I was thinking about this while navigating the spanish Dell online store. We all like Video, but doest it work allright in all terminals ?
I don’t think so. I use to like the Dell online store, in my opinion it’s one of the most engaging and innovative e-commerce sites online, but today I didn’t enjoyed so much the Dell experience. The reason ?
In the presentation product pages the big flash video and 3D animations made the hole store freeze making a very bad browsing experience.

The PC I’m using at home is not so old :
Intel Pentium III, 931 MHz, 384 MB RAM

This leaves me thinking:
How many people is using old and not so fast computers like this one?
How many of them choose to leave to another sites when this big Flash movies freeze all the computer ?
Is the “eye candy” experience worth the ride or it’s also reducing part of the online sales ?

Flash video and animations are great to show products if they are used with rationality. When using it improperly it just eats all CPU resources reducing the website usability and making a bad navigation experience.

All this rant made me remember the book Creating Killer Websites which advocated splash screens and other design atrocities. Soon it was proved that Killer Websites Killed Business ( And yes, I’m phrasing Jakob here )

My advice is:
Use video, but test it with slow computers, test it again with 10 windows open with less memory and make sure it streams well without freezing your browser navigation. Because this could be just the case of a potential client trying to purchase something at your online store.

Original article here

This was a post to translate the article to spanish with my personal touchs.

The importance of blue is relevant when defining CSS styles for link colors. As Jakob emphasizes:

Textual links should be colored and underlined to achieve the best perceived affordance of clickability (With a few exceptions)

He has an extense article about this but my personal opinion is that you need to recognize the clickable areas for a correct navigation.

In this blog I’m going to write about many facts related to Internet and Technology and one of them that is very important this days is Usability.
As Jakob Nielsen defines in his book Prioritizing Web Usability:

Usability is a quality attribute relating to how easy something is to use. It refers to how quickly people can learn to use something.

Working for the web usability is esential because if the user can’t use your interface he will leave your site or get frustrated. In this blog entry, I will talk about labels, that tiny piece of code that helps to reduce the amount of kilometers we do with our mouse in a daily basis.

As Garret says, I’m obsessed with usability and efficiency, and I’m totally convinced that “If it needs instructions, it doesn’t work.” And with forms the label tag that is either overlooked or not common knowledge. Unfortunately, there are still many major sites that don’t use this simple and powerful tag.
He enhances:

Labels not only improve accessibility, but they make the clickable area for radio buttons and checkboxes significantly larger thereby directly increasing usability. (For more on this, check out Fitt’s Law.)

Also, screen readers for the blind people will associate a label with its respective input tag, which of course is a good thing.

Definition of Labels
Defines a label to a control. If you click the text within the label element, it is supposed to toggle the control.

We can see them at work in the Google.co.uk website:
Search:

the web

pages from the UKThis would be like this without labels:
Search:
the web

pages from the UKYou can see that in the last example we need to focus right on the radio button to get it selected. Using labels we gain time and the user can click right over the text to make his choice.
HTML explanation<form name=”input” action=”">
<input type=”radio” name=”sex” id=”male” />
<label for=”male”>Male</label>
<br />
<input type=”radio” name=”sex” id=”female” />
<label for=”female”>Female</label>
</form>

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