It is all about usability! Usability of GUIs you see every minute you spend at your PC: applications usability reviews, websites usability reviews, Flash usability. Tips and tricks, my comments and suggestions. Lets make this world usable together ;)

Monday, October 27, 2008

Amazing Craigslist.com Fact Sheet

Q: What is craigslist? A: Local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries worldwide - community moderated, and largely free. Q: What can I find there? A: Jobs, housing, goods, services, romance, local activities, advice - just about anything really. Q: What is the origin of craigslist? A: An email list of SF events, started as a hobby by Craig Newmark in early 1995. Q: Who runs craigslist? A: Jim Buckmaster has been CEO since late 2000. Q: Is Craig still involved with craigslist? A: Craig works in customer service, in addition to fulfilling his iconic responsibilities. Q: Is craigslist a nonprofit? A: No, craigslist was incorporated as a for-profit in 1999. Q: Why does craigslist still use a ".org" domain? A: It symbolizes the relatively noncommercial nature of craigslist, as well as our service mission and non-corporate culture. Q: How much traffic does craigslist get? A: More than 12 billion page views per month Q: How does that compare with other companies? A: craigslist is #8 worldwide in terms of english-language page views Q: How many people use craigslist? A: More than 50 million each month, including more than 40 million in the US alone Q: How many classified ads does craigslist receive? A: craigslist users self-publish more than 30 million new classified ads each month Q: How many job listings does craigslist receive? A: More than 2 million new job listings each month Q: How many images are uploaded to craigslist? A: More than 10 million new images per month Q: What about craigslist discussion forums? A: More than 100 million user postings in 100 topical forums Q: How many employees does craigslist have, and where are its offices located? A: 25 of us work out of a victorian house in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco Q: How does craigslist support its operations? A: By charging below-market fees for job ads in 10 cities, and for brokered apartment listings in NYC. Q: How much are job ads? A: $25 in Chicago, NYC, LA, DC, Boston, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle, and San Diego, and $75 in SF. Q: How many craigslist sites are there, when were they launched, and why is craigslist expanding? A: Per user request, there are over 500 craigslist sites in all 50 US states, and over 50 countries: 3/1995: SF Bay Area 6/2000: Boston 8/2000: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Diego, Seattle, Washington DC 10/2000: Sacramento 4/2001: Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Vancouver 10/2002: Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix 4/2003: Dallas, Detroit, Houston, London, Toronto 11/2003: Baltimore, Cleveland, Honolulu, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, St. Louis, Tampa Bay 1/2004: Montreal, Providence 2/2004: Nashville, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Columbus, Fresno, Hartford, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Norfolk, Orlando 9/2004: Albuquerque, Anchorage, Boise, Buffalo, Memphis, Salt Lake, Santa Barbara, Manchester, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Sydney 11/2004: Albany, Amsterdam, Bangalore, Eugene, Inland Empire, Monterey Bay, Omaha, Orange County, Ottawa, Paris, Reno, San Antonio, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Spokane, Tokyo, Tucson, Tulsa 1/2005: Auckland, Bakersfield, Belfast, Berlin, Brisbane, Brussels, Burlington, Calgary, Cardiff, Des Moines, Edmonton, Glasgow, Jacksonville, Louisville, Richmond, Stockton, Winnipeg 2/2005: Birmingham UK, Buenos Aires, Columbia, Manila, Mexico City, Rome, Seoul 3/2005: Zurich 4/2005: Allentown, Barcelona, Birmingham AL, Cape Town, Delhi, Hong Kong, Lexington KY, Little Rock, Madison, Maine, Modesto, Mumbai, New Haven, New Jersey, Rochester, Shanghai, Stockholm, West Palm Beach, Wichita 6/2005: Adelaide AU, Ann Arbor, Asheville, Athens GR, Bangkok, Beijing, Champaign-Urbana, Charleston SC, Chico, Dayton, Delaware, El Paso, Florence IT, Fort Myers, Frankfurt, Geneva, Grand Rapids, Halifax, Harrisburg, Humboldt, Istanbul, Jackson MS, Jerusalem, Johanessburg, Lima Peru, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, Munich, New Hampshire, Oklahoma City, Osaka, Perth AU, Prague, Puerto Rico, Redding, Rio De Janeiro, San Luis Obispo, Santiago, Saskatoon, Syracuse NY, Tallahassee, Tel Aviv, Tijuana, Vienna, Western Massachusetts, Victoria BC, West Virginia 7/2005: Costa Rica, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming 9/2005: Baton Rouge, Bristol UK, Chennai IN, Ithaca, Knoxville, Leeds UK, Liverpool UK, Mobile, Montgomery, Newcastle UK, Pensacola, Quebec, Savannah, Shreveport, Toledo 1/2006: Bellingham WA, Cairo Egypt, Chattanooga TN, Colorado Springs CO, Gainesville FL, Hamilton ON, Kitchener ON, Hyderabad India, Lansing MI, Medford OR, Oxford UK, Palm Springs CA, Santa Fe NM, Taipei China, Ventura CA 6/2006: springfield MO, columbia MO, rockford IL, peoria IL, springfield IL, quad cities IL/IA, fort wayne IN, evansville IN, south bend IN, bloomington IN, gulfport-biloxi MS, huntsville AL, salem OR, bend OR, london ON, windsor ON, fort lauderdale FL, sarasota FL, daytona beach FL, cape cod MA, worcester MA, green bay WI, eau claire WI, appleton-oshkosh WI, flagstaff AZ, yakima WA, utica NY, binghamton NY, hudson valley NY, long island NY, akron-canton OH, youngstown OH, greenville SC, myrtle beach SC, duluth MN, augusta GA, macon GA, athens GA, flint MI, saginaw MI, kalamazoo MI, upper peninsula MI, mcallen TX, beaumont TX, corpus christi TX, brownsville TX, lubbock TX, odessa TX, amarillo TX, waco TX, laredo TX, winston-salem NC, fayetteville NC, wilmington NC, erie PA, scranton PA, penn state PA, reading PA, lancaster PA, topeka KS, new london CT, lincoln NE, lafayette LA, lake charles LA, merced CA, south jersey NJ, fort collins CO, roanoke VA, charlottesville VA, blacksburg VA, provo UT, fayetteville AR, rocky mountains, micronesia, helsinki FI, warsaw PL, oslo NO, naples IT, jakarta ID, marseilles FR, kolkata IN, budapest HU, caracas VE, hamburg DE, pakistan, bangladesh, beirut LB, malaysia, panama, caribbean, portugal, christchurch NZ, wellington NZ, durban ZA, prince edward island, newfoundland, cote d'azur 11/2006: More than 130 new cities were added in November 2006 4/2008: 120 new cities were added in April 2008 Q: Why doesn't craigslist focus more on generating revenue? A: We rely on local communities to suggest ways to make money without compromising craigslist. Q: Is there a connection between craigslist and eBay? A: eBay acquired 25% of the equity in craigslist from a former shareholder in august of 2004.

