37 Finest Practices for Admirable User-Centered Web-Design

37 Finest Practices for Admirable User-Centered Web-Design

These rules, suggestions, and definitions emphasize the importance of considering your target audience—the actual users of the site—when designing for the Web.

1.    Definition: Usability is the extent to which a site can be used by a specified group of users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

2.    Rule: There is no absolute description of what constitutes a usable site.

3.    Rule: Usability depends on the medium of consumption.

4.    Rule: Usability depends on the type of site, as well as the user’s familiarity with it.

5.    Rule: Usability and user satisfaction are directly related.

6.    Rule: Browsers don’t use sites, people do.

7.    Suggestion: There are no generic people. Always try to envision a real person visiting your site.

8.    Suggestion: Avoid using text, graphics, and backgrounds of similar hue.

9.    Suggestion: Avoid combining text, graphics, and backgrounds of similar saturation.

10. Rule: Keep contrast high. Avoid using text, graphics, and backgrounds of similar lightness.

11. Suggestion: Avoid using busy background tiles.

12. Rule: Make sure colors that are meant to distinguish items like links are significantly different in two ways, such as hue and lightness.

13. Rule: Users try to maximize gain and minimize work.

14. Rule: Recognition is easier than recall.

15. Rule: Do not make visited links the same style or color as unvisited ones.

16. Suggestion: Make pages that will be remembered visually different from the rest.

17. Suggestion: Limit groups of similar choices, such as links, to between five to nine items.

18. Suggestion: Aim for memorization of only three items or pages sequentially.

19. Rule: The amount of time a user will wait is proportional to the payoff.

20. Rule: When response times such as page loads take more than 30 seconds, try to provide your own feedback to the user, such as a load-time progress bar.

21. Suggestion: Make page elements obviously different if they are different.

22. Suggestion: Limit page noise, and segment page objects so that they don’t compete so much visually that users are unable to focus on what they are interested in.

23. Rule: Sensory adaptation does occur on the Web. If you want a user’s full attention, you’ll have to vary things significantly and often.

24. Rule: Try to optimize keyboard access for all pages in a site, not just form pages.

25. Rule: Minimize mouse travel distance between successive choices.

26. Rule: Minimize mouse travel between primary page hover locations and the browser’s Back button.

27. Rule: Make clickable regions large enough for users to move to them quickly and press them accurately.

28. Suggestion: Always remember that you need to bring a site into the user’s world, not the other way around.

29. Rule: Account for the characteristics of the probable environment in which the user will access a site.

30. Suggestion: Aim to create an adaptive Web site that meets the requirements of novices, intermediates, and advanced users.

31. Suggestion: Design for the intermediate user if an adaptive Web interface is not possible.

32. Rule: Users bring past experiences with the world, software, and the Web to your site. Make sure your site meets their expectations.

33. Rule: Do not stray from the common interface conventions established by heavily used sites.

34. Suggestion: Perform user testing early and often.

35. Suggestion: When performing even an informal usability test, avoid talking too much or guiding the user.

36. Suggestion: Do not use usability concerns as a way to avoid or eliminate visual, technological, or economic aspects of a site.

37. Suggestion: Practice “Las Vegas” Web design. Provide the user with a pleasant experience complete with perks and the illusion of unlimited choices, but control the situation strictly at all times.