Designing Web Usability
“Designing Web Usability” by the Usability Guru, Jakob Neilsen.
A few points worth remembering…
Screen real estate is precious…use it effectively.
the navigation bar is not the focus…don’t let it proclaim its presence too loudly and prominently that it robs the spotlight from the actual content
Tufte’s Visual display of Quantitative information:
‘data ink’- part of the graphic that is necessary to represent the numbers
‘chart junk’ the embellishments for pure decoration
Installation inertia
Users continue using their old browsers, even though a new one has hit the market. the rule “if ain’t broke don’t fix it”
Response time:
Don’t let the users wait for more than 10 seconds to dowload a page, as otherwise you’re sure to lose your audience. (10 seconds is about the limit to keep the user’s attention focussed on the dialogue)
The physiologoy of Blue:
Blue text is harder to read than text in other colors such as black or red(assuming black backgrounds) because the human eye has fewer receptors for blue wavelengths.
Fonts:
Avoid using too many fonts…as it might end up looking like a ransom note
Do not set absolute font sizes
Frames are best when avoided!
Writing for the web:
- Be succint
- Write for scannability
- Split long information into multiple pages
79% of the users scan a page than read
Reading from computer screen is tiring and about 25 percent slower than reading from paper.
Error messages:
don’t bombard the user with the technical jargon, try to write them in user-centric language and do not expose the system’s dirty laundry.
Legibility:
Black text against a white background (positive text) has good legibility and so does white text on a black background (negative text),although the negative text slows the reading a bit.
Worst color schemes are Pink text against a Green background. Too little contrast and impossible to read for red-green color blind users.
Avoid using ALL CAPS. It reduces the reading speed by 10 percent. Also it is harder for the eye to recognize the shape of the words.
Users hit the skip button the moment the Splash screen appears.
Navigation system:
Where am I?
Where have I been?
Where can I go?
3 types of hyperlinks:
Embedded links :The traditional underlined text
Structural links: Links that refer to the other levels of the site
Associative links: Links that point to pages on related topic
Design Darwinism:
Best designs survive and the bad ones will decline as users will abandon poorly designed websites.
Reducing Navigation Clutter:
Aggregation: showing one unit that represents a collection of smaller ones
Summarization: abstracts to represent full documents
Filtering: eliminate entire wads of stuff we don’t care about
Example-based representations: use representative example instead of showing everything
Metcalfe’s law:
The Internet is a networking technology and the impact of networks grows by approximately the square of the size of the network because that’s the number of possible interconnections and thus the possible uses of the network.
Different media different strengths:
Televison is about characters
Movies are about stories
Theater is about ideas
HOME RUN
- High Quality content
- Often Updated
- Minimal download time
- Ease of Use
- Relevant to the user’s needs
- Unique to the online media
- Net-centric corporate culture
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credits: Designing Web Usability