Monday, October 08, 2007

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Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Professional X-Cart Templates

aheadWorks released the first pack of professional X-Cart Templates available for instant purchase and download at x-cart-customization.com website. Templates are available under 2 licenses:
  1. Common license (less expencive, templates starting from $65) - after purchase aheadWorks continues selling the template you've bought. But who will find some similar eye catching designs among 1000000000s websites?
  2. Unique license (more expensive) - after purchase the template is taken off sale and removed from the database. This means that only you and people who bought the template before will own it. Of course you can consult aheadWorks about the number of template purchases. But today I am sure most templates are never sold or sold for one-two times, so hurry up - it's a profitable money investing.
Anyway you see what you get and in fact you can't find more professional skins developed for x-cart in other places. aheadWorks will install the template, add your logo or do any additional customization at additional cost.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

World Class Content Management Delivered as a Service

Fast, economical and easy. CrownPeak CMS features an award-winning interface combined with powerful workflow, content management and publishing features. What's the result? Easier, faster, less expensive web content management. CrownPeak's customers manage content, not technology.
Web Content Management Made Easy
With CrownPeak CMS, there’s nothing to install, no hardware to buy and no upgrade costs to worry about - ever. CMSWatch calls CrownPeak’s interface "the most visually attractive and usable interface from among all the products in this report."
Powerful Content Management Capabilities
As InfoWorld noted when naming CrownPeak CMS its Technology of the Year for 2005, “Enterprises requiring functional depth and publishing flexibility won’t be disappointed by CrownPeak CMS. It readily and securely connects to other systems; the UI adapts to a range of authors and traditional labor-intensive jobs, such as modeling new sites, can be done in a matter of minutes”.
Fully Managed, Fully Supported
CrownPeak CMS comes packaged with services to implement, customize and provide ongoing support 24/7/365. CrownPeak includes hours of service in the standard monthly agreement, and guarantees service levels with a complete SLA (Service Level Agreement).
Highly Economical
A world-class system available as a software service. CrownPeak customers pay an economical monthly fee that covers everything: licenses, hardware, hosting, bandwidth, management and support.

Friday, October 13, 2006

X-Cart Performance Optimization

Don't lose customers because of the low performance of your X-Cart store. The problem and solution inside this article.

read more | digg story

Friday, September 22, 2006

New Yahoo Email Interface or don't think that AJAX is panacea!

