Recent Site Diagnosis Report
Site Analysis: Online Bill Pay (PDF format)
The focus of this Site Analysis is the MCC e-bill system used by municipalities to collect bill payments such as excise tax and water/sewer charges. The report includes a fully illustrated bill pay task flow highlighting strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.

Select Articles and Briefs by Jen Cardello
Retrofitting the Navigation Bar, Insurance and Technology, 2003

Application Abandonment:Using analytics and design to improve online conversion rates
Research Brief, 2004

Requesting Personally Identifiable Information (PDF format), Research Brief 2005

Interesting articles and sites:
Article at 37Signals: Why Personas Aren’t Useful
This article is an interesting take on the usefulness of creating full-fledged “Personas”. What is often times more useful (for us) is to define key tasks and usage scenarios.

Boston Globe: Analysis of Presidential Candidate Logotypes

Video: Information R/evolution
Information R/evolution from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Kansas State University — same guy behind the viral Web 2.0 video.

Don Norman article: Logic versus Usage
Great little article about taxonomies and “task-onomies”.

Jakob Nielsen Alertbox: Tab usage guidelines
Jakob’s guidelines for using tabs correctly.

Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
This is an excellent piece by Jakob Nielsen regarding how users can overlook key information/features because of ad-like design and made-up/branded terms instead of straightforward phrases. And, it’s backed by eye-tracking data!

UXmatters article: When Observing Users Is Not Enough: 10 Guidelines for Getting More Out of Users’ Verbal Comments
A great article about user interviews with excellent advice and examples.

Site Analysis tool: Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg shows you where people are clicking and where they are not.

Presentation: Using Search Analytics to Diagnose What’s Ailing your Information Architecture
Fantastic presentation by Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins regarding Search Analytics. They presented this at the IA Summit and will soon be publishing a book on the same topic.

Audience Measurement Tool: AttentionMeter
If you like web site stats, you’ll love this aggregation of Alexa, Compete and Quantcast charts within one site. Created by Jay Meattle of Compete.

Advice: Email Marketing Makeover
This is a very informative article by Campaign Monitor.

Information Architecture Tool: Intuitect
This is a Visio add-on that enhances the usefulness specifically for information architects making site maps, wireframes and interactive HTML prototypes. Axure competitor.

Eyetracking research: 23 design guidelines
Useful article with 23 tips for web design based on eyetracking studies.

Collaborative Writing Tool: WriteWith
WriteWith facilitates group writing/editing of documents. Instead of sending copies around an office, it lives where edits can easily be tracked.

Usability News
Usability News is a truly useful newsletter comprised of recent usability research studies. It is compiled by the Software Usability Research Laboratory of Wichita State University.

Article: Usage-centered design
Provocative piece on *usage-centered design* (instead of user-centered) and the pitfalls of design processes that are too heavily laden with user research, user testing, persona creation and the like. The author, Larry Constantine, calls the ideas in his own paper “The heretical theses”.

Research: Virtual fold and scrolling
Research data from Clicktale

A/B Testing tool: Omniture’s Offermatica
I recently saw a demonstration of this system and it’s amazing. The Omniture suite of products is the analytics dream-team for user experience and marketing professionals.