Have you ever tried to understand how IE8 behaves when searching? As a non-IE user I am used to going to the top right box, type a word and receive instantly the page with the search results. I work mostly with Mozilla and sometimes with Opera and Chrome (when I’m in a hurry and I need a page to load fast, I admit). So for me, as a user, the entire search process is transparent. I don’t even pay much attention to what search engine each of them uses. I know they are going to return some results and I’m always in a hurry.

I was writing the other day about the importancy of the H1 heading and the necessity to use quality headings and content.

I started to search for big-names-earning-money-from-good-websites in order to find good examples of smart headings in their index pages. In case anyone would ask: “Ok smart….girl, show me a million dollar website if your’re so….” I would definitely say: “Look at Amazon or HP or BMW you…..” They have the money to buy web experts in case they don’t have an in-house department. They shoud know better than anyone how important is to have a good website.

But I can’t. Amazon, HP and BMW all have something in common. They all start their index page with a H2. Well it’s not the end of the world. Their pages still look good and at least they don’t say “welcome”

I’m seeing a lot of websites lately that open their homepage with a big “Welcome” title. The beauty of this title is that usually somebody decides it is so important that it also deserves to be a H1 heading.

From the marketing-girl’s perspective – or the PR-guy if you want – probably welcoming your visitors with such a nice and polite heading is the good thing to do. And when a programmer like me decides your welcome does not worth the H1 and lowers its importancy to H3 (because I’m not allowed to delete it completely) then the war inside the company is about to begin.

And at least once a day somebody wants a pixel-perfect website. I’m sure you guys and girls working with designers have heard in the past few months: “Look, I’ve Installed Pixel Perfect addon for Mozilla and the website I designed and the website you coded are not identical”.

I’m wondering what people want. It’s a mistake thinking that what we want is what everybody wants. The user’s needs are not the designer’s need of a good looking website or the developer’s need of a fast loading, functional website. What do the people with the IDEA and the money to build a website want from the company making the website? Do they know what they need?

Being a lazy person, I always wanted to have a translate feature in my broswer so I won’t have to google-translate everything. When it finally was included in the Chrome browser I discovered that at first it was annoying and that the Options button in the right is not the best choice they could have made from the usability point of view.

Sometimes…

I develop websites for foreign clients. At first I am not interested in reading their website cause I just want to take a look at the layout, at the menu, at the images and to asses the general look and feel of the website. So I browse the website and with every new page I check the same message pops-up.

Anyone thinks the language redirect that some companies provide is simply annoying sometimes?

Take for example the three IT giants that probably did some usability testing involving the language redirect.

Google.com

knows even better than I do that I want to go on Google.es and that I want it to search in the Spanish pages.

We made an usability case study for Kroppr.