Not so long ago Yahoo introduced new email interface. It is AJAX based and available at: new.mail.yahoo.com PC Magazine reviewed it as : "The new interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use."(09/20/2005 ). Great! "ease of use" means usability. Lets look inside. I will not describe the good features of this new interface, and praise Yahoo developers :) You may read all this in numerous online reviews, like PC Magazine. I will just enumerate the things that are not usable or things that may be better (do you remember? Our aim to make this ugly WWW better!) - It is not possible to customize main email actions buttons. e.g.(1) I never use "Print" and I always remove it from my email clients tollbars. e.g.(2) "Move" button. Do you use it? It is easier to drag and drop selected emails to desired folder. And new Yahoo email UI supports d'n'd. - Where is "Compose" button? I spent some second searching it. I see "Reply", "Froward", "Move" and others. No "Compose" button in main toolbar! Oh, it is at top left. Next to "Check mail" button! - Calendar as well as notes opens in a new window (Firefox 1.5.0.7). Why not in a new tab next to "Inbox" tab? - "Find messages" search box again at top left. No comments! Conclusions: AJAX gives great abilities for UI developers. But in the rush for modern technologies we should pay more attention on UIs.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Top 5 usability books

Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen (Author), Hoa Loranger (Author) In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web—Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling usability guru is back and has revisited his classic guide, joined forces with Web usability consultant Hoa Loranger, and created an updated companion book that covers the essential changes to the Web and usability today. Prioritizing Web Usability is the guide for anyone who wants to take their Web site(s) to next level and make usability a priority! Through the authors’ wisdom, experience, and hundreds of real-world user tests and contemporary Web site critiques, you’ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design and layout, content design, and more!

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

by Steve Krug (Author) People won't use your web site if they can't find their way around it. Whether you call it usability, ease-of-use, or just good design, companies staking their fortunes and their futures on their Web sites are starting to recognize that it's a bottom-line issue. In Don't Make Me Think, usability expert Steve Krug distills his years of experience and observation into clear, practical--and often amusing--common sense advice for the people in the trenches (the designers, programmers, writers, editors, and Webmasters), the people who tell them what to do (project managers, business planners, and marketing people), and even the people who sign the checks. Krug's clearly explained, easily absorbed principles will help you sleep better at night knowing that all the hard work going into your site is producing something that people will actually want to use.

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen (Author)

Creating Web sites is easy. Creating sites that truly meet the needs and expectations of the wide range of online users is quite another story. In Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, renowned Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen shares his insightful thoughts on the subject. Packed with annotated examples of actual Web sites, this book sets out many of the design precepts all Web developers should follow. This guide segments discussions of Web usability into page, content, site, and intranet design. This breakdown skillfully isolates for the reader many subtly different challenges that are often mixed together in other discussions. For example, Nielsen addresses the requirements of viewing pages on varying monitor sizes separately from writing concise text for "scanability." Along the way, the author pulls no punches with his opinions, using phrases like "frames: just say no" to immediately make his feelings known. Fortunately, his advise is some of the best you'll find. One of the unique aspects of this title is the use of actual statistics to buttress the author's opinions on various techniques and technologies. He includes survey results on sizes of screens, types of queries submitted to search portals, response times by connection type and more. This book is intended as the first of two volumes--focusing on the "what." The author promises a follow-up title that will show the "hows" and, based on this installation, we can't wait. --Stephen W. Plain

Designing Interfaces [ILLUSTRATED] by Jenifer Tidwell (Author)

Designing a good interface isn't easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology -- Web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices -- may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well. UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence. Designing Interfaces captures those best practices as design patterns -- solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You'll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them. Each chapter's introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight. A book can't design an interface for you -- no foolproof design process is given here -- but Designing Interfaces does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen (Author), Marie Tahir (Author) While there is a plethora of books available that provide tips on Web design, most authors leave a significant gap between the theory and practice--a gap that is left up to the reader to fill. Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed boldly steps into that gap with specific observations and suggestions backed with solid quantitative analysis. This book focuses only on home page design as the most important point of presence for any Web site. This definitive work is coauthored by Jakob Nielsen--the accepted industry expert in Web usability--and Marie Tahir, an expert in user profiling. Their collaboration has produced a guide of such rare practical benefit that Web designers will likely wear out their first copy scouring the pages to savor every last morsel of wisdom. The book begins with a chapter of precise guidelines that serve as a checklist of the features and functionality to include on your home page. The specifics found in categories such as "revealing content through examples" and "graphic design" will quickly hook you and whet your appetite for more. These guidelines are followed up with hard statistics and an examination of the ominous Jakob's Law: "Users spend most of their time on other sites than your site." Here you'll find some interesting statistics about how various conventions like search, privacy policies, and logos are used. All this leads up to the showcase element of the book--a systematic deconstruction of 50 of the most popular home pages on the Web. The authors painstakingly pick apart each in an uncompromising autopsy of usability. Each site is graphically analyzed for its use of real estate and summarized with the frankness only found from true experts. Then each section of the home page is bulleted and analyzed for potential improvements. It's a bold move to offer a critique of industry-standard Web sites such as Yahoo, CNET, and eBay, but the authors have done such a fine job that the designers of those sites will surely make reading this book a high priority. For the rest of us, this work will serve as an invaluable gospel. --Stephen W. Plain