate repetitive tasks, reduce costs, and enhance efficiency in the logistics sector with our advanced solutions.
Are you interested in learning about creating an attractive website? Here it is! Take part in the challenge that will broaden your knowledge about creating cool websites! Don't miss this opportunity, only in "Redesign Challenge"!
Video traffic on the Internet is constantly growing; networked multimedia applications consume a predominant share of the available Internet bandwidth. A major technical breakthrough and enabler in multimedia systems research and of industrial networked multimedia services certainly was the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) technique. This resulted in the standardization of MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) which, together with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), is widely used for multimedia delivery in today’s networks. Existing challenges in multimedia systems research deal with the trade-off between (i) the ever-increasing content complexity, (ii) various requirements with respect to time (most importantly, latency), and (iii) quality of experience (QoE). Optimizing towards one aspect usually negatively impacts at least one of the other two aspects if not both. This situation sets the stage for our research work in the ATHENA Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory (Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and Emerging Networked Multimedia Services; https://athena.itec.aau.at/), jointly funded by public sources and industry. In this talk, we will present selected novel approaches and research results of the first year of the ATHENA CD Lab’s operation. We will highlight HAS-related research on (i) multimedia content provisioning (machine learning for video encoding); (ii) multimedia content delivery (support of edge processing and virtualized network functions for video networking); (iii) multimedia content consumption and end-to-end aspects (player-triggered segment retransmissions to improve video playout quality); and (iv) novel QoE investigations (adaptive point cloud streaming). We will also put the work into the context of international multimedia systems research.
How Netflix Builds High Performance Applications at Global ScaleScyllaDB
We all want to build applications that are blazingly fast. We also want to scale them to users all over the world. Can the two happen together? Can users in the slowest of environments also get a fast experience? Learn how we do this at Netflix: how we understand every user's needs and preferences and build high performance applications that work for every user, every time.
How Netflix Builds High Performance Applications at Global Scale
Chapter2
1. 2
Optimizing the User Experience
Optimizing the User Experience
Web sites should be designed to facilitate and
encourage efficient and effective human-computer interactions.
Designers should make every attempt to reduce the user’s workload
by taking advantage of the computer’s capabilities. Users will make the
best use of Web sites when information is displayed in a directly usable
format and content organization is highly intuitive. Users also benefit
from task sequences that are consistent with how they typically do their
work, that do not require them to remember information for more than
a few seconds, that have terminology that is readily understandable,
and that do not overload them with information.
Users should not be required to wait for more than a few seconds
for a page to load, and while waiting, users should be supplied with
appropriate feedback. Users should be easily able to print information.
Designers should never ‘push’ unsolicited windows or graphics to users.
R e s e a r c h - B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
2. 10 2:1 Do Not Display Unsolicited Windows or Graphics
Guideline: Do not have unsolicited windows or Relative Importance:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
graphics ‘pop-up’ to users.
Comments: Users have commented that unsolicited Strength of Evidence:
windows or graphics that ‘pop up’ are annoying and
distracting when they are focusing on completing
their original activity.
Sources: Ahmadi, 2000.
2:2 Increase Web Site Credibility Relative Importance:
Guideline: Optimize the credibility of information- Strength of Evidence:
oriented Web sites.
Comments: Based on the results of two large surveys,
the most important Web site-related actions that organizations can do to help
ensure high Web site credibility are to:
• Provide a useful set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and answers;
• Ensure the Web site is arranged in a logical way;
• Provide articles containing citations and references;
• Show author’s credentials;
• Ensure the site looks professionally designed;
• Provide an archive of past content (where appropriate);
• Ensure the site is as up-to-date as possible;
• Provide links to outside sources and materials; and
• Ensure the site is frequently linked to by other credible sites.
Sources: Fogg, 2002; Fogg, et al., 2001; Lightner, 2003; Nielsen, 2003.
