Category Archives: Blogging

How a Change on Design Improves Usability and Visits

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A small change could improve a website usability a lot. Sometimes, that could also drive a lot a traffic to it. I have a clear example about that. These are the Design vs Art Blog feed subscription stats:

Feed Stats For The Design vs Art Blog

 

Reading the graphic it is possible to deduce the following:

1 After an initial flat phase I changed the position of the "Feeds" logo from the bottom of the website to the top. The resulting effect was the first big jump in subscriptions (around 300% in less than a month).

Design vs Art Blog Showing Usability Improvement

 

 

 

2 After a second "flatish" short period (second, bigger bubble on image 1) I added some instructions to the RSS Feed logo: "Subscribe to Feed, get every week fresh articles"

Feeds Logo With Text

 

Lesson

A Put the tools the people need and you want to promote in a prominent position, do not assume that users will look for them.

B Tell users what you are actually offering, do not rely on images and icons. Telling people that the Design vs Art Blog is updated every week is encouraging them to subscribe.

C This tips have a marketing impact but they could be applied to everything that is on a website, potentially improving usability with a few changes.      

Improvements on WordPress 2.5, nice details!

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Wordpress is a greet blog tool that I have been using for some time. The new version 2.5 has some improvements, specially on design.

1. Default color. By default the old WordPress interface used to come with a horrible strong blue. The new one comes with a web2.0 pastel palette. This is something that our eyes can be happy about.

2. Wording. If a feature or button is not labeled properly users are going to have a hard time finding it or discovering what this feature is for. An example is the "Presentation" tab on the old wordpress administration that was hiding the design-related features of the blog. I remember having some trouble to find this features the first time I used WordPress. Now the tab is called "Design". Great!

3. Organization. A good little move to improve usability was to reorganize the menu. Write, Manage, Design and Comments are on the left, the rest was move to another corner. This puts the important stuff together and makes the administration page look simpler.

 

The old WordPress

 

Wordpress Old Design

 

The new WordPress 2.5

 

Wordpress 2.5 New Design

 

Things that users are not supposed to use often were move to another place (Settings, Plugins, Users)

Wordpress 2.5 New Design Settings

 

Do Not Include Too Many Links, Usability

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Links are used to give users more information, details, context. They also are a way to show what is important. They could also be use to drive traffic to other parts of the same website. But abusing could have a negative effect, if your web design has too many links, like this very same article, the effects of linking would be mostly annoying. See here more Design vs Art articles about Links.

Use links, but don’t abuse.