WEBSITE USABILITY

There is more to designing a good website than slick graphics, spinning logos, and interesting (or, conversely, annoying) sound effects. In fact, those things are often distractions from the real purpose of a website.

Usability is an important and often overlooked factor in website design. If a business website is not usable, the site will not be in business for very long. Customers have to be able to find what they are looking for on your site, and they want to find it with a minimum of fuss, distraction, and difficulty.

Customers are impatient, among other things. Make your site usable, or your intended customers will leave.

What Is Usability? In the broadest sense, usability is the extent to which a website, system, or product can be used, effectively and easily, by human beings as they work on tasks. People—the actual users of products or systems—are the beginning, middle, and end of usability efforts.

In a narrower sense, usability as it relates to the Internet in general (and websites in particular) can be assessed with five key questions.

← • Learnability: Is the site easy enough to learn that the user can begin accomplishing tasks after a short time? ← • Efficiency: Once a user has learned to use the site, can it help him or her accomplish tasks quickly and easily? ← • Memorability: Are features of the site easy enough to remember that users who have left the site can come back to it without having to waste time relearning? ← • Errors: Does the website have a low error rate—one low enough so that users make few errors while using it, and those few errors can be easily recovered from? ← • Satisfaction: Is the website pleasant enough to use that users report a satisfying experience after encountering it?

Why Is Usability Important? Web usability is about attracting visitors, converting as many visitors as possible into customers, and aiming to retain the long-term business of each customer.

On the web, it is all too easy for a potential customer to leave your site and go to one of your competitors'. In business terms, the switching costs (time, effort, and financial expense) of leaving your site and going to another site are negligible. For this reason alone, it is important for you to make sure that your site is easy, efficient, and pleasant for your customers to use.

In the early days of the web, hit counts and page visits were common measures of the success or failure of a site. Today, although it is still important to attract visitors and maintain a high level of traffic through your site, it is far more important to build relationships with visitors and to convert visitors into paying customers. A usable site can help boost your conversion rate (the percentage of your site's visitors who actually make a purchase).

Even the top business websites have a conversion rate that is around 8 percent. The conversion rates of most business websites are much lower, and even on top sites, more than 90 percent of visitors leave without purchasing.

Building site traffic is not generally the problem of web design: There is plenty of traffic. The problem most companies face is that most visitors are not becoming customers.

The key to conversion is making sure that your visitors have an experience that is as pleasant, efficient, and easy as possible. Only in this way can you work to ensure that your site will attract visitors, convert them into customers, and serve the long-term needs of both your customers and your business.

In the long run, it is better to retain the loyalty and repeat business of a core group of customers than it is to attract business from many one-time customers. In a perfect world, a successful website would convert all of its visitors into customers, and all of its one-time customers into long-term customers. Concentrating on site usability is the only way you can even The usability of your business website is the foundation of your business house. Build a strong foundation, and your house will stand. Neglect the foundation, and your house will collapse in the wind.

Usability Issues Follow these five basic steps to make sure the people who use your site have a pleasant and productive experience:

← • Find out who your users are. ← • Find out what your users want to do on your site. ← • Bring a representative group of users in to test your site, so that you can learn how well or how poorly your site performs when real users try to find information or make a purchase. ← • Redesign your site based on what you've learned from your users. ← • Repeat steps one through four on an ongoing basis.

Four very basic guidelines that underlie user-centered website design. These user traits all begin with an "I."

On the web, the customer is

← • in charge: In control of the transaction, resistant to high-pressure sales techniques ← • impatient: Absolutely unwilling to tolerate slow-loading graphics or deal with technical problems ← • insistent: Demanding a high level of service, often higher than in traditional retail situations ← • inconstant: Quick to switch to an alternative provider of products and

services

As true as these observations may be in the traditional retail world, they are truths raised to the level of commandments in the world of web-based commerce. A truly usable website is designed with the four I s in mind.

Strategic Research Websites are often poorly designed and of low quality. The causes for this can range from misunderstood user needs, to lack of innovation, to outdated technology. Many website problems, however, can be prevented through solid strategic research.

What is strategic research? Broken down into its component parts, strategic research comprises three basic elements:

← • Company research ← • Technology research ← • Competitor research

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Company Research First and foremost, it is crucial to research the company for which you are designing. You cannot create a strategic website without first understanding a company's objectives, budget, failures, and successes.

Understanding business objectives will provide you with insight as to what a company's website should require and what the website will need to support those web requirements. Building a website with a company's objectives in mind will help you support those objectives and, in turn, obtain the company's goals.

To define company business objectives, you should answer the following three questions:

← • What does your company do? ← • With what companies and consumers does your company do business? • How can you meet business objectives while making your customer central to your business processes? Successfully defining business objectives in terms of customer needs requires answers to several more questions: ← • What will the website do? (e.g., provide information, offer products and services) ← • For whom is the website intended? (e.g., individual customers, business customers, potential investors) ← • What kinds of features and functions will the site need to offer? (e.g., search capabilities, database integration, secure shopping areas) ← • How can the site be best designed to match the objectives of the

business to the objectives of its customers? (e.g., integrating business requirements, customer needs, and technical requirements)

A company that does not know its own strengths and weaknesses will not survive. A company's strengths define its sustainable advantages and differentiate it from competitors. Thus, you should view a company's weaknesses as opportunities for the company to reinvent itself to move its objectives and processes closer into alignment with its customers' needs.

Some companies use a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to measure strengths and identify weaknesses. With a SWOT analysis, companies contrast their internal strengths and weaknesses with the external opportunities and threats they may face. A SWOT analysis helps evaluate each of these elements to continually improve business practices and strategies.

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Technology Research In the current e-commerce environment, creating an innovative website using today's technology is no longer enough to stay competitive. New technology will often make its debut on the market before it is expected. When this happens, companies' websites often lose their competitive edge because they have not planned for the new technology. To be truly innovative, you must plan for future technology; by doing this, your company has a good chance of remaining competitive.

For example, many companies use new technology that allows them to customize their websites for their customers. Yet many companies that use this new technology haven't begun to consider technologies on the near horizon, such as hand-held wireless technology.

Wireless technology, which some companies have already adopted, may soon capture the majority of the market. If this happens, websites of companies that are unprepared for this shift in technology will be incompatible with other wireless devices. Only companies that offer these services will remain strategically viable.

The best way to stay abreast of new technology is through research and reading. Good sources include monthly and weekly science and technology magazines and journals.

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Competitor Research You must understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors to compete with them. When designing your website, you can gain customers by recognizing the strengths of competitors' websites. In doing so, however, you must remember to check for intellectual property rights. In addition, you should be sure to recognize weaknesses in other sites and offer services that other sites have overlooked.

Designers use two forms of competitor research: competitive analysis and comparative analysis. Both techniques will be discussed later in the course. Designers also seek out other resources for competitor research,

Competitive Analysis Competitive analysis is the process of using the experience and intelligence of your competition as an asset.

By testing and analyzing other sites, you can save the time and costs associated with several early rounds of prototyping. If you learn early from your competitors' mistakes and leverage their successes as you design your own site or interface, you'll be far more likely to create a site that is more attractive to your intended customers.

