New Site Design
What you've been saying about the new look & feel

David,

I looked at the site, and there does seem to be useful information, but the constant spelling errors are a major turn-off for me... hard for me to see the site as professional (though it _looks_ very professional) because it seems the Content Producers are hurrying and don't care to proof-read the material. The odd capitalization is disconcerting, too.

Jorah

uidesign reply,

Hi Jorah,

We are always trying to strike a balance between timely release of current material and making sure that the material is absolutely perfect when released. This is a difficult job.

For example, the Alan Cooper interview was proof read by 3 people plus two of Cooper's PR people, despite that one week after release, a regular reader delivered an email detailing 16 grammatical and punctuation errors. Naturally, these have been corrected.

We encourage reader to write in with corrections when they find typos which would not normally be found by spell checkers alone.

Your letter prompted a review of some recent material and some punctuation and capitalization has been corrected.

The spelling and capitalization on this site has a "transatlantic flavour". Initially uidesign was published in English. Recently, many articles are in American. Some are in a mixture of both. Capitalization rules are generally american and have two additions. Words which can be considered as fields of study with the UI, HCi, HF, Uasability fields are treated as Proper Nouns as are Classes, Objects and States being referred to in code, models, analysis or design discussed in an article.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will update the FAQ with the rules as we use them and will try harder to keep the content clean in future. Meanwhile, we welcome you to detail errors you have found,

Regards,

David Anderson
Editor

Why aren't there any pdf's?

Overall I like the site, but the green border is a tad too much, I don't know how your template/page generation system is organized, but the practice of using one big all encomposing table tag is a real drag on rendering speed. Oh well I'm sure these comments aren't unique but really overall I'm impressed with the site, I'm be back.

C.S. Schwarz

uidesign reply,

We agree with you many of the White Papers would benefit from pdf format versions. However, at this time it is felt that the investment in time and money to produce them does not justify the return. We will continue to monitor the situation and may produce pdf format White Papers in the future.

First of all I have to say that I'm very pleased with your new site design. It now looks pretty "fresh" and more informative.

The only thing I want to ask you is about "striped" way of text list rendering (for example "the most popular" column on the right). Is this tecnique meaningful and usable? Do you know any research results concerning this? My opinion is that it doesn't carry any meaning and even sometimes distracting.

Another question is about your site redesign article. You have shown us the resulting user roles (personas) but you haven't shown how exactly did you get it. I'm very interesting in this question because I will also have to do my russian site redesign. I think defining the roles is an subjective process. Suppose I have some user roles of my site but how can I be sure that there are no other ones or these ones are correct enough?

Thank you for keeping my site ("For Better Software! Monthly") in your links. Many visitors came from it.

With respect,

Sedelnikov Andrei

Andrei,

Thanks for your note. Most of the points you raise in your second paragraph will be answered in the forthcoming papers on Site Redesign - Analysis and Site Redesign - Design. Keep an eye out for them.

To answer you specific point about the Personas: Personas are not real people. They do not need to be real people as long as they sound believable. This is from the writing of Alan Cooper who has promoted the idea of these imaginary Personas. The important concept behind Personas is, that you do not design for everyone but only for someone. (or perhaps two or three).

By selectively designing my site to accomodate the goals of the 4 Personas, I have actually designed a site which will appeal to wider audience, even if it is not completely ideal for that wider audience.

With your own site you must do the same. Do not try to design it for everyone, just a few real people or believable Personas.

Good luck and best wishes,

David

Hi,

I don't have a lot of time to look over the site, but a quick look turned up a few things. I like the new logo and layout at the top. My base platform is NN4.7 on a Mac with screen set to 832 x 624.

The Browser window is a very limited canvas for the designer. You could probably compress the area that you use for the search.

I would recommend that you "tweak" the navigation a tad. For example, on the book page the advantage of the topic menu is lost the minute you click on one of the topics below "Visualisation & Design". Also, you might want to connect the "Review Scoring" link, directly to the book reviews.

Regards,

Jim Avery