To prepare for our upcoming Navigation Design seminar, we've been running user studies of various navigation features. As always, some test poorly. Also as always, the more faddish features — such as tag clouds — exhibit major usability problems.

Luckily, other Web trends fare well in user testing because they have inherently good usability and match user behaviors and goals. Indeed, one particular navigation design — the mega drop-down menu — tested well enough that I want to encourage its wider use.

Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other.

It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

En utmärkt hypotes för "Human Interface Design", användargränssnittsdesign, av Tantek Çelik. I korthet handlar det om att ett användargränssnitt blir bättre om det är enklare, färre klick för att genomföra en uppgift, färre textfält att fylla i och om det

En artikel om nackdelarna med frames.