Why Do a Competitive Analysis?

Unless your company is the only one that serves a particular market, offers a particular service, or markets a particular type of site, then your company has competitors.

Your competitors, like your customers, are intelligent. Your competitors have generally put a great deal of thought and work into the design of their sites; why not benefit from that thought and work?

Testing or evaluating an existing site or interface is often more realistic than testing a prototype. Test users (including yourself, if you've had very little experience with or exposure to the object you're testing) can perform real tasks with competitors' sites, giving you the opportunity to see how well their functions and features support the tasks.

Competitive analysis allows you to see where your competitors' sites are strong and where they are weak. It also allows you to gather data on the tasks and goals of your own projected users.

Guidelines for initial site assessment You can form valuable first impressions of a site you're not already familiar with by attempting to perform a set of tasks on it yourself. You can also evaluate it according to sets of existing usability and design guidelines. It's important to already be familiar with a site before you attempt to observe other users trying to use it. You can (and should) structure your first explorations of a site around an awareness of usability guidelines.

What do you do with the results of a competitive analysis? Once you have evaluated how well the functions and features of your competitors' sites support tasks, you can then use this knowledge to shape your own design decisions. For instance, if a competing site uses oddly shaped icons or a navigational method that you as a user found confusing or unhelpful, you could avoid imitating those design features.

Of course, it's also important to know why users react positively or negatively to a site or feature. Perhaps, in the example above, the icons are simply too small or are conceptually unrelated to their functions. It may not be the shape or color of icons that is the problem; it may be their placement on the page, or any number of other things.

Your competitive analysis should arm you with both negative and positive information; in other words, you'll probably pick up ideas for things you'd like to see on your own site, and things you'd rather avoid. Both types of information are important outcomes of a thorough competitive analysis.

If your competitor has created a highly effective way of guiding users to the purchase pages, you might want to imitate that architecture and flow. By doing so, you'll already have identified a streamlined, effective way of driving users to the commercial area of your site.

Finally, in most cases you'll want to extend your competitive analysis and watch real users interact with your own site. Use what you learn about their strategies and frustrations to design features and functions that users want, that they find easy to learn and remember, and that allow them to be active while using your site.

What Is Comparative Analysis?

Comparative analysis involves a side-by-side comparison of two or more designs. This can be done as a variety of competitive analyses (with your competitors' websites) or as a form of in-house parallel design (in which you evaluate two or more design ideas).

If you perform a comparative analysis with competitors' websites, you can save a great deal of time and money that might otherwise have been spent creating multiple in-house designs. In this way, comparative analysis allows you to learn from the strengths and weaknesses of different design features that your competition has implemented.

Comparative analysis forces you to consider different solutions to design problems. It also encourages you to avoid designing a new website that looks, feels, and functions like websites previously created. Users want original sites that cater to their needs; if a website is unoriginal and unhelpful to users, they will go elsewhere.

Heuristic Evaluation Heuristic evaluation, developed in 1990 by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich, is expert evaluation of a site or software package using a set of clearly defined principles (known as "heuristics"). The goal of a heuristic

evaluation is to find usability problems at an early stage so that they can be resolved during the iterative design process.

Heuristic evaluation uses a relatively small number of evaluators who analyze a user interface and assess the interface's compliance with a predetermined set of usability principles.

Number of Evaluators Although a single evaluator can perform a heuristic evaluation, better results are obtained from a small group of evaluators. A single evaluator, no matter how skilled and diligent, is more likely to miss many of the usability problems in the interface being studied. There is no "magic" number of evaluators. However, on critical projects where usability problems could severely affect business, more evaluators should be used.

Although using multiple evaluators will increase the number of usability problems found during testing, each evaluator should work alone. If evaluators work together, the possibility of bias is introduced, and the independence of evaluator conclusions is compromised.

Multiple Passes Through the Interface Ideally, evaluators should pass through the interface several times. The first time through will allow the evaluator to get an understanding of a system as a whole, and further passes allow the evaluator to focus on specific usability issues and specific interface elements. The specific focus of the later passes can then be placed in the context of the overall view of the system obtained in the first pass.

Help How much help, if any, evaluators should be given depends largely on the intended use of the interface being evaluated. If the interface is being designed for a museum or video store display that visitors need to use once, quickly and easily, then no help should be available. If the interface is being designed for a system that requires specialized information, however (such as a website intended to provide real-time stock quotes), then some help may be necessary to ensure that evaluators can perform their task properly.

A good example of appropriate help is a user's task scenario—a list of real-world tasks that users will eventually expect to perform with the finished interface. If you are designing a website that provides real-time

← • Look up a stock symbol ← • Find the currency price for a stock ← • Find the history of a stock price for a specific company

Session Length Typically, heuristic evaluation sessions last no longer than one or two hours. Longer sessions may result in decreased focus and attention on the part of the evaluators. Professional and skilled as they are, even the most diligent evaluators can get bored. If more time is required—for especially intricate interfaces, or iterations with numerous design problems—then the evaluation should be split up into several short sessions, rather than one or two long sessions.

Collecting Results Evaluator results can be collected separately or collectively. The advantage of individual, written reports is that they serve as a formal account of each evaluator's interactions with the interface. The disadvantage of formal reports is the time it takes each evaluator to write them and the time it takes a third party to read them.

Another way to collect results is to have an observer keep notes on the activities and comments of each evaluator during each session. After observing the evaluators, this observer then organizes his or her notes and writes a single report. This method allows faster access to an overall picture of the evaluator results, but the possible drawback is the additional cost of having the observer present during each evaluation session.

Final Product The end product of a heuristic evaluation will be a comprehensive list of the usability problems found by the individual evaluators. This list indicates which specific heuristic each design problem is violating.

A heuristic evaluation is a quick and easy way to catch glaring errors. It facilitates the process of revision and redesign according to the principles violated by the current iteration.

Reading For more details about heuristic evaluation, read the following:

• Nielsen, Usability Engineering, chapter 5.

Design Process

Human-centered design is a wide field, encompassing many definitions that vary in their details. Although there is no single correct way to describe the process, one useful way

is to identify the three basic phases of design: research and planning, creation, and use. The use phase involves redesign, which requires designers to return to the beginning of the human-centered design process.

Designers do not create usable websites by simply inventing them. Well-designed, human-centered sites don't just happen. Designers must focus on human users from the beginning and involve users at each stage of the design process to ensure that they will be able to use, and will enjoy using, the final design. View the animation below for more details about human-centered design.

Research Before starting any website design, you must ask and answer two basic questions in the research phase:

← • For whom is the website being designed? ← • What will those users want to do on the website?

Another important aspect of the research phase involves looking at competing websites to get an idea of what works and what doesn't.

Who are the users? The human-centered design process starts by asking a fundamental question: Who will be using the website? User analysis, or trying to define the users, is the first and most important step of the human-centered design process. This kind of information can be gathered from a company's marketing department, by designing and administering questionnaires, and by conducting focus group interviews with potential users.

