Entries tagged with ‘usability’
Local Navigation Context Clues
If you've been paying close attention to the Gustavus website over the weekend, you've probably noticed that we added a subtle but helpful new feature to the Gustavus Template. Now, each page's local navigation will highlight the page you are currently viewing if it happens to appear in the local navigation. For instance, check out the Classics Events page.
Text input example text with jQuery
When filling out a form on the web, it isn’t always crystal clear what you are supposed to type into every text input field. Since a confusing form is a form that is less likely to be completed, it is critical to provide help wherever important. In these cases, it can be very helpful to have [...]
ColorFlashing with jQuery Enchant
Widgets, buttons, and doodads are always vying for one's attention. So, if something is very important, what options does a developer have that will effectively and unobtrusively grab the user's focus?
Gustavus Website Updates
We’ve made some noticeable modifications to the Gustavus template recently. The changes were made to address various minor issues, the foremost being usability problems in the “seach/go quickly to…” area of the header. Simple, comprehensive searching Where once we had a “go quickly to…” menu, search box, and search menu, we now have one simple search box. [...]
Linking in Style… CSS3 Selectors for the Win
Today, we made a couple subtle but visually helpful additions to hyperlink styles in our site-wide CSS. We used some advanced features of CSS3 to isolate off-site links, to add an extra background image and padding to the link, based on how MediaWiki handles off-site links. We also added a mail icon to mailto: e-mail [...]
Gribly Gets New Feathers
Last week, we put live a slightly upgraded version of the Gribly with some extra color coding (among other features) that should help visitors parse information more quickly and efficiently. Finding a particular faculty member with the last name “Smith” among a sea of students, administrators, and support staff with the same surname should become [...]
More Usable Contact Form
In celebration of World Usability Day we re-designed Technology Services’ contact form. How is this better? The new design divides the form into two logical sections to help visitors input their information as quickly as possible. It also sports a larger text box for visitors to type their concerns. Additionally, the form now will remember who you [...]
Wanna say something? You have 4 seconds.
New research shows that four seconds is the acceptable threshold for loading times on retail websites. This comes in light of similar recent research which suggests that visitors judge the quality of a website in a mere 50 milliseconds. So, if you want to say something on the web, you have no more than four seconds [...]
“Click here” is bad
One of the most often overlooked details when authoring documents for the web is link text. Link text is the “clickable portion of text displayed for a link”. As with most things, there are good and bad practices when it comes to crafting link text. It seems that, it is common to author a web document [...]
Section Highlighting
To improve the usability of the Gustavus website, we added a small, but incredibly handy feature to pages within the Gustavus template that fall under one of the sections found within the global navigation (the colored bar of links at the top of each page). Sections such as the college calendar, athletics, or academics will [...]