I did some very informal user testing on an image gallery I’m putting together.

Further to Jonathan Christopher’s post on the problems with Lightbox, I’ve been trying to come up with as usable a solution as possible. I found that testing on three more non–technical users backed up my original findings, namely:

• I added some explanatory text above the thumbnail gallery
• I added a hover state to the thumbnail links (these two features help overcome the biggest problem I observed, namely: What do I do with these thumbnail images?)
• I used a Lightbox variation that displayed pagination links by default

It’s edifying that something as simple as adding a line of text to a page can increase its usability so much.

My only remaining problem is choosing which image viewer to use. Highslide is better in that displays links to next and previous gallery images by default; Lightbox, on the other hand, doesn’t. Users have to hover over the image before it displays next and previous links.

Unfortunately, Highslide doesn’t play nicely with IE6. For some reason, it displays three navigation toolbars.

As a depressing 35% of the site’s visitors use IE6 I’ve decided to go with Lightbox. Not ideal but the best current solution.

Oh, and here’s the site in question: NCSW 2009.