What do the users want? Once the "who" question has been answered and a target audience has been identified, the question, "What do the users want?" should be answered by inviting representative users to work with the design team. Such representative users participate in the design process primarily by answering questions such as the following:

← • What do you want the website to do? ← • What do you want to do on the website? ← • Where will you be using the website? (At work? At home? Elsewhere?) ← • What features of the website would you use most often?

Answers to these questions form the basis of user task analysis.

What should you do (or not do) based on competitors' sites? In human-centered web design, it is important to pay special attention to competing

websites, performing competitive and comparative analyses that teach the design team how users currently complete their tasks.

In this process, you will observe as users try to accomplish tasks with competing websites and pay close attention to the ways in which competing sites support users as they try to accomplish these tasks. After the observations, ask users questions such as "What methods have you found most and least successful in trying to accomplish your tasks and goals?"

Creation

Developing a new site: Prototyping After getting to know what users want and need from a site, and analyzing the ways in which competing websites support these wants and needs, the design team can start to decide how best to support users in a In the early stages, prototypes should be as simple as possible. Design ideas can be drawn on paper to illustrate different screen designs, ideas for information architecture (the organization of information), and visual treatments. As the process progresses, prototypes can advance, moving from paper to screen; they eventually can include enough features to test most or all of the design's features.

Involving users: Testing User testing can begin with early prototypes, but if it is not feasible to test early prototypes with users, then nonuser evaluation techniques (such as heuristic evaluation) should be used. With more advanced prototypes, user testing should not be skipped.

Test participants should be recruited from the previously identified target groups. These recruits will use the prototype to try to accomplish real tasks. The performance, responses, and observations of the test participants should be used to help designers decide what to change and what to keep in the current design. This iterative process of design, testing, and redesign continues until the prototypes meet the goals of users and the design team.

Use and Redesign

Releasing the website and beyond: The continuing process Once the prototype meets the goals of the users and the design team, the website is ready for a final build and an initial release for use by consumers out in the world. However, the human-centered process does not end there.

User feedback should be gathered continually, even after commercial release. Field tests can be performed to evaluate how well the website supports the goals and tasks of users in the everyday world.

Competitive and comparative analyses should be conducted periodically as business conditions change, new products and services are introduced, or new technologies are developed. Customer service personnel should also keep track of any problems reported by users.

Market research should also be done periodically to ensure that the website is still communicating with the right people. Users change over time; their needs, goals, and tasks also change. Keeping user profiles up-to-date and accurate is the basis of all other human-centered design efforts.

All of this information—users, tasks, competitors, changes in business or technology, and problems with the current website—is vital in helping designers know what needs to be updated, improved, or thoroughly redesigned in the next iteration of the website. People are the center of the design process. Who are websites designed for, if not for the people who will use them?

Human-Centered Design Principles: The Basics Human-centered design has one primary principle: products are designed for human beings, not the other way around. A website is not designed in a vacuum; rather, it is designed for use by actual people who have different capabilities, backgrounds, goals, and ways of achieving those goals.

This primary principle—human needs and capabilities are the center of the design process—can be broken down for business purposes into several subprinciples. For each of these subprinciples, the goal is the same: keep the users at the center of the design process.

Determine business goals Identify the market, intended users, and primary competition for the website being designed.

Know the users Get to know the characteristics, goals, and tasks of the intended users, and involve users at each stage of the design process if at all possible.

Competitive (and comparative) analysis Analyze the websites of competitors. How are they supporting the goals and tasks of users? Learn from their strengths and weaknesses.

Coordinate the site design Design the site so that everything users see and touch has a consistent look, feel, and function.

Test with users and iterate, iterate, iterate Gather user feedback early and often. Use prototypes at early, middle, and late stages in the process to obtain user feedback and guide design iterations.

Gather data from users throughout the life of the website Test the site with users on an ongoing basis, and use the data to guide

Aesthetic Issues Some of your design decisions will be primarily aesthetic, visual judgments: Does the site look good? Does it use company colors? Is it exciting, or soothing, or conservative, or progressive? Does it fit the company's image? Does it fit the product's image? Does the visual message of the site match the message you're trying to convey through text?

Graphic designers and visual communicators are always looking for new ways to present information on websites. As long as these specialists don't compromise the site's usability, they should feel free to create unique-looking sites with features that fit your product, service, or company image.

Aesthetic Good Deeds While being creative, every design should follow some general guidelines, and these grow out of Nielsen's Law of the Web User Experience:

Users spend most of their time on other sites. Thus, anything that is a convention and used on the majority of other sites will be burned into the users' brains and you can only deviate from it on pain of major usability problems.

Deviation from these standards causes confusion and reduces your site's usability. Some of these usability standards are described below.

Consistent look and feel If at all possible, the site designer should ensure that each page on your site looks like it

belongs with the other pages on your site. Never jar users with huge shifts in the look and feel of your site; you'll make them wonder whether they've left your site entirely.

If your homepage, for example, uses a white background, black text, and blue links, you shouldn't design your product pages with a black background, red text, and yellow links. Not only does the latter scheme make the text hard to read, it also breaks the user expectations established by your homepage and by most other business web pages.

Consistent logo placement As the web developed, certain design decisions that were initially arbitrary became standards. The placement of logos on a page is one of these design decisions. To make your site as easy as possible for your customers to use, you should place your company's logo in the upper left corner of each page on your site. Any other placement is nonstandard and will tend to confuse your users.

Users need to remember they are on your site, not one of the millions of other sites on the web.

Attractive but optimized graphics Graphical elements can add visual interest to your site, help show off products, or illustrate the services your business offers. Graphics that are too large or too slow to load, however, will result in frustrated users who decide to click the Back button and leave your site.

Make sure that graphics are optimized for the web. They should be small and cropped tightly to show relevant details—what might be referred to as "zooming in" or "tight focus." The graphic files should also be compressed enough that they do not take more than a second or two to load.

A good rule of thumb is that any page on your site should take no more than 15 seconds to load in its entirety—that is, all text, images, and other elements—on a 28.8 baud modem. This guideline corresponds to a page size of about 45 KB at typical analog modem speeds.

If you wish to provide larger, more detailed images than optimization will allow, use your optimized graphics to link to the larger images. Be sure to tell the users beforehand how large—in terms of file size—the uncompressed image is, so that they can make an informed choice about whether to view it or go on to something else. (You can do this with a caption below the thumbnail, or with a rollover.)

Aesthetic Mistakes Some aesthetic choices will enhance your site's appearance and build customer trust. Others, research has shown repeatedly, are more likely to cause annoyance and

frustration than to lead to increased sales. Be on the lookout for the following design elements: They reduce your site's usability.

Moving text and animated images Moving text and images attract attention. Normally, that would be a good thing. But on a business or information-driven website, such attention is not a good thing.

Screen elements that are constantly in motion are distracting. In general, you do not want the attention of your users to be drawn away from the information, products, and services they are looking for on your site.

Inconsistent use of visual elements A business website is a virtual storefront to the entire world. From the user's perspective, your website is your business.