See page xxii
for detailed descriptions
Research-Ba s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s of the rating scales
3. 2:3 Standardize Task Sequences Relative Importance: 11
Guideline: Allow users to perform tasks in the same Strength of Evidence:
Optimizing the User Experience
sequence and manner across similar conditions.
Comments: Users learn certain sequences of
behaviors and perform best when they can be reliably repeated. For
example, users become accustomed to looking in either the left or right
panels for additional information. Also, users become familiar with the steps
in a search or checkout process.
Sources: Bovair, Kieras and Polson, 1990; Czaja and Sharit, 1997; Detweiler
and Omanson, 1996; Foltz, et al., 1988; Kieras, 1997; Polson and Kieras,
1985; Polson, Bovair and Kieras, 1987; Polson, Muncher and Engelback,
1986; Smith, Bubb-Lewis and Suh, 2000; Sonderegger, et al., 1999; Ziegler,
Hoppe and Fahnrich, 1986.
Example:
Drop-down boxes for
date selection are
consistent across the
site, but one page places
calendars in ‘pop-up’
windows, whereas other
pages in the site show
the calendars. This can
confuse users, and
should be avoided.
R e s e a r c h - B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
4. 12 2:4 Reduce the User’s Workload Relative Importance:
Guideline: Allocate functions to take advantage Strength of Evidence:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
of the inherent respective strengths of computers
and users.
Comments: Let the computer perform as many tasks as possible, so that users
can concentrate on performing tasks that actually require human processing
and input. Ensure that the activities performed by the human and the computer
take full advantage of the strengths of each. For example, calculating body mass
indexes, remembering user IDs, and mortgage payments are best performed by
computers.
Sources: Gerhardt-Powals, 1996; Moray and Butler, 2000; Sheridan, 1997.
Example:
When looking
to buy a house,
users will know
the value of
variables necessary
to calculate a
monthly payment
(interest rate, loan
amount, etc.), but
are incapable of
quickly calculating it
themselves.
See page xxii
for detailed descriptions
Research-B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s of the rating scales
5. 2:5 Design for Working Memory Limitations 13
Guideline: Do not require users to remember Relative Importance:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
information from place to place on a Web site.
Comments: Users can remember relatively few Strength of Evidence:
items of information for a relatively short period
of time. This ’working memory’ capacity tends to
lessen even more as people become older. One
study compared the working memory performance of age groups 23-44
years and 61-68 years. The younger group performed reliably better than
the older group.
When users must remember information on one Web page for use on
another page or another location on the same page, they can only
remember about three or four items for a few seconds. If users must make
comparisons, it is best to have the items being compared side-by-side so
that users do not have to remember information—even for a short period of
time.
Sources: Ahlstrom and Longo, 2001; Baddeley, 1992; Bailey, 2000a;
Broadbent, 1975; Brown, 1958; Cockburn and Jones, 1996; Curry, McDougall
and de Bruijn, 1998; Evans, 1998; Kennedy and Wilkes, 1975; LeCompte,
1999; LeCompte, 2000; MacGregor, 1987; McEneaney, 2001; Nordby,
Raanaas and Magnussen, 2002; Raanaas, Nordby and Magnussen, 2002;
Spyridakis, 2000.
2:6 Minimize Page Download Time Relative Importance:
Guideline: Minimize the time required to Strength of Evidence:
download a Web site’s pages.
Comments: The best way to facilitate fast page
loading is to minimize the number of bytes per page.
Sources: Barber and Lucas, 1983; Bouch, Kuchinsky and Bhatti, 2000; Byrne,
et al., 1999; Evans, 1998; Lynch and Horton, 2002; Nielsen, 1997d; Spool, et
al., 1997; Tiller and Green, 1999.
R e s e a r c h - B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
6. 14 2:7 Warn of ‘Time Outs’ Relative Importance:
Guideline: Let users know if a page is programmed Strength of Evidence:
Optimizing the User Experience
to ’time out,’ and warn users before time expires
so they can request additional time.
