March 14th, 2008 | Tags: atypical interaction, contingency design, form validation, graphic design
Good design: Air Canada search form
We benchmarked several flight reservation systems over the last few years and AirCanada.com’s search form is truly one of the most usable.

(Typing “FRA” in the airport input field)
Their airport input field displays tips on focus, validates errors in real-time and, what we really like about it, suggests airports, cities, provinces, states and countries containing the 3 first characters entered.
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Posted by Étienne in Design Ideas | No Comments »
March 7th, 2008 | Tags: automated tests, browser compatibility, Firefox, Internet Explorer
Browsershots.org is a very interesting and practical tool to test and fix browser compatibility issues. Designers will appreciate its simplicity and extensive testing parameters (screen resolution, color depth, javascript and Flash versions, etc).
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Posted by Étienne in Web Design | No Comments »
March 6th, 2008 | Tags: conversion, credit card validation, customers, dropout rates
Earlier this week I was shopping for a digital camera. I went online and compared products and prices on a few Websites. After I had an idea of what I wanted to buy, I ended up going on a big electronics chain’s Website.
I sign up, add the product to my cart, proceed to checkout and begin the 5-step process.
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Posted by Étienne in E-Commerce | No Comments »
March 1st, 2008 | Tags: contingency design, form validation, pagination, Pareto rule
Good design: ING registration form

(Upon clicking “Enroll Now”)
We like the big obvious orange required field indicators, the real-time validation and the input formats on field focus. Very hard to make an error, attention to detail has made this a very efficient registration form.
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Posted by Étienne in Design Ideas | 2 Comments »
March 1st, 2008 | Tags: end-users, FAQ, navigation, usability tests
We can’t stress enough the importance of knowing your end-users. A lot of techniques are available (card sorting, interviews, surveys, shadowing, usability tests, etc) to do this.
Yesterday, I received an email from a big French Web service. The following excerpt explains the creation of a FAQ to help users understand the navigation. The button to access the section was even in attachment…
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Posted by Étienne in Usability Testing | No Comments »