Features Archive: 2006
Dear Santa, please can we have...?
— Published December 8th, 2006 | by David Moore
We've been very good here at iQ Content Towers this year, so we thought we'd share with you a few of the tech-related things we've got on our list for Santa.
Good sites need good writing
— Published September 5th, 2006 | by David Moore
All the visual design in the world won't save a site with poor writing.
WCAG 2 - a backward step for accessibility?
— Published August 4th, 2006 | by David Moore | 1 Comments
As people who work with accessibility and websites, we’re used to the arcane world of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but the new guidelines are going to change things a lot, and maybe not for the better.
Insurance websites - experience counts
— Published July 4th, 2006 | by David Moore
Like air travel, insurance is often seen as a market driven by price - you shop around, and go with the best deal you can find. Online window-shopping has made this much easier. Recent research from Forrester shows that 63% of online adults expect to buy their next motor policy online, so now with a little research, the informed consumer can get a great deal whether it's from the largest provider or the smallest - levelling the playing field.
The trouble with focus groups
— Published June 4th, 2006 | by John Wood
It has long been known that you should not rely on focus groups to test the design of your website. In The Use and Misuse of Focus Groups, Jakob Nielsen argued cogently that focus groups are a good way to gather requirements at the start of a project but have many failings when used to test usability. To test usability you should conduct user tests, which are much more suited to the task.
A-Z indexes: A painful exercise in mindreading
— Published April 28th, 2006 | by Brian Donohue | 1 Comments
Lots of people think they like A-Z indexes on websites. Why? They have the allure of simplicity. Users think the index will cut through the confusion and bring them quickly to where they want to go.
How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better - Part 2
— Published March 31st, 2006 | by John Wood
In part one of this article, I discussed the core concepts of personas, how they are created and what advantages they offer over other ways of modelling user needs. Here in part two I want to provide a similar overview of scenarios, which help you explore how people will use your website. I'll also provide a couple of examples of how we applied personas and scenarios in our work and the benefits they delivered to our clients.
Ten questions about Content Management Systems
— Published March 29th, 2006 | by David Moore
What everyone should know and understand about CMSs.
Don't Fight over your Homepage
— Published February 28th, 2006 | by Laurence Veale
Most organisations spend most of their design time focusing on the homepage, often in tense negotiations with different departments, each jockeying for prominent positions in the global navigation. There’s more politics here than the appointment of a Fianna Fail junior minister.
How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better - Part I
— Published February 28th, 2006 | by John Wood | 2 Comments
Personas and scenarios are techniques for representing your users and the things they do on your website. They are one of the key tools in iQ Content's arsenal, and we deploy them at every opportunity because they deliver more benefits for less effort than anything else that we do. In fact, we have seen this technique transform confused and failing web projects by providing a sense of direction and purpose that set the team on the road to success.
WYSIWYG Text Editors Reviewed
— Published February 27th, 2006 | by Laurence Veale | 6 Comments
Question: We’re looking to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for some text fields in our application. We need to configure it to have certain formatting functions turned off, and we need the ability to add some custom functions. Do you have any suggestions?
Your site judged in 1/20th of a second?
— Published January 25th, 2006 | by Brian Donohue
So all your work on a website comes down to making an impression in the first blink of an eye? That's a tempting conclusion you could make from a recent academic study.
Web 2.0: Introduction to Mash-ups
— Published January 24th, 2006 | by Colm McBarron | 7 Comments
Mash-ups of everything imaginable are appearing all over the internet, from blogs and real estate, to social networking and traffic news. Information is now being repurposed in ways never thought possible before. And just to show how easy it is, we've built one of our own.