The Law Firm Intranet

It looks like I skipped posting the Bad Usability Calendar last year. I’m not sure how I missed it, it’s one of the most interesting ways to demonstrate easy ways to avoid bad usability. Developed by Netlife Research, a user experience consultancy firm based in Oslo, Norway, the calendar is in the 6th year of publication and available in 16 languages. The 2010 calendar included a blog post each month that focused on the usability issue of that month. They included:

• January: You only know 10 percent of your website. Take control.
• February: Users are seldom as loyal as you think. Check your statistics!
• March: Go through the top 100 searches in your log. Make sure they all give good results.
• April: Add calls-to-action to all relevant pages. Start with the 5 top important pages.
• May: Do you need all the menus? Put more navigation in the content field.
• June: Link names should be meaningful. Remove “Read more”-links.
• July: Don’t let news get in the way of what the users want. Cut news.
• August: The most important first. Use the reverse pyramid and rewrite your texts.
• September: Put your website on a diet. You can cut 50–90%.
• October: The job starts once you have launched. Iterate to increase the quality.
• November: Test your website on at least 5 users. They will find errors you have overlooked.
• December: If you’ve done it all right you can add a little extra to you website.

Make sure you click on the links on the calendar, they take you to some very funny videos, blog posts, etc. You can download the calendar and print on 8 1/2 x 10 or purchase for $17 USD.