Free UI reviews: World usability day tommorow

World usability day

Tommorow is the first annual world usability day. Free events all over the world are taking place to promote ease of use and good design in everything.

I’m surprised not to see more events in the SF Bay area or Seattle (Nothing at Microsoft, Amazon.com, Zaaz, Blink, Real, Saltmine, Adobe ?) so I’ll do my part:

I’ll do 100% free expert reviews of the first 3 websites people submit in comments (I will likely do many more but I can only promise 3). It can be your website, your company’s, a site you use or something you think would be interesting (or entertaining) to have me critique.

Update: About ten in already but do keep them coming. I will do as many of these as I can tommorow and more over the next week. It’s not too late.

27 Responses to “Free UI reviews: World usability day tommorow”

  1. Christian Watson

    Scott, I’ll take you up on your offer and second Bryan’s request. I am the manager of the web team that runs http://www.seattlechildrens.org and it would be interesting and useful to know your thoughts on the site.

    We are in the early stages of redesigning our home and ‘hub’ pages to make it easier for visitors to get to the content they need, and so it would be helpful to hear your feedback.

    Reply
  2. Bryan Zug

    >>
    Oh come on now – we have to get you to do something from the evil empire, don’t we?
    >>

    Good point.

    I would actually get a lot of mileage from a usability review of the current version of Sharepoint — but we don’t have a public facing version that would be easy to eval.

    Anyone else interested? If so anyone know of any public or demo sites that are pretty much a default install of Sharepoint that could be used for such a thing.

    Reply
  3. Sharon French

    This is a real estate tool that allows consumers to search for property listings.

    There is a portion of the site that you can get information about our product without loggin in, and an entire product you can get access to by signing up.

    Any feedback on either portion of the site would be hugely appreciated.

    Reply
  4. Steve Slotnick

    http://www.maizeweb.com

    This started as a project at the University of Michigan, now we’re trying to build upon it for fun. We’ve just gotten to the point where we can start thinking about getting some users, so we’d love to know more about the usability.

    Reply
  5. Busy

    Sharon French said, “I mistakenly thought the “Website” field in the “Leave a Reply” section would be included as part of my post.”

    I think this is an example of usability issues that are easy to miss. The *website* field in blog comments is very common, and typically works the same way, but if even one person leaves a comment that they were confused about it, then how many people could be silently confused about it? After all there’s tons of people who don’t have their own website.

    Even though it’s something small that’s not critical to the total site experience, little details like this can make a big difference in a site. Especially for novice users.

    (Don’t know how to make it better though, perhaps more descriptive text, or maybe there isn’t a better way ;)

    Reply
  6. Scott (admin)

    Hasn’t anyone written articles on blog usability? Nielsen wrote one but it was more about general blog design, rather than little gotchas like this one.

    Reply
  7. Alex Bendig

    This is a great idea! Are you going to make your reviews available on your blog?

    Reply
  8. Scott (admin)

    Yes: I’ll definitely be posting them up here. Stay tuned.

    Reply
  9. Matt Lacey

    Please have a go at our corporate site (www.city-link.co.uk). We inherited it a few years ago but our IT director won’t let us fix the numerous problems with it. Maybe, if we had your comments to back up the numerous problems we’ve identified, we may be able to get permission to change it. This would remove the numerous daily problems we have with supporting the beast.

    Reply
  10. Marilyn Langfeld

    I’ve been out of town for a week, so missed the deadline, but here goes anyway. We’ve just finished the redesign for NAIFA ( http://www.naifa.org ), a large (over 800 pages) association site. The client chose a “kitchen sink” approach to the home page, but since they are a national association with many thousands of repeat viewers, we felt that would work. I’d be very interested to hear your comments.

    Reply

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