What is the primary message you want to communicate to your customers? Once you have answered that question, you should enlist all design elements to communicate that same message across your entire website.

Your site's logo, graphics, color and layout choices, and typefaces all need to serve, enhance, and establish the image you want your customers to have of you. To that end, you also need to be consistent in your use of these elements. Inconsistent use of visual elements may confuse users or suggest to them that your site and your business are disorganized or unreliable. To that end

← • place the company logo in the same place on each page ← • keep typefaces uniform ← • place navigation bars or links in the same location throughout the site ← • maintain a consistent color scheme as the user moves from page to page

Content Issues Designers should also pay attention to a family of "good deeds" and mistakes that arise from the actual content of the site—the information, words, numbers, messages, and/or meaningful elements of a site.

Content Mistakes

Outdated, inappropriate, or incomplete content Information is the currency of your website. It's the reason people visit your site in the first place, and it's the reason they keep coming back.

If your site presents information that is out of date, users will have no reason to return.

If your site presents information that is unrelated to the products or services that your business offers, then you are wasting your users' time and, once again, they will have

no reason to return.

Paradoxically, however, presenting partial or incomplete information is in some ways worse than presenting outdated or unrelated information. Old information may still be useful in some way—archival or historical information has uses, which is why many sites keep archives of materials that are several years old. Missing information, however, is not only not useless, but a source of user annoyance.

If, for example, a manufacturer of DVD (digital video disk) players has a website, it would be appropriate to include user manuals somewhere in the site, because they are often lost. Even if the company's stakeholders did not consider such information to be critical for the site (especially when contrasted with other forms of content, like financial statements, human resources information, etc.), a significant portion of customers will come to the site seeking technical product information. To omit user manuals from a DVD manufacturer's site would be frustrating to those visitors who are looking for the code to unlock parental control or to reprogram their remotes.

User and task analysis can help site managers to plan appropriate content for the site, but above all, that content should be up-to-date, useful, and complete.

Long scrolling pages Although recent research has shown that user reluctance to scroll has diminished in recent years, long-standing research indicates that most web users tend to pay the most attention to the first information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up.

Writing specifically for the web is one way to handle users' propensity to focus most on the first text they see.

Long blocks of text Many studies have shown that the vast majority of web users do not read the same way on the web that they read printed material; instead, they tend to skim or scan text on the web, "hunting" for the information they really want. No matter how tempting it is to simply "repurpose" printed materials, these studies suggest that it's necessary to write your web content specifically with the reality of web reading in mind.

Orphan pages or out-of-context pages Web users want and need to know two things at all times:

← • Where am I now? ← • Where can I go from here?

To create a site that users can navigate easily, each page on your site should provide users with this information—preferably in the same place on every page. An "orphan" page is one that does not offer navigation back to previous pages. Out-of-context pages offer users no idea about where they are situated within a site. Both of these can easily cause confusion and frustration.

At minimum, each page should have a link to the homepage, because users may initially find your site through search engines or e-mailed links that take them deep into your site. You should equip such users with a quick and easy way to access your front page, no matter how they got to your site in the first place.

In addition to providing a link to the homepage, each page should also provide some indication of where the user is within your site. Breadcrumb trails are a good way to keep users oriented: Jakob Nielsen uses this method on his (http://www.useit.com/)

.

Moving pages to new URLs The web is a linking medium. When you move information on your site from one location to another, you disable the links that users have made to that information (in the form of browser bookmarks) and the links that other websites have made to your information.

Content Good Deeds

Provide meaningful content Content is supreme on the web. Your site's unique content is the most powerful tool you have to draw users to your site and your business. Getting web

users to visit a site once, however, is an entirely different matter than getting them to come back again and again.

Recently, it has been a popular strategy for companies to spend significant resources on advertising a website during high-profile televised sporting events. The hope is that tens or even hundreds of millions of people will see the ad for a company's website, then go to the site.

This strategy works. People do go, in large numbers, to the sites that have advertised in this manner. The important question, though, is how many of those one-time visitors ever come back? What reason does any website give users to come back?

Content that is interesting, useful, or otherwise appealing to users is the first, and possibly most important, thing your website should offer. Think about your company and its customers, and consider the following questions:

← • What do your users want to know? ← • What do your users want to do? ← • What do your users want to learn? ← • What do your users want to communicate with others about?

Use the answers to these questions as a guide to shaping the content your site provides.

Update your content often Many readers might not mind reading a Shakespeare play over and over again. However, your website isn't a Shakespeare play.

Unless your site continuously provides new information, new opportunities for user interactivity, or new products for purchase, why should users keep returning to it?

Some of the highest-traffic sites on the Internet—not counting search engines—are those that provide a steady stream of new information, opportunities for interaction, and products for purchase. Such sites—for example, eBay, ZDNet, CNET, the Weather Channel, and Amazon.com—regularly appear in the Media Metrix Top 50 ratings.

In an Internet world where switching costs are low, stale content will cause users to leave your site quickly. There are literally millions of other places to be on the Internet, and you can be sure that users will find them if you bore them with the same old thing they've seen on your site before.

Make your content relevant to your users

With the exception of portals, sites that attempt to be all things to all people are likely on their way to the trash heap. In other words, if your customers are interested in, say, wireless technology issues, then content Even within the general topic of wireless technology, your users will have different interests and concerns. You can and should provide content that covers the various subtopics your users are interested in—and be sure to arrange content in such a way that users can go directly to their areas of greatest interest.

Write your content competently The web is littered with misspellings, poor punctuation, questionable grammar, and tortuous sentences. Most customers may not care if you know whether a compound sentence should use a semicolon or a comma, but some of them will.

If you do not have a professional-level writer in house, then you should definitely contract with a writer on an as-needed basis.

It is imperative that your site's prose be grammatically correct and reasonably enjoyable to read. Sites with prose that contains misspellings, run-on sentences, incorrect punctuation, and inappropriate or inaccurate use of vocabulary appear unprofessional. Sites with prose that is just plain boring appear dead.

Also be aware that research has shown that users are exceedingly impatient with anything that seems like marketing lingo—the overblown, exclamation-point-ridden, hyped-up language style that has traditionally been used to sell things. Web users report that marketing lingo lowers their level of trust in a site, so make sure your writer practices rhetorical restraint.

Write for the web, not for print Research shows that web users scan text; they don't read it. Consequently, you shouldn't expect users to read long blocks of text or long scrolling pages. Although "repurposing" print is a big temptation, you Generating text for the web is a specialized skill, and you should be sure your copywriter is using best web-writing practices.

Navigational Issues If users can't find what they're looking for on your website, they'll leave. You can minimize this kind of customer attrition by paying attention to a set of common navigational "good deeds" and mistakes.

Navigational Good Deeds

Provide a search engine Nielsen's usability studies have found that more than half of all web users go straight to the search button on a site when they need to find information. If your site has more than 100 pages, then you should provide a search function. (It is a good idea to provide search even if your site has fewer than 100 pages.)

Design the navigation of your site around user expectations It is of utmost importance that you and your designers consider the needs, desires, and goals of your intended users. This information can help guide you in adopting the kind of content organization that will seem most intuitive to your users.

