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Getting Started with Web Usability

Are you a designer or developer looking to make your web sites easier to use? Or are you managing a site and believe that you can increase traffic and/or revenue by implementing more user centered design? This is the place to find out the basic principals and processes used to successfully make your site more usable.
What do users find annoying and how can they be avoided?
There are several things users hate to come across on websites, this article explores these further in an effort to help you improve the usability and effectiveness of your designs.
Tips on how to position content on the web
The position of content plays an important part in website usability as there are standards users expect when visiting a site. Here we explore some of these expectations to help you design a user friendly and effective site.
Pros and Cons of Flash Websites
There are many pros and cons associated with Flash websites, here we will explore these to help you decide if Flash is the best option for you.
How to design websites for mobile devices?
With more mobile devices now having internet access, website developers and designers now need to consider if their site should be compatible with these. If the answer is yes make sure you read this article to learn more about how you can make your site more usable in this medium.
Usability Design Process
Part of Usability is following a set of design processes. This step-by-step tutorial provides an overview of these user centered design processes.
Ten Simple Usability Fixes
Many people ask, where do I start applying usability to my site? Getting started can be the hardest part, so don’t be afraid to just dive in and start! Many currently existing problems can be found by doing an overall usability evaluation of your current web site; these problems can have simple, easy to understand fixes. Subtle changes you make today can have a big impact tomorrow.
First Principles of Interaction Design
Tog summarizes many of the basic principles you need to apply to make a site more usable. These include consistency, efficiency, learnability, readability, and more.
Choosing the Right Usability Tools
Many usability tools/methods are available for you to use on a project. UsabilityNet's Choosing the Right Tools chart helps you to select which will be most useful, based on your experience, resources, and access to users. You may also want to look at UserDesign.com's chart, which summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of most methods.
Resources for Selling Usability
Before you start adding usability practices into your design process, you'll sometimes need to convince others of their value. The Usability Professionals Association provides some great Resources for Selling Usability for when you need to justify the time and effort before you get started. Usability.gov also provides some resources specifically for Making the Case for Usability in Government
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