Yahoo has come out with a Web-based smushing tool. Smush.it optimizes your imagery for you so you can minimize your page size and load time. Upload an image or input the image url and Smushit will smush it for you and provide the results of the smushing. You can then download the decreased file size image in a zip file. I tried it; you can see the results in the screenshot. You can also get a Firefox extension to optimize the images found on any Web page.
As described on the site, “Smushit.com is a service that More»

Labels: usability, user experience, web 2.0, Yahoo, YHOO

In its first major redesign in two years, Yahoo announced plans to makeover several popular front-door sections of its Web site including the homepage over the next few months. The company plans to streamline the design of Yahoo.com giving users what matters most to them no matter where they ‘live’ on the Web. The company plans to:

add more bells and whistles like widgets for increased personalization
provide users with a dashboard area (off to the left) that will let users add previews of their favorite Yahoo and non-Yahoo services such More»

Labels: redesign, usability, user experience, web 2.0, Yahoo

The online Health information category got a healthy prognosis today. According to a study conducted by comScore, health information Web sites grew 21 percent over the last year – more than four times the growth rate of the total U.S. Internet population. WebMD Health led the category with 17.3 million visitors in July (up 3 percent versus year ago), followed by Everyday Health with 14.7 million visitors (up 63 percent), Revolution Health Network with 11.3 million visitors (up 182 percent), and AOL Health with 11.1 million (up 88 percent). The visitor spike More»

Labels: google, Microsoft, usability, user experience, web 2.0

Tom Thornton calls it the “wow” factor. The third-party applications built for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch have plenty of it. “It’s ‘Wow,’ I can’t believe a phone can do this now,” says Thornton, a senior research science at usability specialist Perceptive Sciences in Austin, Texas. 
But there’s a dark side to wow moments, too. Thornton had one of those when he was fooling around with MyWeather. He discovered the weather application’s best feature–a nifty, full-screen depiction of the weather–entirely by accident when he inadvertently tilted his phone on one side. That “wow,” Thornton says wryly, More»

Labels: apps, iPhone, usability

Microsoft today released IE8 Beta 2 for public download. The newest iteration of the browser was created around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).
The new browser promises an improved tab and navigation experience. When navigating to a web site in IE8, the smart address bar searches across Favorites, History, and RSS feeds More»

Labels: browsers, internet explorer, Microsoft, msft, Privacy, usability, user experience, web, web browsers

Could your site map be a design cop-out for poor information architecture? In a recent piece titled, The Site Map: An Information Architecture Cop-Out, usability guru, Jared Spool, contends that users don’t want site maps and if they are asking for it or a large number of them are going to it, that could be indicative of a scent problem.
By itself, “site map” doesn’t give off scent — the clues that tell the user if the link will lead them to their desired content. It’s only in the absence of anything else that gives off scent that users start More»

Labels: internet, usability, usability 2.0, user experience, web

There was a post recently on how “UI Guru Jakob Nielsen’s Site Is Unreadable“. The writer, Hank Williams, states that:
Unfortunately, I have to say, Jakob has perhaps the worst site design I have ever seen. It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid polyester suit. In truth his site is fine from an information architecture perspective. But from an aesthetics perspective it is awful. And aesthetics is important in UI. If you begin to look at something and want to avert your eyes, the site has failed.
Although design is usually associated More»

Labels: usability, user experience

Apple sold one million of its new and improved iPhones, the iPhone 3G, over the weekend after its much anticipated release on Friday, July 11.  According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, “iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend. It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.” Additionally, more than 10 million applications were also downloaded over the weekend from its new App Store.
The new iPhone 3G combines all the features of iPhone plus 3G networking More»

Labels: Apple, mobile web, usability, user experience, web, web 2.0

If you don’t have an online presence, create one! That’s the advice coming from a segment on the Today Show which aired on Friday. The piece which was focused on people over 40 years of age seeking employment encouraged job seekers to invest the time and effort into establishing a web site or blog or joining a professional online network such as LinkedIn and even Facebook. However, they did caution viewers to ensure that their online presence is ‘professional’ given that 80% of employers look online More»

Labels: brand, design, internet, usability, user experience, web, web 2.0

Most corporate blogs would likely agree with the assessment that they are unimaginative failures. They all start with the best of intentions - they need a blog because everyone else has one; it’s the new new ‘thing’; and then they justify it as a means of communicating with and engaging their customers. Unfortunately, this is where they fail.
It’s tough to make a corporate blog cool and fun given that it’s not exactly the most interesting material to work with. A B2C company blog, for instance, stands a better chance than a B2B blog because of the personal nature of the More»

Labels: Blogs, usability, user experience, web 2.0