Articles

(This page also in Dutch / Nederlands)

See also: what you will find here.

2008

- Abeleto stops usability testing (published: 20 February 2008).

Abeleto will always keep developing websites with an eye for both usability and accessibility, but will no longer provide user tests.

2004

- Objective evaluation of likely usability hazards, part 2 (published: 1999; republished: 5 October 2004).

A comprehensive list of simple tests for a heuristic usability evaluation of a web site. Use this test to chart (and solve) major problems before you test with real users, or use it to see how your site fares in the light of known usability problems. In areas, this test is dated.

- Objective evaluation of likely usability hazards (published: 1999; republished: 21 September 2004).

Jasper Sprengers explores the possibility of finding objective criteria to identify usability hazards and prioritize solutions. The results could be used as the basis of a heuristic evaluation or of a user test. This is the first of a two part article. The second part will actually present such criteria.

- Nomenclature and recommendations for a website's page of expected entry (published: 22 December 1999; republished: 15 September 2004).

Why do we call a home page a home page, and should we call it that? This golden oldie was salvaged from the Abeleto UK web site, which is no more. More of Abeleto UK's insightful articles will follow in the weeks to come.

- Some guidelines for creating and storing web images (published: 19 May 2004)

A customer was spending inordinate amounts of time getting the images for their web site right, and since they were paying me to play their help desk, I decided to save them some money and explain how to avoid the mistakes they made the most.

- Book review: Defensive Design for the Web [currently at Evolt.org] (published: 13 May 2004)

The folks at 37signals [external link] have discovered a way to present usability in a very clear manner. By presenting examples of sites getting it wrong and other, similar sites getting it right, they make clear immediately how you can improve your web site.

What you will find here

The presentation of a web site helps determine how much a visitor trusts the available information. A medical web site is served by a clinical appearance, with cool, distant colours. A second hand car sales person is expected to have many moving images, large headings and bright colours. And a usability agency must do the 'Jakob Nielsen', and publish a continous stream of essays about usability, accessibility and web design.

I dare not make any promises about the frequency with which articles will appear here. However, from time to time I will publish articles about usability, accessibility and web design.

English is not my native tongue. On the other hand, it is the lingua franca of the web. The result of these two conflicting influences is that sometimes I will publish English articles of which I will not make a Dutch version available, and sometimes it will be the other way around; I will publish a Dutch article for which you will not find an English counterpart. If you speak both languages, it may be useful to keep track of both the Dutch and English sections of this site.