Comments: Some pages are designed to ’time out’ automatically (usually
because of security reasons). Pages that require users to use them within a
fixed amount of time can present particular challenges to users who read
or make entries slowly.
Sources: Koyani, 2001a; United States Government, 1998.
Example:
See page xxii
for detailed descriptions
Research-Ba s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s of the rating scales
7. 2:8 Display Information in a Directly Usable Format 15
Guideline: Display data and information in a Relative Importance:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
format that does not require conversion by
the user.
Strength of Evidence:
Comments: Present information to users in the
most useful and usable format possible. Do not
require users to convert or summarize information in order for it to be
immediately useful. It is best to display data in a manner that is consistent
with the standards and conventions most familiar to users.
To accommodate a multinational Web audience, information should
be provided in multiple formats (e.g., centigrade and Fahrenheit for
temperatures) or the user should be allowed to select their preferred formats
(e.g., the 12-hour clock for American audiences and the 24-hour clock for
European audiences).
Do not require users to convert, transpose, compute, interpolate, or
translate displayed data into other units, or refer to documentation to
determine the meaning of displayed data.
Sources: Ahlstrom and Longo, 2001; Casner and Larkin, 1989; Galitz, 2002;
Gerhardt-Powals, 1996; Navai, et al., 2001; Smith and Mosier, 1986.
Example:
Displaying time in
a 24-hour clock
format is not suitable
for U.S. civilian
audiences.
Recognize that there is a
difference between the data units
used in science and medicine
and those used generally. Data
should be presented in the
generally-accepted manner of the
intended audience—in this case,
pounds and ounces.
R e s e a r c h - B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
8. 16 2:9 Format Information for Reading and Printing
Guideline: Prepare information with the expectation Relative Importance:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
that it will either be read online or printed.
Comments: Documents should be prepared that are Strength of Evidence:
consistent with whether users can be expected to
read the document online or printed. One study
found that the major reason participants gave for
deciding to read a document from print or to read it online was the size of
the document. Long documents (over five pages) were printed, and short
documents were read online. In addition, users preferred to print information
that was related to research, presentations, or supporting a point. They favored
reading it online if for entertainment.
Users generally favored reading documents online because they could do it
from anywhere at anytime with 24/7 access. Users were inclined to print (a) if
the online document required too much scrolling, (b) if they needed to refer to
the document at a later time, or (c) the complexity of the document required
them to highlight and write comments.
Sources: Shaikh and Chaparro, 2004.
2:10 Provide Feedback when Users Must Wait
Guideline: Provide users with appropriate feedback Relative Importance:
while they are waiting.
Comments: If processing will take less than 10 Strength of Evidence:
seconds, use an hourglass to indicate status. If
processing will take up to sixty seconds or longer,
use a process indicator that shows progress toward
completion. If computer processing will take over one minute, indicate this to
the user and provide an auditory signal when the processing is complete.
Users frequently become involved in other activities when they know they must
wait for long periods of time for the computer to process information. Under
these circumstances, completion of processing should be indicated by a non-
disruptive sound (beep).
Sources: Bouch, Kuchinsky and Bhatti, 2000;
Meyer, Shinar and Leiser, 1990; Smith and
Mosier, 1986.
Example:
Research-B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
9. 2:11 Inform Users of Long Download Times 17
Guideline: Indicate to users the time required Relative Importance:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
to download an image or document at a given
connection speed.
Strength of Evidence:
Comments: Providing the size and download time
of large images or documents gives users sufficient
information to choose whether or not they are
willing to wait for the file to download. One study concluded that supplying
users with download times relative to various connection speeds improves
their Web site navigation performance.
Sources: Campbell and Maglio, 1999; Detweiler and Omanson, 1996; Evans,
1998; Nielsen, 2000.
