Usability

There is a great little plugin for Firefox that makes the browser display sites as if it were a mobile browser. I have used user agent switchers to check Safari and IE in Firefox but this is the first time I have been able to do it for Japanese mobile phones.

The user agent switcher can be found here:

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

Here is a list of Japanese user agents can be found here (need to be added in the plugin’s preferences):

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html#domoco

Marco thank you for the information!

Prioritizing Web Usability Jacob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger’s new book present design principles that increase web usability. This is an easy read luckily because I was so amazed by all the information presented that I read some of the chapters twice.

One point that amazed me was about scrolling. According to their research only 23% of users scroll down a website’s content. If users enter a site from the search engine, they will scan what is visable — without scrolling — if they don’t see what they are looking for, they click on the back button on the browser and return to the search engine results.

Regarding site design, they recommend:

• Support short visits; be a snack [to the information hunters].
• Encourage users to return; use strategies such as newsletters as reminders.
• Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users’ immediate needs.

This makes sense with the research results showing that web users do not have the patience to scroll anymore.

This book is excellent. I can’t write everything I learned here–there is not enough space. I highly recommend it to other web design and online marketing professionals.