Usability useful links

I teach a class once a week on digital marketing. It mostly covers the promotional 'P'. I thought it would be a useful exercise to share the links, resources and others thoughts here.

This week's is usability. I think I first came across website usability when working for Interactive Return - now owned by Radical.

Some links:

Two to the most popular books back then were Jakob Nielson's Designing Web Usability and Steve Krug's 'Don't make me think'. Both still popular.

• Top Ten mistakes in web design by Jakob.
• Strong feedback
• Ten tips for a usable website
• Sample usability test script here if you were going to test a website's usability. Via Steve Krug (Thanks).
• Good example here of a website (facebook page actually) with one clear objective. And their views on this.
• Another fine example of a website here with a clear objective. This website leads us into a our next class about direct and digital marketing.
• A good experiment / test here.
  

I'll write at a slower pace

For a number of reasons, I've been blogging a lot less.

Partly lazy. Partly because I've been using internet on an iPad which while amazing for reading and watching the internet - is not so great for typing. So I wasn't writing much. And Google Reader doesn't work so well on the iPad, so wasn't reading many blogs either.

I was still looking around for all the wonderful things I'd been finding on blogs by folks like Dave Trott, Grant McCracken etc but found myself using twitter looking for these nuggets. The other thing I realised is that most of my blog posts were simply sharing stuff I stumbled onto. Stuff I liked. Not very much of my own.

Consider this. If I saw a TV ad I liked, I could share it by grabbing some youtube video code, embedding into a blog post and adding my own thoughts. I considered this a fast process. In fact, at the time, I was amazed at how easy it was to share.

Today, sharing is a Retweet.

So. I'm going to continue blogging. Because I like writing and a blog is a good place to articulate a viewpoint. But I'll write at a slower pace. (I already am actually). Not once a week. Perhaps only once ever few weeks. This is not considered best practice blogging. Not by a long shot. But this is my plan. And I'll use continue to use twitter to find and share stuff. Different tools for different needs I guess.

By the way, I found an iPad app called Reeder as a way to read the blog posts, so am back reading them. And happy about that.

How to build a brand Like Corona

I'm a fan of the Corona brand. Think their advertising is very smart. Here is some analysis on how they've managed to position it as premium beer. Found via HBR

100 Million Page Likes on Disney's Facebook

Impressive. Interesting to know how they went about it - people, budget etc. Found via Snorre Martinson

More strong outdoor: lottery of life

Found this via Chris Wiggins

The 4 most common types of role ambiguity

We're near end of year, which means reviewing individuals' performance objectives for next year. The four big areas (according to expert Charles Handy) where employees feel ambiguity about their role are:

1. About how their work is measured and evaluated
2. Around their role enhancement
3. Around the scope of their responsibility and
4. Uncertainty around others' expectations on their work.

As managers, we could find worse ways to spend our time than on figuring out and clarifying the above for our team members.