An effective method for finding out how to organize the content and navigational structure of your site is to have representative users contribute to the necessary decisions. This can be done with a technique called "card sorting" that involves using index cards and an empty flat surface, such as a table or desk.

On these cards, write descriptions of top-level categories—"Products," "Support," "About Us," and/or any others that are appropriate. On other index cards, write brief descriptions of the content of individual web pages. Ask users to decide where these cards should be placed. You may need to have duplicate page-description cards, because some users may want to place individual cards under more than one top-level category.

Use the information you gather from this technique to organize the content of your site in a way that seems natural to your users.

Use your logo as a link to your homepage Assume that users will often be reaching your site through pages other than your homepage. Users who reach your site via search engines or e-mailed links likely

bypass your homepage altogether. Turning your company's logo into a link to the homepage (except on the homepage itself, of course) allows users to navigate quickly and easily to the top level of your site.

Navigational Mistakes

Breaking the Back button The Back button on a web browser is the user's "life preserver" on the web. It enables users to quickly escape pages that are not useful, reorient themselves when they feel lost, and feel safe about going into unfamiliar territory, knowing that familiar ground is only a click away.

Disabling the Back button is a serious design mistake. It produces user hostility, not user loyalty.

Breaking the Back button by using scripts that immediately redirect a browser to the previous page catches users in a trap that seems inescapable.

Experienced users may know how to deal with this kind of trap by right-clicking on the Back button of newer browsers, but inexperienced users become bewildered. Such inexperienced users often resort to closing their browsers entirely to escape from the trap that a designer has set for them.

Other methods of disabling the Back button may be less immediately obnoxious, but they remain serious problems for users. Preventing web-page caching causes delays in accessing information, requiring a fresh request to the web server to resend information that should have been merely a click away for the user.

Opening new browser windows disables the Back button indirectly. Users may be confused by the fact that the new window's Back button is inoperable (because no previous page has been visited in that window).

Using frames Nielsen's First Law of Frames is "just say no."

A frames-based page is essentially an instruction page that tells your web browser to display two or more individual HTML pages in a particular layout on the screen. This causes problems in a number of areas.

← • Frames prevent easy bookmarking of pages, because current browsers bookmark the instructions page, not the individual HTML page that has the information the user wants. ← • Frames often force users to scroll horizontally, especially if the frames are defined as a rigid number of pixels that cannot be adjusted (pixels are discrete elements that form an image on a screen; they are often

used as an informal measure of screen width) rather than a percentage of screen width that adjusts to the size of a user's screen.

• Frames can be a helpful navigational tool if used by a skilled designer, but they should only be used with the utmost care.

Nonstandard link colors Link colors are a navigational concern and an aesthetic issue. In the early days of the web, link colors were standardized. Blue was the color for links that had not yet been followed, and purple was the color for links that had been followed. This is no longer entirely true.

Often, designers change standard link colors to achieve a unified aesthetic organization on sites for which blue and purple would be ugly or intrusive.

However, users are not as familiar with other color schemes. Using nonstandard link colors may confuse users about where they've already been and where they have yet to go. As with other poor design choices, this increases the likelihood that users will leave your site entirely.

Opening new browser windows Users can become confused and annoyed when they click on a link and it opens a completely new window. It can be difficult for the user to remember which window contains what information when a site opens new windows with links.

The Back button on the new window will not function, because there is no previously visited page to which the new window can return. Users can find this both troublesome and confusing.

A particularly obnoxious version of this problem is seen on sites that include a little snippet of code that causes numerous new windows to open when a user tries to leave by using the Back button or closing the browser. Use this technique only if you don't want users to never return to your site.

Technology Issues

il the majority of Internet users have broadband access and are web savvy enough to update their software as frequently as programmers, you should pay attention to some basic technology "good deeds" and mistakes to keep your site optimized for access through current technology.

Technology Good Deeds

Keep your pages small Minimize download times by keeping each page on your site as small as it can be while still getting the job done. Avoid using large images, long scrolling text pages, or pages organized within a single HTML table that cannot be displayed until all of the information is downloaded.

Current browsers do not display partial contents in an HTML table. Accordingly, small tables will "be visible" to the user before large tables will. If you use tables to organize the visual presentation of each page, use multiple small tables so your users will have something to look at while the rest of the page loads.

Keep the text on each page down to an eloquent and effective minimum. If you need to expand on ideas or concepts at length, use links to other pages on which you include expanded information. Let the users decide whether they want to access further information—do not simply assume that they will want it on the first page they read.

Design for older browsers Do not assume that your users will all be using the latest and most advanced web browsers. If a planned feature on your site demands capabilities that only the latest browsers support, then either cut that feature or provide an alternative for users who do not have cutting-edge browsers.

Keep it simple Do not demand that users download plug-in software to access critical site features. If you do, you are issuing users an open invitation to click on their Back buttons and go elsewhere. Allow users to access all of the

Technology Mistakes

Slow response times/long download times Too often, the World Wide Web turns into the "world wide wait." Make your website stand out by not making users wait for bloated graphics, embedded sound files, bandwidth-hogging animations, and other flashy, but information-poor objects to load.

According to Nielsen, 15 seconds is the maximum time users will wait on the web before they begin to grow impatient and lose interest.

As more users get on the web with each passing day, bandwidth is becoming increasingly limited. Keep this in mind as you decide what kinds of visual and textual information will be most important to your users and will most effectively communicate your messages.

Unnecessary use of the latest and greatest technology Unless your business is intimately involved with using or creating advanced web browser plug-in programs, three-dimensional modeling of visual space, or complex graphic design, it serves no purpose to cram your page full of the latest bandwidth-draining features.

The majority of your users are interested in information, products, or services. They are not likely to be interested enough in your artistic, but slow-loading, animations, graphics, or three-dimensional models to sit through them even once, much less multiple times. Unless these items serve a specific informational purpose, be extremely careful about using them.

Failing to design for differences in platform and screen resolution Your users come to you from all kinds of places. Likewise, they come to you using an increasing variety of hardware and software. Computer users will visit your site using PC or Macintosh hardware, using different operating-system software, and different web-browsing software. Web pages will look significantly different on a Macintosh running Netscape Navigator 3 than they will on a PC running Internet Explorer 5.

An increasing number of users will be coming to your site on handheld devices with small screens. It is important, therefore, not to design your pages using absolute definitions of page width. Instead, define the important visual and textual elements of your pages in terms of a percentage of whatever screen width any user may have. That way, the HTML page can adjust to the width of the user's screen, rather than forcing the user to adjust to the page.

Accessibility IssuesThe Internet is not exclusively in English. Moreover, many Internet users have imperfect vision, hearing, or motor skills. It is common human decency to consider and design for the needs of disabled and international users; it also makes good business sense to do so.

Currently, the needs of disabled and international users are often overlooked in website design. AS the Internet increasingly becomes an everyday part of life in the 21st century—and as websites become progressively more central to the efforts of businesses to communicate with their customers—the needs of these users must be taken into account.

