Many people continue to find the site difficult to use. So based on one member’s advice (with which the site’s designer concurred) I read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, a classic in the website usability genre. It’s a quick read, and I picked up some useful tips. I’ve spent the last couple of days improving the organization of the site and the layout of various pages. What do you think?

A partial list of the changes:

• Navigation bar redesigned to make the buttons more obvious and more like tabs (which Krug loves)
• Log in moved to navigation bar
• RSS button moved to “What’s new?” section
• Initial page for the Fuel Economy Survey and that for viewing its results combined; this way the button in navigation bar leads to both; also reduces number of links on home page
• Same for the Repair History Survey
• Link back to home page added to last page of these surveys
• Links to Vehicle Reliability Survey results and Repair History Survey now at top of sidebar on the main reliability page
• Changed “Sign in” to “Log in,” as the latter is more commonly used and the former can be confused with signing up for the panel (my wife suggested this one)
• “Think Piece” editorials lost button in navigation bar; they can now be reached through a prominent link in the Blog sidebar
• When logged in, clicking on the “Blog” will open a new window; I haven’t figured out how to integrate the blog log in with the site log in, and opening a new window will prevent you from inadvertently signing out (older change, but worth noting)

There will be further changes, but hopefully this is a helpful start.