The following video was shot by Google in New York. They asked random people on the street the question: What is a Browser? People who work in the IT industry will probably cringe or even laugh when the hear the answers. But it is important to accept that these persons are your average users! When you design your next user interface keep in mind that not everybody studied IT. Build software which everybody can use which is probably still one of the hardest problems the IT industry has to tackle.

See also my post about guerrilla testing.

One of the biggest usability problems on the internet is still the inconsistency in which links are displayed. Back in the good old days my Netscape browser displayed every link on nearly every website in the same way because not many people knew how to change their looks. Nowadays this is not the case anymore. Probably one of the first things a web designer does when building a new site is overwriting the default link design. However this leads to a lot of pain especially for people who did not grow up with the internet and do not have that sixth sense when it comes to knowing what word, box or picture is a link and which is not. Lets have a look at Twitter as a concrete example. As you can see Twitters main site uses a wide range of designs for their links: underlined text, text in a different color, boxes, pictures,... I doubt that you can tell me the number of links on the page after one quick look. Now lets compare this with the most visited site on the internet the Google Search homepage. As you can see the site uses only one design for every link: blue underlined text. Obviously this makes it very easy to spot links.

It will be interesting to see how this topic will evolve further. I strongly believe that it is important for every website to have a consistent way to design links.

By the way this post was inspired by my own attempt to improve the links on this site. As you can see every link, except to top menu, is underlined, now. Hopefully this will have a positive effect on the usability of the site.

Informal testing sessions on the street, in cafe's (also called guerrilla testing, ghetto testing,...) are a great and inexpensive way to get valuable feedback from potential customers of your software. I wrote about the topic before here.

One of my favourite websites last.fm is currently beta testing their next version and guess what they use guerilla testing to do so. Fortunately they also spread the word and write about it. So hop over to their blog and learn how they organize their testing sessions and how it works out for them.

Over at copyrighteous Benjamin wrote a nice post about how online stores could fill in the type of the credit card you are using automatically.

"Any decent credit card system knows that if a sixteen digit credit card number starts with 4, it's a Visa."

Actually some websites are already smart enough, e.g. shopify. However I would be interesting to know why not more websites are implementing a similar system like shopify has.

Once you start writing websites on a different platform than windows, you have to go the extra mile in order to access the Internet Explorer for compatibility reasons. Fortunately there is handy website which you can use to render your site with a variety of IE versions.

The service is called netrenderer and you can find it here. It is completely free of charge.