Accessibility Good Deeds

Use text that can be resized The web is traveled by users with varying levels of eyesight. Not all of your users will be

able to read the tiny, yet stylish text many designers might favor.

Design your pages so that users can resize the text in whatever way they please. A truly user-centered design strives to put the user in control at every point. Giving users the ability to resize text so they can actually read it is one of the most basic good deeds you can perform.

Remember users with visual and hearing impairments Provide enough text content on each page so that users with visual impairments can take advantage of screen-reading technology to access the information on your site. For users with hearing impairments, be sure to provide text-based forms of any important information that is provided in audiovisual form elsewhere on your site. For instance, if your site features videos explaining product features, provide a transcript of the video so that all of your users can access the information.

Use the language of your users Your users are from different regions, different countries, and different cultures. If your site is attempting to do business with international customers, have the text content professionally translated into the various languages of those customers. It is critical to use translators who are fluent enough in these languages to understand the subtleties and idioms of each language.

Images may also need to be adjusted or removed depending on the cultural associations they have in various countries. For example, if a page is using a sports metaphor, a picture of a U.S.-style football may have little or no meaning for an audience that is more familiar with soccer.

Accessibility Mistakes

Using nonresizable text A large percentage of the users your website will attract are older than 40 years, and as people mature, their eyesight often begins to weaken. Using small text on a web page may present no problems for younger web users, but older users will often have a hard time reading the content you have provided.

The problems of small text are compounded when a designer decides to create web pages whose text cannot be made larger with the appropriate browser control. Creating and using small text that is illegible to an older audience is effectively telling older people to take their business elsewhere. They will—you can rely on it.

Lack of transcripts for audio material According to the National Women's Health Information Center (NWHIC), there are more than 28 million hearing-impaired people in the United States alone. This represents approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population. The NWHIC also provides an age-group breakdown for the hearing impaired population: approximately 30 to 35 percent of people between 65 and 75 years old suffer from some degree of hearing impairment, and more than 40 percent of those older than 75 live with serious hearing impairment.

Information that is presented exclusively through downloadable or streaming audio formats presents a significant problem for hearing-impaired web users. Audio files can be a valuable way of communicating with users, but designers should be extremely careful to provide transcripts of the audio information.

Overly colloquial or technical language Your users do not think the way your designers do. The internal vocabulary of your

company is quite likely not the vocabulary in which your users think and express themselves on a daily basis. Try to communicate with your users in a familiar language that they are comfortable with.

Remember also that the World Wide Web is exactly that—worldwide. Many of your users and customers may be from countries whose native language is different from your own. Ideally, you should hire professionals to translate both the textual and graphical content of your site into the languages and cultural conventions of the various countries in which you do business.

If you cannot afford to have your site professionally translated, then at the very least, make sure that the graphics and text of your site do not rely on culture-bound ideas, images, and expressions. Avoid slang, overly technical language, and the use of complex terms and sentence structures whose meanings could be communicated more simply.

Point-E Task 1 Overview: Animation Transcript

Point-E Task 1 Narrator: Andrea Keith, your predecessor at Point-E, had primary responsibility for the website. Based on feedback from both inside and outside the company, she recently contracted with XMPlary Design for a complete rebuild of the site.

Andrea left Point-E last month for a six-month family leave, but her notes and a memo were waiting for you on your desk when you joined the company.

Andrea: You're taking on a big task with our website project, I can tell you. Web design is much more complex than I'd ever imagined, and I thought you might benefit from my experience with that project so far.

If I can give you one piece of advice, it's this: Our site is only one of dozens that customers might choose to visit if they're looking for a handheld computer, and

so you should definitely start by comparing our site with our competitors'. The comparison process should give you a lot of good ideas about what works—and what doesn't—on each site. That kind of knowledge will give you a very strong basis for the rest of your decisions about our redesign. Good luck with this project—Magdalena's finally giving it the kind of attention it deserves, and I'm glad she's dedicating somebody to deal with these issues full-time!

Amazon.com's "Stickiness" One high-profile website, Amazon.com, was initially launched with one purpose in mind: to sell books through an e-commerce model. When Amazon established an early web presence, its primary purpose was simply to offer its customers the widest variety of books available via any sales channel.

Over time, however, Amazon has not only begun to sell other products, but the book portion of its site is now used for tasks that reach beyond its original mission:

• Amazon has become a frequently used resource for finding out which book titles are currently (or are not) in print. The "old" way of finding this information (searching Books in Print, either at a library or a bricks-and-mortar bookstore) has become an outdated way of determining a book's publication status. • Students in various disciplines frequently use the search function on Amazon to gather bibliographic information for research papers. • Collectors and book lovers go to the site to find out whether their collections of old books might contain a rarity. If they discover they own valuable editions, they can decide to sell their books at auction—either through Amazon itself or another auction site.

Although none of these new and originally unanticipated uses of Amazon.com directly contributes to selling books (the original purpose of the site), they do keep users returning to the site again and again—a condition known as a "stickiness."

Building a sticky site requires understanding users and their intentions when visiting a site.

Eventually, of course, Amazon hopes that the researchers, students, and auction buffs will use Amazon.com for its first purpose—to buy (or now, to sell) over its site. To reach this goal, it offers personalized recommendations (created from a database that tracks customers' previous purchases and the purchases of others) to offer customers books that they may never have known existed. Meanwhile, however, users keep returning to the site and develop positive feelings about it.

Often, it is just as important to build loyalty in a user—encouraging the user to return to the site often, even if the user does not purchase on each visit—as it is to convert every visitor into a sale.

Design Process: Example Preliminary timeline for designing and developing a website for Coddington Tea Company.

Task Name Duration Completed Coddington Project 97 days

Phase I: Product Research 35 days

User and task analyses 3 days

Create and test questionnaire

1 day

Revise questionnaire 1 day

Administer questionnaire 20 days

Collect and analyze results

7 days

Phase II: Product Creation 48 days

Competitive and comparative analyses

3 days

Parallel design (prototype creation)

5 days

Participatory design 1 day

Heuristic evaluation of prototypes

4 days

User tests of prototypes 5 days Design and testing of prototypes for continued iteration

30 days

Phase III: Product Use 14 days

Field testing new website under actual conditions of use

7 days

Outline plan for updates and next redesign

7 days

Usability: Exercise Some websites delight in cataloging horrible websites. The following is a well-known example:

• Vincent Flanders's Web Page (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/)

Visit one or more of the "bad" websites listed at this site, and see whether you can determine the site's purpose and the user needs it might be intended to address. What makes the site "bad"? What hinders it from accomplishing its purpose?

Usability: Info The following list of usability guidelines is adapted from Jakob Nielsen's published list of 10 usability heuristics. A heuristic is a useful rule of thumb—a general strategy for problem-solving that has worked in the past. In the context of web usability, heuristics are guidelines; they are not exhaustive or completely inclusive, but they do provide quick and efficient strategies for making judgments and solving many common usability problems.)

Make Location and Status Information Visible Make sure visitors know where they are and where they can go. On the web, users most want

and need to know two things:

← • Where am I? ← • Where can I go next?

