Web Bloopers: How to Avoid Web Design Mistakes

A Professional Development Seminar

Date: Saturday, May 21, 2005
Time: 8:00am to 4:30pm
Location: Microsoft Technology Center, 1065 La Avenida, Mountain View, CA

Overview
This tutorial is based on the presenter's book: Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003). The book explains how to avoid common Web design errors, illustrated with examples from actual websites. The tutorial, like the book, organizes bloopers into categories: Content, Task-Support, Navigation, Form, Search, Text & Writing, Link Presentation, and Graphic and Layout. It includes class exercises in which participants review actual websites looking for bloopers and discuss how to improve them. The tutorial is intended for Web designers and developers, mainly those who lack several years of experience designing and evaluating websites and Web applications. Others who might benefit from this tutorial are web Q/A engineers, usability testers, and web development managers. After completing this full-day tutorial, participants will:

The Speaker
Jeff Johnson is President and Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, Inc., a product usability consulting firm that offers UI design, usability reviews, usability testing, and training. He has worked in the field of Human-Computer Interaction since 1978. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, he worked as a user-interface designer and implementer, engineer manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and Sun Microsystems. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in Human-Computer Interaction and the impact of technology on society. He frequently gives talks and tutorials at conferences and companies on usability and user-interface design. He is the author of GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Dos for Software Developers and Web Designers (2000), and Web Bloopers: 60 Common Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (2003). Among other consulting projects, he assisted in the design and evaluation of a web-based system for reporting voting problems and irregularities.