Yesterday popular self-improvement blog Zen Habits launched its first redesign. It’s a blog I read regularly and one I know many Skelliewag.org readers also enjoy. The redesign was crafted by one of my favorite blog designers and an all-around nice guy, Collis Ta’eed.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to do something I’ve been waiting to do for a while: a published simplicity review. A simplicity review is a web design review with an emphasis on simplicity and usability.

Rather than simply making recommendations, I want to show you how I approach simplicity reviews: the kinds of questions I ask and the things I look for.

The aim of this post isn’t just to give some suggestions and feedback to Collis, but to give you a toolbox you can use to evaluate the simplicity of the designs you create or customize.

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Readers only have so much attention to give, and this variable will expand and contract depending on factors you can’t control: whether they are rushed for time, whether they have had your site recommended to them or have simply stumbled across it, and so on.

Reader attention doesn’t expand depending on how much information your site communicates to them. More elements does not mean they will devote more attention to compensate.

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Photography: Hedge Maze by Ingorrr

In light of the positive feedback received for A Beginner’s Guide to Making Your Site More Usable, I’ve composed a 19 point checklist that should be useful to any blogger looking for a practical way to evaluate (and improve) the usability of their blog. Many of the principles here will apply to websites, as well.

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Photography: Azzuro by fabbio

This post is part of the Simple Web series. It’s best enjoyed in light of Part I (an introduction), Part II (how to grip readers), Part III (how to resonate with them), and Part IV (encouraging them to interact), but will make sense in its own right.

In this post I’ll be examining how we can create a site others will want to talk about. In the ‘Simple Web’ context, ‘talking’ refers to linking in, sharing with social media, and word of mouth. I’ll also be examining how you can do some of the work, and start to ‘talk’ about yourself elsewhere.

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Photography: Interacting with the art 3192 by vertigonoir

This post is part of the Simple Web series. It’s best enjoyed in light of Part I (an introduction), Part II (how to grip readers), and Part III (how to resonate with them), but will make sense in its own right.

In this post we’ll be looking at ways to encourage readers to interact with your site. I’ll be focusing on three key areas of interaction: subscribing to your feed, commenting, and exploring more deeply.

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