Thursday, May 19, 2005

Top 10 Web Design Tips

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. brings us the "Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design."

Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 77 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.
A reproduction of Dr. Nielsen's list appears below without his nice explanations. Reading his explanations is highly recommended. Avoid these mistakes:
  1. Bad Search
    Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms.
  2. PDF Files for Online Reading
  3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
  4. Non-Scannable Text
    Write for online, not print
  5. Fixed Font Size
  6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
  7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement - ie. if you make your content look like an ad it will be ignored
  8. Violating Design Conventions
    users spend most of their time on other websites
    (one of my personal favorites) ergo, user expectations of your website are based upon other websites
  9. Opening New Browser Windows
  10. Not Answering Users' Questions

Dr. Neilsen has created a great list. As a webdesigner I enjoy having these reminders. It is easy to form habits, good and bad, and reviewing the reasons behind what others view as good and bad help to steer us from bad choices.

I would like to add to number ten something I always say to my clients. "People come to the Internet for three things.

  1. Information
  2. Utility
  3. Entertainment
And they come in that order. Design must remember this order. Potential customers frequently turn to the Internet before the Yellow Pages so contact information should be prominently displayed or easy to find. Examples of utility might include the ability to purchase products or schedule a flight online. Entertainment might include games."

As designers we must put ourselves into the shoes of the user. We must understand how the user could perceive our design and make corrections for these perceptions. Ideally, as we design software we should enlist potential end-users for usability testing.

djuggler's personal blog is Reality Me and consults as Superior Internet Designs.


Posted by: djuggler | 8:00 AM |