Match the System to the Real World Web users will be coming to your site from different places, speaking and reading different languages, and expecting different things. It is a significant challenge to design a site that uses language familiar to the user and makes that information appear natural and logical at the same time. Try to avoid overly technical or colloquial language when writing for the web. Don't assume that all of your users will know what you know, think like you think, or even share the same vocabulary. Your content should support the widest possible audience—the real people who populate the "real world."

Design for User Control and Freedom There is rarely a good enough reason to disable basic browser functions in your design. These functions are there to give users control over their Internet experience and the freedom to tailor that experience to their own comfort level and expertise. A few common usability problems are directly related to this guideline.

← • The Back button is your user's most familiar method for "undoing" a navigational mistake. Disable the Back button, and you've removed user control. (This especially means that you shouldn't break the Back button by opening new windows, unless you're absolutely sure that your users won't want to return to the place from which they came). ← • Give users the freedom to customize the appearance of your site by, for example, letting them resize fonts on your pages. Sight-impaired users will appreciate this simple design decision. ← • Make certain that tables are coded in relative terms (a percentage of screen width) rather than in absolute terms (a fixed width—say, 800 pixels—based on an absolute system of measurement). • Make pages on your site easy to bookmark by keeping them in the same location, keeping consistent file names, and trying to avoid frames whenever possible. Do not assume that users are always going to be interested in your home page (or in your entire site, for that matter). Allow them to access information without having to jump through unnecessary hoops. ← • An important way to enable bookmarking is to avoid generating temporary URLs. If you frequently post new information to your site, be sure that you provide, and maintain, a permanent URL, even after the content is no longer current. This will allow you and your users to access archival information and to bookmark often-used articles, features, and information on your site. ← • Finally, provide a Home link on each page so that users can always get back to the top level of your site. Try also to minimize continually repeating animation, scrolling text, embedded sound files, and other active features that the user cannot turn off.

Apply Consistency and Common Standards Use consistent language and terminology and provide a consistent visual design, or look, on your site. This will ease the transition from page to page and allow users to feel comfortable as they move within your site. Pay special attention to consistency between link titles and page titles. A link that says "Usability Principles" should lead to a page with a title that is closely related to (or includes the words) "Usability Principles." Failure to be consistent can confuse users, who may think they've ended up in the wrong place when the destination page has a radically different title from the link that led them there.

Prevent Errors Website designers often use numerous forms (name and address information, credit card information, and so on) that need to be filled in by users. Typing information into these forms is a frequent cause of user error. You should design web forms, if possible, to prevent (or, more realistically, minimize) errors before users submit their information. Keep the following points in mind.

← • Enable "undo" in web forms. ← • Create forms that refuse to accept submissions that are incompletely or incorrectly filled out.

← • Try to put your users in such a position that it is impossible for them to make a serious mistake on your site.

Build for Recognition, Rather Than Recall This is closely related to consistency and standards. Users should be able to recognize where they are by looking at the current page (as opposed to having to remember where they are and how they got there). Each page should give users cues, both graphical and textual, that let them know where they are in relation to the rest of the site. Descriptive page titles, links, and page headers are valuable tools for letting users know where they are on your site.

Ensure Flexibility and Efficiency of Use If you can provide shortcuts for your users, by all means do so. Sites that use forms for shipping and billing addresses, for instance, should provide a quick way Amazon.com's "one-click" ordering process is a great application of this principle—the easier you can make your site to use, the more your business will enjoy the bottom-line benefits of a usable site.

Use Aesthetic and Minimalist Design Less is more on the web. Keep your design as simple as possible while still getting your information and message across to users, and do not provide so much information that users are overwhelmed with choices or details. Make rarely needed information accessible via logical links, so that the details are there when needed, but do not interfere with more relevant content. Another important consideration is how you write for the web. As a rule, people do not like to read long blocks of text on a computer screen, so in most cases, you shouldn't ask them to do so on your site.

Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors Users will make mistakes. Errors happen. Despite the best intentions and diligent efforts to prevent such unfortunate occurrences, people do not live in an error-free world. Those error messages that do inevitably appear on the user's screen should be as helpful as possible. Error messages should suggest a course of action or a solution to the problem that gave rise to the error. Error messages that communicate in cryptic language that most users do not understand (and should not be expected to understand) are annoying. (When was the last time you found a "Fatal Exception Error" message useful, for example?)

Search engines have become quite good at providing error messages that offer helpful information. If a search term appears to have been misspelled, for example, alternative spellings are often suggested. This gives users information about what they can do when something goes wrong, rather than merely reporting that something has gone wrong.

Provide Help and Documentation Many websites might not need a formal "Help" function, but such features as FAQs, e-mail, prominent links to customer support personnel, and phone contact information can provide users with the human contact they often need.

Where documentation is concerned, your site should provide specification lists for products you may be selling, and explanations of specialized terms your site may have to use because of its subject matter.

In short, make sure you provide any and all information your users need to complete tasks they want or need to complete on your site.

Usability: Info Following are typical usability issues along with suggestions.

Accessibility Issues

Good deeds Mistakes • Use text that can be resized • Use non-resizable text • Remember users with visual and hearing

• Don't include transcripts for audio material

impairments • Use colloquial, jargony, or technical • Use the language of your users language

Aesthetic Issues

Good deeds Mistakes ← • Generate a consistent look and feel • Use scrolling text and animated images ← • Follow consistent logo placement • Use visual elements inconsistently ← • Use attractive but optimized graphics

Content Issues Good deeds Mistakes • • • • •

Provide meaningful content Update your content often Make your content relevant to your users Write your content competently Write for the web, not for print

• • • •

Offer outdated, inappropriate, or incomplete content Present long, scrolling pages Use long blocks of uninterrupted, unbroken text Create orphan pages or out-of-context

• pages Move pages to new URLs

TECHNOLOGY ISSUES Mistakes

← • Clutter pages with many elements, resulting in slow response and

long download times ← • Use the latest and greatest technology ← • Fail to design for differences in platform and screen resolution

Navigation Issues Good deeds

← • Keep pages small ← • Design for older browsers ← • Keep it simple

Good Deeds • Provide a search function

Mistakes ← • Break the Back button ← • Use frames ← • Choose nonstandard link colors ← • Open new browser windows

← • Design the navigation of your site around user expectations ← • Use your logo as a link to your home page

Design Process: Info Designing a website is like designing a product. In fact, a website is a product, just as much as word-processing software packages are products. Both websites and word-processing programs need to satisfy the performance, preference, and needs of their users. Can you imagine willingly continuing to use a word processor that made it difficult—or downright impossible—to write letters, memos, or other documents? No. You would likely stop using the program as soon as you had the money or the time to buy one that enabled you to get your work done more easily.

The same holds true for a website. For example, if two websites are devoted to selling wireless phones and service plans—and one makes it more difficult than the other to quickly compare phone and service plan features—customers will likely rush to use the easier-to-use site.

