The usability of photos and URLs
Usability mistakes to avoid when using photos in your website There is often a temptation to use photos to brighten up a page without giving much thought to whether it helps serve a real purpose, or whether it might…
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Reviews, lists, and responses to articles or resources we think are interesting or useful.
Multiscreen; writing for the web
Windows on the web This article is about multiscreen, the increasingly common phenomenon whereby web users begin a task on one device and complete it on another. It is interesting to note that the most common device to…
Accessibility
This week’s theme is accessibility – making the web easy to use for all. Seniors as web users Jakob Nielsen’s latest ‘Alertbox’ usability report. We probably don’t have many users aged 65 and over, but we do have a…
Social media and Tumblr
Teens, social media, and privacy This is quite lengthy, but may be of interest to those with an interest in social media and how young people behave online. Universities turn to Tumblr to reach prospective students The…
Redesign projects
The theme of this week’s links is redesign projects. Redesigns are painful. Users find it unsettling when a familiar website radically changes its design, even if the new design is a great improvement. But…
Personas; decentralised web publishing; the web turns 20 (again)
Here is this week’s selection of articles and resources. Don’t let user experience design methods die Some debate on user experience design methods such as personas and user journeys. Rian van der Merwe argues that…
Gov.uk wins design award; usability for teenagers
I have begun to share interesting articles, along with my comments, with some staff members internally. It has been suggested that it would be good to publish these on the web team blog as well. So here they are.…
New website for the Andrew Marvell Society
While the majority of our work in the web team involves developing and maintaining the main University website, using our enterprise content management system TERMINALFOUR Site Manager we do occasionally get asked to…
Trello at St Andrews
At the meeting of the Scottish Web Folk, on Thursday 31 May held at the University of Edinburgh, I gave the above presentation about Trello from Fog Creek Software. Trello is, according to its own help text, a…
Moving our team task board online to Trello
For the last few years the Web team have been using, and adapting, a form of Agile/Kanban board to manage what tasks need to be done and by whom. It has served us very well, but this week we moved it online to Trello,…