Position Of Search Box Issue

Being consistent with the search box position is going to help your users when looking for the products you sell online. Many could say that the right position for the search box is the upper right corner. Maybe Yes.

But setting your own search box position is a practical web design option. Keep in mind that you should place the search box in the same place across your whole website.

Check, for example, Foodnetwork.com, a website about cooking. It doesn’t matter where your are, there is only one search box, always in the same place.

Foodnetwork 20071227

On the other side, an example of poor usability, could be found at Colorware.com. At the beginning the search box is in the right position, after the user makes a search another search box appears in the middle of the screen. This is confusing for some users, many click once again the search button but this time in the new search box.

Colorware 20071227

Fixed-Width Screen Size Example

Reading large amounts of text on a website could be not very comfortable. If you are designing, for example, a news website you have to take care about the screen size.

In order to make reading more enjoyable The New York Times, as well as other newspaper websites, use a fixed-width screen size. It doesn’t matter how big the browser window is, the site width stays the same:

New York Time A 20071226

New York Time B 20071226

If they were not using a fixed screen size users could make their browsers too big and the text lines would be too long to easily read them.

This web design and usability pattern help users read the information you are offering them, having as a result better chances of them finishing reading the text and staying longer in your website.

Blog Comment Solutions

Encouraging users to give you feedback is not that easy, if you are designing a blog you should make the posting procedure as simple as possible. Otherwise many users will get impatient and leave without writing any comment.One example of complicated design could be the SEOmoz blog. The content of this blog is very useful but if you want to post a comment a pop-up is prompted and users are asked to login or register.

SEOmoz blog Register 20071225

Note that the Register button is not visible, users must drug the window (although that might depend on the screen configuration). This adds one more usability flaw to this interface.Then another floating window to post the comment:

SEOmoz blog Window 20071225

Techcrunch, the famous blog, has a much more practical solution for posting comments. I will go for simple solutions, allowing users to post straight away.

Techcrunch Post Comment 20071225