Example:
See page xxii
for detailed descriptions
of the rating scales R e s e a r c h - B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
10. 18 2:12 Develop Pages that Will Print Properly
Guideline: If users are likely to print one or more Relative Importance:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
pages, develop pages with widths that print
properly.
Strength of Evidence:
Comments: It is possible to display pages that are too
wide to print completely on standard 8.5 x 11 inch
paper in portrait orientation. Ensure that margin to
margin printing is possible.
Sources: Ahlstrom and Longo, 2001; Evans, 1998; Gerhardt-Powals, 1996; Lynch
and Horton, 2002; Spyridakis, 2000; Tullis, 2001; Zhang and Seo, 2001.
Example:
Sections of this
page are trimmed
when printed on
standard 8.5 x 11
paper because of
the design of the
page.
Research-B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
11. 2:13 Do Not Require Users to Multitask While Reading 19
Guideline: If reading speed is important, do not Relative Importance:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
require users to perform other tasks while reading
from the monitor.
Strength of Evidence:
Comments: Generally, users can read from a
monitor as fast as they can from paper, unless
they are required to perform other tasks that
require human ’working memory’ resources while reading. For example, do
not require users to look at the information on one page and remember it
while reading the information on a second page. This can reliably slow their
reading performance.
Sources: Baddeley, 1986; Evans, 1998; Mayes, Sims and Koonce, 2000;
Spyridakis, 2000.
2:14 Use Users’ Terminology in Help Documentation
Guideline: When giving guidance about using a Relative Importance:
Web site, use the users’ terminology to describe
elements and features.
Strength of Evidence:
Comments: There is varied understanding among
users as to what many Web site features are
called, and in some cases, how they are used.
These features include ’breadcrumbs,’ changing link colors after they’ve
been clicked, the left and right panels on the homepage, the tabs at the
top of many homepages, and the search capability. For example, if the term
’breadcrumb’ is used in the help section, give enough context so that a user
unfamiliar with that term can understand your guidance. If you refer to the
’navigation bar,’ explain to what you are referring. Even if users know how
to use an element, the terms they use to describe it may not be the same
terms that a designer would use.
Sources: Bailey, Koyani and Nall, 2000; Foley and Wallace, 1974; Furnas, et al.,
1987; Scanlon and Schroeder, 2000.
See page xxii
for detailed descriptions
of the rating scales R e s e a r c h - B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
12. 20 2:15 Provide Printing Options Relative Importance:
Guideline: Provide a link to a complete printable or Strength of Evidence:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
downloadable document if there are Web pages,
documents, resources, or files that users will want to
print or save in one operation.
Comments: Many users prefer to read text from a paper copy of a document.
They find this to be more convenient, and it allows them to make notes on the
paper. Users sometimes print pages because they do not trust the Web site to
have pages for them at a later date, or they think they will not be able to find
them again.
Sources: Detweiler and Omanson, 1996; Levine, 1996; Lynch and Horton, 2002;
Nielsen, 1997e.
Example: Clicking on the ‘Print Friendly’ link will open a new browser window that
allows the user to choose the sections of the document they wish to
print. This is particularly useful for long documents, where users may
only be interested in a particular section.
Research-B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s
13. 2:16 Provide Assistance to Users Relative Importance: 21
Guideline: Provide assistance for users who need Strength of Evidence:
Links
Optimizing the User Experience
additional help with the Web site.
Comments: Users sometimes require special
assistance. This is particularly important if the site was designed for
inexperienced users or has many first time users. For example, in one Web
site that was designed for repeat users, more than one-third of users (thirty-
six percent) were first time visitors. A special link was prepared that allowed
new users to access more information about the content of the site and
described the best way to navigate the site.
Sources: Covi and Ackerman, 1995; Morrell, et al., 2002; Nall, Koyani and
Lafond, 2001; Plaisant, et al., 1997.
Example:
See page xxii
for detailed descriptions
of the rating scales R e s e a r c h - B a s e d We b D e s i g n & U s a b i l i t y G u i d e l i n e s