Web page design

[Steve]

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Ten Good Deeds in Web Design

...Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox


When analyzing Web design, it is easy to identify a large number of
mistakes that reduce usability.

It is much harder to say what good things to do since I have never
seen a website that was truly stellar with respect to usability. The
best major site was probably amazon.com as of late 1998, but during
1999 Amazon declined in usability due to the strategy of blurring the
site's focus. 

Of course, articles that list 30 mistakes can be seen as constructive
criticism and a prescription for 30 things to do in a Web project:
design to avoid each of the mistakes! 

Here's a list of ten additional design elements that will increase
the usability of virtually all sites: 

1.  Place your name and logo on every page and make the logo a link
to the home page (except on the home page itself, where the logo
should not be a link: never have a link that points right back to
the current page). 

2.  Provide search if the site has more than 100 pages.

3.  Write straightforward and simple headlines and page titles that
clearly explain what the page is about and that will make sense when
read out-of-context in a search engine results listing. 

4.  Structure the page to facilitate scanning and help users ignore
large chunks of the page in a single glance: for example, use
grouping and subheadings to break a long list into several smaller
units. 

5.  Instead of cramming everything about a product or topic into a
single, infinite page, use hypertext to structure the content space
into a starting page that provides an overview and several secondary
pages that each focus on a specific topic. The goal is to allow
users to avoid wasting time on those subtopics that don't concern
them.

6.  Use product photos, but avoid cluttered and bloated product
family pages with lots of photos. Instead have a small photo on each
of the individual product pages and link the photo to one or more
bigger ones that show as much detail as users need. This varies
depending on type of product. Some products may even need zoomable
or rotatable photos, but reserve all such advanced features for the
secondary pages. The primary product page must be fast and should be
limited to a thumbnail shot. 

7.  Use relevance-enhanced image reduction when preparing small
photos and images: instead of simply resizing the original image to
a tiny and unreadable thumbnail, zoom in on the most relevant detail
and use a combination of cropping and resizing.

8.  Use link titles to provide users with a preview of where each
link will take them, before they have clicked on it. 

9.  Ensure that all important pages are accessible for users with
disabilities, especially blind users. 

10.  Do the same as everybody else: if most big websites do something
in a certain way, then follow along since users will expect things to
work the same on your site. Remember Jakob's Law of the Web User
Experience: users spend most of their time on other sites, so that's
where they form their expectations for how the Web works. 

Finally, always test your design with real users as a reality check.
People do things in odd and unexpected ways, so even the most
carefully planned project will learn from usability testing. 
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