If your product—your website—makes it difficult for customers to find information or make a purchase, they won't come back. Why should they? Life is too short, and it is too easy to switch to someone else's website, for customers to give your poorly designed site a second glance. The crucial difference between a website as a product and a word processor as a product lies in the area of cost to the customer: specifically, the costs of using the product and, if necessary, switching to a competing product. Word processors can be relatively expensive and inconvenient to obtain; thus, the switching costs are high. Websites are free, and they are as numerous as grains of sand on the seashore. The cost of switching from one site to another is a click of the mouse. Because it is easy to switch from one website to another, it is even more important to involve users in the design of a website than it is in the design of a word-processing program. Website users don't need to spend money or wait even for a minute to find another site. The entire web is

always just a click or two away.

If your site is dedicated to e-commerce, and your company is selling its products on the website, you should get used to thinking of your website as your first and most important product. It is the product that potential customers see first, before they see any of your other products. If the first product is designed in a way that confuses, annoys, frustrates, or otherwise displeases customers, they will never get around to your other products.

Content Issues: Info One simple truth should guide all writing for the web: Web users do not read on the web.

Instead, they scan text, picking out individual words and phrases and trying to find immediately relevant information. According to Nielsen's research, 79 percent of web users always scan a new page, while only 16 percent of users always read the text word for word as if they were reading a book or magazine article. Effective web pages use text that is quickly and easily scannable. Content providers should strive not to create long blocks of unbroken text. Instead, writers generating copy for the website should use • highlighted keywords • frequent and meaningful headings and subheadings • bulleted lists • one idea per paragraph • inverted-pyramid style • half the word count of print writing

Highlighted Keywords These words should reflect the primary content of the page. For instance, a page about the software compatibility of a particular product should highlight the names of the relevant software packages. This can be done using large header text, bold or otherwise highlighted text, and/or hypertext links. (You may wonder why this course does not follow the highlighted keyword convention: It's because an online educational environment is an application, not a web page, and user requirements are different. In the case of Ellis courses, students need to understand complex concepts. Highlighting only certain words might cause a student to miss equally important information.)

Meaningful Subheadings Subheadings should serve as both a meaningful preview of the content that follows them and as a quickly scannable outline for the entire document. Users should be able to form a reasonably accurate picture of the page's contents from reading only the page title, the main header, and the subheadings. Puns and clever turns of phrase may entertain you and your developers, but what use are they to your users?

Bulleted Lists

Lists can, and should, serve a purpose similar to that of subheadings. Lists ← • allow you to condense the main ideas expressed on your page ← • let you express them quickly in a scannable manner ← • are easy to see and read at a glance ← • will not cause a user to get stuck or lost, the way long blocks of text do

One Idea per Paragraph Ideally, the central idea of a paragraph should be expressed in the first line of the paragraph. Many web users read only first—and sometimes last—lines of paragraphs as they scan a page. Keep your paragraphs short, and get the ideas up front.

Inverted-Pyramid Style

Put your conclusion first. Don't take time to make an entire argument before you get to your main point. Users will never get there if you do.

Journalists have known this for years. Get to the point immediately, if not sooner. Use the linking capability of the web to keep your pages short and provide explanatory material on secondary pages.

Half the Word Count Remember that the majority of web users do not read big chunks of text. So why write big chunks of text?

Eliminate unnecessary boasts, descriptions, marketing jargon, subjective language, and overly long sentences. Write short, to-the-point sentences that use as few words as needed to give users the information you're conveying.

Usability: Video Transcript

Jakob Nielsen on the Role of a Website Project Manager One of the key things that the project manager for a website has to do is to keep in mind the actual user, the actual customer at the other end of the Internet who's coming to look at your company and only sees that web page, only sees that website, whereas, all the other people inside the company have all the extra information. And so understanding the special needs of the poor person coming from the outside, not knowing anything except what's on the page. Your goal is to make sure that the business goals are met, yes, but also, that the customer is satisfied, that they understand what they can do, that they find what they want to find. And that is what really creates success on the Internet. You're really the user's advocate in the company.

Usability: Video Transcript

Jakob Nielsen on Usability Studies versus Demos I'll tell you the one way you cannot judge a website: by just getting a demo. Because when somebody gives a demonstration of a design, they're just showing it. They're not actually going to be using it. And, in fact, when you do a demo, you know how to demo over the weak spots. That's the science and art of giving a demo. And so, when you are receiving a demo from somebody, you cannot really judge whether it's a usable site—only whether it's glamorous or fancy, but not whether it's going to work in real life. So, refuse demos. Go and actually use the site and, even better, watch real users, real customers, as they use it. That's actually the ultimate.

Strategic Research: Video Transcript

Don Norman on the Product Research and Planning Phase A critical point in design is: It's less expensive to fix something when you catch it early than if you catch it late when the product is already finished. That's why we must do solid research in the early stages when it's not too late to change. Research and planning are critical. It often turns out that if you spend more time on the initial research and planning, you can take less time overall to complete the product, at less cost.

Design Process: Video Transcript

Don Norman on Human-Centered Design Process People develop websites all the time. Not everybody keeps the user in mind, quite often because the designers say, "Well, I'm a person. I'm designing for people. I'm designing for myself." Or sometimes the designers say, "I understand how people work. What's all this nonsense about human-centered design?" Well, you really don't know how people work unless you watch people. Even I learn a lot every time I watch people doing a task. I'm always surprised. In designing a website you really have to know why somebody comes, what they're looking for. And you have to design it around those goals. They have a wide variety of people coming, sometimes with a variety of goals, and that's your challenge. You have to fit every one of those, match every one of those. Study your users, understand what they are like, design for them. Not everybody does that.

Design Process: Video Transcript

Jakob Nielsen on the Importance of Having a Process You need to have a systematic approach to ensure human-centered design

because, otherwise, that user is going to be left out of the picture because they're not at the table when you have all your meetings. That, I think, is the real reason to have the process: to make sure that [there is] the systematic way to include that user data. Now, what is the process? I mean, there are so many steps, and some projects will use all the steps; some projects might use fewer steps. But all the steps basically get appropriate use of data for each and as you evolve the site—the different methods are useful at different stages—but they all aim at that one simple idea: make sure it works it with a real customer as opposed to just your own people, as opposed to the people who are sitting around the meeting table trying to make the discussions, trying to debate, "What might the customers want?" Well, get some customers. See what works.

Design Process: Video Transcript

Jakob Nielsen on the Importance of Development Process There are many different design processes around. The first one may be having no process and just, like, "doing it" without really planning specifically. That almost always leads to disaster.

Then, in the old days, there was a famous design process called "The Waterfall Model," which was based on the idea that you would write a specification document and you would get your customers to sign off on that saying: "Yes, this is what we want." Then, you would build that. Then you would send it off to quality assurance and they would say, "OK, let's fix the bugs." And then you would launch it, and it would go through these stages, just as a waterfall, just down, down, down, down. This process just does not work. Another method that's used a lot on the Internet is the "just throw it out there and see if it works approach," which is you kind of take your best guess at what would be a good site. You put it out on the web and if it works, you are successful and you score your many millions of dollars and you go home; or if it doesn't work, you've wasted your millions of dollars and you also go home but just poorer. And that is just such a bad idea.