Maybe you're asking for too much: Keep online forms as brief as possible

Whether it's because people always seem to be in a hurry on the Web, or because they're reluctant to give personal information when they think it might generate spam, it is generally true that the longer the web form you ask people to fill out, the fewer the people who will fill it out. Bob Johnson elaborates on this topic in his blog post Online inquiry forms... a special place for brevity.

Firefox 3.5: The World's Most Popular Browser

The good news here is that Firefox, an open source project, is gaining ground on the proprietary behemoth, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Why does that matter? Because the whole idea behind the World Wide Web was the creation of a platform that would allow the open exchange of information, regardless of the brand of the users' software. This open exchange of information relies on open standards developed by a large community of people without proprietary interests. Microsoft has often flouted open standards or twisted them to fit their own proprietary interests. Increasing market share from an open source project like Firefox applies pressure to Microsoft to keep its browser development in line with open standards. Read the article on Mashable.

How did Google beat Yahoo! in the Great Search Engine Race?

Gerry McGovern, a web marketing specialist often quoted here, thinks that Google beat Yahoo! in the competition for top search engine by focusing more on the needs of its users. Yahoo!, he argues, focused more on the needs of its advertisers.

See Gerry's newsletter "The real difference between Google and Yahoo."

How can we relate this focus to the TWU website?

For most TWU websites, the primary goal* is recruiting new students. To accomplish that goal, your department's website should focus on what potential students want to know or what they want to do when they come to your website. This may differ from what you want to tell them or what you want them to do when they come to your site. But if Gerry's right, we'll be more successful recruiting new students when we focus on what they want.

*not the only goal, but the most important one

Simpler is better

I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal, from a letter

Editing copy to make it shorter and easier to read, or designing web pages to make them simpler and easier to use are difficult tasks. It's one of the ironies of the human mind: making something complex is easier than making something simple. But simpler is nearly always better.

So I hope that Rosabeth Moss Kanter is right that simplicity is the next big thing.

How Users Read on the Web Redux

by Leen Jones

They DO.

I feel the need to say what should be the obvious. Why? Because recently, while catching up on my Twitter feed, the following statement smacked me like a gauntlet:

It’s a fact that users don’t read, and we have to design for it. *

I was too late to join the conversation, but the statement has concerned me ever since. In the user experience and design communities, has an assumption locked our thought about reading so tight that we refer to it as a “fact?”

Read the whole "How Users Read on the Web Redux" piece...

Does your organization suffer from organaritis?

Does your organization have organaritis? If you answer yes to one or more of the following questions you probably need to seek medical help:

• Do you have pictures of very important people within your organization (your needy children) on your webpages?
• Do these needy children require messages from them to be published prominently on the site?
• Do you have big pictures of smiling actors pretending to be customers? (Shiny, happy people.)

See more organaritis questions in the full article...

You're so not welcome

Just read a terrific little piece on doing away with "happy text" on websites. We all want to be polite and welcome visitors to our site, but the best way to do that is to build a better site, a site that gets to the point.

Read "You're so not welcome" on Brain Traffic's blog.