All posts in Jargon Buster

Website Usability Testing is a technique to evaluate the effectiveness of a website design by testing it with real end users.

As designers or website owners we can often be too close to a project and too familiar with how a site functions to identify potential usability issues. By observing real users (ideally from a site’s target audience) performing common site tasks we can quickly identify areas of friction or confusion within a design and resolve them. Usability Testing can also be combined with Emotional Response and Recall tests to build up a wider user experience picture. (more…)

Progressive enhancement is a web development approach which places an emphasis on accessibility, the aim being to create sites using sparse, semantic markup that are functional for all but offer an enhanced user experience to visitors with more capable browsers.

The starting-point is developing a base functionality that is consistent across all browsers and devices and then you add in additional design bells and whistles using external CSS and Javascript. This approach forces you to focus on a site’s key functionality and understand what is really important to it’s success. It’s a strategy which recognises the reality that designing sites to look pixel-for-pixel the same across every browser, across every device is something we need to let go of. Progressive Enhancement embraces these differences and lets us make use of the latest web technologies, rather than simply dumbing everything down to capabilities of the lowest common denominator.

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Information Architecture is a term that you might hear a lot during the early stages of planning a web development project. It’s used by project manager types like me to describe the way information is organised within a website and the paths visitors will use to get to it.

Bad information architecture is like an unordered shop with products grouped randomly and mixed in with each other on the shelves. Or it could be perfectly orderly but completely illogical, like grouping food items by colour or height rather than type.

Effective information architecture achieves a grouping of information that is logical and intuitive. Not only that, but the journey to that information should be equally intuitive.

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