Design Patterns - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

I read an interesting article on usability and user experience posted recently on this site by Tom Stewart, the Chair of the sub-committee of the International Standards Organisation (ISO), which is responsible for the revision of ISO 13407, the international standard for Human Centred Design.

We are in the process of redesigning our site for a new platform being developed for release later this year, and the aforementioned article got me thinking about the planning for the design of a website.

The study of the relationship between people and technology has been called a variety of names over the years - from computer ergonomics, human computer interaction and usability to, more recently, human-centred design and user experience.

A new survey finds that retailers in the UK still have a lot to learn about email marketing, with 46% failing to comply with legal guidelines and many others not following best practice.

TopShop, STA Travel, ASDA and M&S came off best in dotMailer's benchmark study (pdf), scoring over 80%, while Office, Expedia and H&M scored less than 60%.

An effective and easy to use navigation system is essential for any site and can be the difference between making a sale and losing a customer.

The navigation should be easy to find and use, and should work consistently across the site. Make users work too hard and you risk losing them to another, more usable rival.  

Here are some checkpoints for making your navigation more effective:

Shoppers using an e-commerce site have two main ways of finding the exact product or service they want – the navigation bar and the search box.

While many sites have great navigation, there are plenty whose search options return some pretty poor results. 

The Independent has completed a long overdue revamp of its website, placing more of an emphasis on multimedia content.

Businesses should beware of adding too many Web 2.0 features to their websites, and instead concentrate on getting the basics of user experience right.

This is the view of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who argues in his latest post that, while features like user reviews can benefit consumers, others can make sites overly complicated.

E-consultancy has just released its Travel Website Benchmarks Report - an interesting insight into the good and not so good practices being adopted by travel agencies, car rental firms, hotel aggregators and airlines on the web.

Compiled by Adam Goodvach of Global Reviews, it looks at ways travel sites are enabling users to search for and book products and services, while minimising abandonment rates.

We've listed some of its recommendations after the jump.... 

In the same way as more instruments don’t necessarily make a better tune or more words a better poem; when it comes to creating effective website pages, less is often more.