Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category

Website designers should use more free space and at least 1 usability tester

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Designing new layout for your website live some free space

Free space improves visual perception — it’s a well known fact for website designers. They take into consideration importance of space between paragraphs, images, buttons and other elements on the page. They can also group items reducing space between them, it helps to show connections, structure and hierarchy of elements.

Free space also makes content more readable. Numerous studies show that spaces between paragraphs increase perception by 20%.

website_design_usabilty

Effective user testing should not be extensive

Jakob Nielsen has calculate the ideal number of website usability testers. His statistics shows that only 5 testers identify almost 85% of all the problems on your site, while 15 testers identify almost all the problems.

The most serious problems usually can be found by the first or the first two testers, the rest testers will only confirm these problems and will find some more minor bags. So those who working at website and web application development can obtain good results without extensive and expensive user testing.

usability testing

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Posted in Software Development, Web development | 1 Comment »

Web-development: trying to draw users’ attention

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

1. Users concentrates on faces

People instinctively notice other people. The same occurs on web pages, users focus their attention on somebody’s face and eyes. So web developers and designers have a good tool to manage users’ attention. Moreover they also can take into account that people usually start to look in the same direction, following photomodel’s look.

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Temperature map that shown quantity of users looking at an image with a child who looks at them.

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And now he is looking at the content. Pay your attention to the increase in the number of people who read the title and the text.

2. Most of users do not see advertising

Jakob Nielsen says that most of people do not see ads. Looking for some information or focusing on site content, they simply do not pay any attention to banners. It means that users also avoid anything that looks like an advertisement, even if it is not an ads actually. Some menu items may look like banners, so website designers should be careful creating such elements.

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Square banners on the left side of the FlashDen site are not banners: they link to content on the same site. But they may be ignored by some users.

However, advertising that looks like content, can be visited by people who are looking for this very information. It can bring more revenue from advertising, but also can reduce level of visitors’ trust because they will click on a banner thinking it’ just a reference to required material on the site. So consider what will be better for you: short-term gain or long-term trust.

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Posted in Software Development, Web development | No Comments »

How to make users to read your web pages till the end

Friday, October 30th, 2009

We all have heard a popular rule of the first screen: “User does not scroll a web page, that is why all your information should be on the top of it”. This rule is based on the fact that users do not use the scroll bar because they feel too lazy to do it. Guys from the CXpartners company (United Kingdom, Bristol) decided to conduct a research to clear up this question. So the Elegance IT company, which specialists are developing new web sites as offshore dedicated team, presents surprising results of this research:

Truly speaking web development professionals know that the rule of the first screen is a myth. :) Over the past 3 years, we have carried out about 800 user tests and only in three cases a lower window boundary has become a real obstacle for users.

Actually this rule came from newspapers: the most important materials are always located at the upper half of the first page. In the Internet it is used to describe a page that users see without scroll.

Why are we are not worry about the rule of the first screen?

Customers don’t care have a web page scroll bar or not, they think it can’t spoil good website design, and we have made sure of it. Users felt more than comfortable scrolling long, very long pages to find what they need. So you can find a lot of successful websites, which creators really don’t worry about the rule of the first screen:

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Adding evidences

An eye tracker was used for the research; it allows you to see what user sees. As a result we have created temperature maps.

Scrollbars

Analyzing results, we saw a clear spot in the right corner of the map. It was a scroll bar, this means that it is used to estimate the length of the particular page.  Some content at the end of the page provides a stimulus for further reading.

The image below shows two versions of Bristol airport web pages: at the first one the information is divided into two columns, while the second template has an illustration as the main element. As a result, people have used scroll:

2

“Stop sign” for your eyes

Take as an example the First Choice company site, its web page was very long and users didn’t want to read it till the end.

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A new title with photos changed the situation:

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Tips for successful website design:

•    large amount of space between elements facilitates eye movements;

•    horizontal lines stop your readers and prevent further page viewing, so all the elements should be above the lower limit;

•    avoid scrollbars inside web pages.

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Posted in Software Development | 5 Comments »

Nearshoring vs. offshore IT outsourcing

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Belarus gets the 5th place in the list of the best exporters of IT services

At first sight it seems that nearshore and offshore IT outsourcing are the same models of software development. Nevertheless some principles of nearshore partnerships can play a key part in successful cooperation with foreign specialists.

So, fists of all a customer gets the work done by people in neighboring countries. It means that geographic nearness allows easier and less expensive traveling and communications. Moreover there are some commonalities between the cultures, so business partners can avoid misunderstandings that can appear between people who are separated not only by thousands of kilometers but also by completely different cultural patterns.

The second corner stone is statistics. Experts can tell you about cultural differences and other intangible things as much as they want, but some figures will explain you everything much better. This year Outsourcing Association in the counties of Central and Eastern Europe announced Belarus the fifth country in the list of the best exporters of IT services in CEE. Here is the Top-10 of CEEOA:

1. Ukraine – $ 530 millions,
2. Romania – $ 410 millions,
3. Hungary – $ 375 millions,
4. Poland – $ 350 millions,
5. Belarus – $ 310 millions,
6. Czech Republic – $ 300 millions,
7. Bulgaria – $ 250 millions,
8. Serbia – $ 157 millions,
9. Estonia – $ 105 millions,
10. Slovakia – $ 90 millions.

So, now European countries have two significant reasons to choose Belarus (outsourcing to Belarus) as the main nearshore partner to provide IT services.

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Posted in IT World, Software Development, Unknown about Belarus | 3 Comments »