Column: Good Questions

Here are my basic best practices for buttons:

1. Make buttons look like buttons.
2. Put buttons where users can find them.
3. Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one.
4. Put buttons in a sensible order.
5. Label buttons with what they do.
6. If users don’t want to do something, don’t have a button for it.
7. Make it harder to find destructive buttons.

Nothing particularly revolutionary there, right? Ever since the <button> tag arrived in HTML4, buttons haven’t been especially difficult to create. Despite this, it’s rather easy to find buttons that don’t comply with these basic best practices, so I’m going to dig into them a little deeper in this column. Read More

One of the nicest things about being an author is that, from time to time, people write to say they enjoyed our book, Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability. Of course, I write back and ask what they like about it. And surprisingly often, the reply is “question protocols.” Read More

If you’ve ever had your computer give you a readability score or a grade level for something you’ve written, you’ve run a readability formula. Readability formulas are easy to use and give you a number. This combination makes them seductive. But a number isn’t useful if it isn’t reliable, valid, or helpful.

In this article, we’ll explain how readability formulas work and give you seven reasons why you shouldn’t use them. We’ll also show you better ways to learn whether the people you want to reach can find, understand, and use your content. Read More