Dutchability | Home of Jeroen Bet

When researching websites, I often see a lot of call to actions like “Read more” linking to an article or deeper content. There are a number of reasons why this is not a great idea. The most obvious is that the “Read more” description isn’t a description at all. It doesn’t tell me anything about [...]

Tagged as: User Experience

When it comes to making and keeping your website successful, content strategy should take an active role in your organization. What is content strategy? Content strategist extraordinaire Kristina Halvorson describes content strategy as: “planning for the creation, publication and governance of useful, usable content”. In other words, it is a strategy – you got to [...]

Tagged as: Content Strategy

My colleague Kathy asked me what the design width of email blasts should be. I had to admit I had no idea. So I did a little research in my inbox, measured my recent html email blasts and notifications and here are the results. Pixel width is approximate, I might be off a pixel or [...]

Tagged as: Email Blasts

A new book has been released in the “A Book Apart” series. Luke Wroblewski, best known for his research on forms, has written a book about mobile websites and apps. If you are familiar with Luke, you know he is pretty much the authority on this subject. In a recent podcast with Jared Spool he [...]

Tagged as: Mobile · User Experience

One of the more elaborate techniques of researching information architecture is card sorting, a tool for examining how users group topics. It will help the information architect to figure out what the taxonomy of a website should look like and determine a dominant organization scheme. It also helps with taxonomy or labeling content. Ultimately we [...]

Tagged as: Card Sorting · research

Worked extremely hard these last two weeks to release this new website. Take a look at the SEO dropdown menu. The objective was to incorporate SEO text on the homepage of the site and at the same time increase the findability of deeper content. I decided to go for a jQuery rich dropdown menu with [...]

Tagged as: jQuery · SEO · User Experience

This week had me looking at log files for various websites I worked on. These websites are both B2B and B2C with the majority of users originating from North America. A few obervations: 1024 x 768 is no longer the most commonly used screen resolution. This surprised me somewhat, but here in North America 1280×800 [...]

Tagged as: log files · screen sizes · user agents

Imagine the following scenario: while looking for specific information you came across a PDF file that had all the information in it you wanted. You downloaded the file and saved it in your documents folder. Since you didn’t have time to organize files – you never seem to have enough time – the file isn’t [...]

Tagged as: Usability · User Experience

Don’t you just love the choice Google offers for their “Add to Google Calendar” buttons? They even dare to call it “A variety”. Yeah sure. Worst of all, there’s no choice of using your own button or, using no button at all. Of Course when you know a little HTML it’s no problem to take [...]

Tagged as: Google · Google Calendar

After experiencing my iPhone for the last 2 weeks, I noticed that the worst user experiences I had with websites were the ones with one-word hyperlinks. It is very hard to actually tap a one word hyper link if you have anything but the tiniest fingers. A solution for this is to make sure you [...]

Tagged as: iPhone · Mobile · Usability · User Experience