| "Human-Computer Interaction" |  |
Kia Ora, Blogging has taken a back seat over the last two weeks as our priorities have been elsewhere in terms of working. I haven't had a go at using transparent divs to generate a drop shadow effect as mentioned in my previous post (Dynamic drop shadows) but this is still in the back of my mind.
Catch phrase of the week "Human-Computer Interaction" this is something I have been thinking about for while in terms of how people use the internet and browse websites and now I have a phrase to explain it, or at least a good website to find out information to back up some of my thoughts. The website HCI Bibliography : Human-Computer Interaction Resources is full of interesting articles, guidelines and resources (as the title suggests) for designing and building websites to work better inline with human behavior in terms of use with the internet.
For an example the names of pages in a page menu, this is something I came across recently when one of our clients renamed their "About Us" page to "Who we are". I found it very difficult to adjust to the new name and also to find that page in the menu when I first went to the site looking for it. People are used to the basics or "Old words" like "About Us" and in most cases will find the information they want when the page is named as it always has been. This is explained better in the article "Top 10 Information Architecture Mistakes" (Number 10) by Jakob Nielsen on his Alertbox. In saying this though I believe renaming pages something unconventional isn't such a big deal and over time there will be more and more of this, as web users are constantly getting smarter at seeking out the information they require. There are a lot of other good points made in the article written by apparently - "the king of usability" Jakob Nielsen.
What are some things in terms of usability that bug you on the internet?
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