I entered my credit card the right way on the first try this morning. I think this new diagram had a lot to do with it:

I don’t understand why the white diagram works so well. From the perspective of the diagram, you are looking up at the credit card slot, and the keypad had a completely different perspective. But it does work. I guess this is why testing is so important.

The most usable credit card slot holder would be one that could accept your credit card in any orientation, or a credit card with four magnetic strips. I don’t think that’ll happen any time soon.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Last weekend I redesigned my website. The new site has a homepage featuring a bunch of different things I’ve been working on, and a blog post view with no header, just a sidebar and the post itself. As a result the site is way more usable.

With any redesign you have to start by looking at what your audience needs and then tailor the site for those needs. My user base divides into three groups:

• Friends and family, who will read more or less everything I write
• Drive by Google traffic, who are likely to visit one page and then leave
• Potential clients/employers/partners, who were referred from Hacker News, Twitter, an email I sent out or a job application.

I am guaranteed to get traffic from the first two groups, as long as I don’t break the site. The third group of clients, employers and business partners are people who do not yet know me, but may interact with me soon, and the site plays a big role in helping them make that decision. So the redesign is targeted toward that group.

To win that third group of users, my site has to answer one question: Who is this person and why should I listen to him? My old site didn’t do a very good job of answering that question. Here’s what it looked like:

The standard blog template, where posts are displayed in reverse chronological order, is good for only one use case – where the writer updates frequently and the readers want to see what’s changed since the last time they visited. The majority of blogs on the Internet don’t fit this model because the authors update infrequently and don’t have a consistent audience. Therefore, they should consider a different navigation scheme for their sites; the main problems are outlined in this Jakob Nielsen article on blog usability. My old site used a reverse chronological order for navigation, and here are some of the problems with that design:

• No way to find good content that may be a year or more older.
• Posts are on a variety of different topics, appealing to different groups of users, with no organization.
• No photo, or description of me, on any page.
• All of the action items (send email, read more about me, etc) require at least one full page refresh; this is too difficult, as most users are lazy and won’t hunt around.
• Articles are posted in full text, meaning that user attention span might run out quickly (and also that 10 posts worth of images are requested and downloaded)
• Finally, the large number of different pages made it more difficult to maintain, and each attempt to tackle a part would leave me overwhelmed thinking about fixing the whole thing.

So I had the following goals in mind for the redesign:

• Tell a better story about me on every page.
• Put the best content on my site in front of users.
• Make the action items (email, Twitter, etc) easier to click.
• Also, improve page load time, which would boost user satisfaction and my Google rankings. Google found that a half second delay in page load time dropped traffic by 20%.

So here’s what I came up with for the homepage:

And the single blog post view:

I’m pretty pleased with the way they turned out. The homepage essentially consolidates the information that was spread across five pages in the menu of the old design. Furthermore, it displays ten of my best posts, organized by category, and a sample of things I’ve tweeted, so there will be at least some dynamic content on the page for users who visit.

I also took some steps to improve the page load speed. I installed two caching plugins – WP Minify, which minifies and combines all of your Javascript and CSS files into one file of each type, and WP Super Cache, which generates a static HTML file and then serves that file to users, instead of hitting the database every time a user requests a page. These help minimize the response time, the number of requests, and the size of each request.

I also use a sprite to display the icons on the blog page view, turning five requests into just one. As a result, the blog post view gets a score of 83/100 and the home page gets a score of 78/100, about a 20 point improvement over the old design.

So that’s the analysis of my site redesign. Now if I could just to find a posting schedule and stick to it!

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

I just spent two hours finding and fixing all of the broken links on my site. The Broken Link Checker plugin is invaluable for this task (as well as extremely usable!) Here's what I learned:

• Don't hotlink images. Hotlinking is where you embed an image into your page that is hosted on someone else's page. Not only does it cost the other person bandwidth to serve the request, but it is extremely vulnerable to breaking whenever the other person decides to change their site, or (worse) change the image hosted at that URL, so where you thought you were showing an image of a cat, you are actually showing a porn image meant to embarrass you. The majority of broken links were hotlinks.

• The alternative to hotlinking is downloading the image, uploading it to your own site and then displaying it from there. This is pretty tedious in Wordpress; there should be a plugin that lets you do this.

• Think very, very hard before deleting or moving resources on your site. Once you create a resource, you should serve the content at that URL forever, or use a 301 redirect to indicate the new location of the resource. If you don't, you are breaking the Internet. A related problem is that it's very easy to break links: change your page title, move subdomains, or move a small section of content, and you've caused a problem for your site's users.

• If a link is broken on your site, you've created a problem for every single person that links to that resource, because now they are pointing their visitors to a broken link. The best way to handle this is with a 301 redirect. However many webmasters don't know they broke links, or don't care, so I had to update many links by hand to point to the new resource.

  It would be nice if there were some kind of link wiki service that you could update to point to the correct resource; then everyone could just point their links to the wiki and the Internet would not be broken when someone updates the location of their content.

• I had a much better chance of finding what I was looking for when the URL described the post content than when the URL was opaque (e.g. http://example.com?p=519). It's also good SEO to have the title of your posts displayed in the post URL's, so you should definitely try to do this for your posts.

• As a webmaster, you should try to make your 404 (File Not Found) page helpful for users. Try parsing the URL and outputting the results of a site search onto the page, in case you can find the content under a different name. At the very least, you should set up your CMS to send an email whenever your site serves a 404. That's an easy way to find broken links on your site that are hurting users.

All in all, there were 2300 total links on my site, and about 230 of them were broken, for about 10%. This means that, roughly speaking, a user has a 1 in 10 chance of being disappointed when they click on a link on my site; I cut that down to about 20 broken links by unlinking content that 404's or updating it to point to the correct resource. This was a good use of my time; it's important to keep a good user experience for all of my users, even the ones that will only visit once.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.