Best Practices & Usability Studies for Web Design

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Web Design: Best Practices, Website Usability

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Best Practices for Title Tags
Excerpt: Use the title of your site or brand at the beginning or end of every title tag to help searchers know where they're going and to increase return visits... If you're struggling to find justification for this component, think of all the ad studies showing that consumers are willing to pay more for a brand name product than an off-brand or store brand item of the same type - apply this logic to the SERPs and you'll find that users will go further down the rankings to click on a trusted brand...

Should Links Open In New Windows?
Excerpt: No, they shouldn’t. At first glance, the decision to open links in new windows or not depends on the given site and the preferences of its visitors. Visitors of the sites with heavy linking are more willing to have links opened in new windows than open dozens of links in new windows manually. Visitors of less-heavy-linkage-sites are more likely to open some specific link in new window to remain on the site and continue to browse through it afterwards. However, this is not true...

Progressive Enhancement: What It Is, And How To Use It?
Excerpt: Progressive Enhancement is a powerful methodology that allows Web developers to concentrate on building the best possible websites while balancing the issues inherent in those websites being accessed by multiple unknown user-agents. Progressive Enhancement (PE) is the principle of starting with a rock-solid foundation and then adding enhancements to it if you know certain visiting user-agents can handle the improved experience. PE differs from Graceful Degradation (GD) in that GD is the journey from complexity to simplicity, whereas PE is the journey from simplicity to complexity. PE is considered a better methodology than GD because it tends to cover a greater range of potential issues as a baseline. PE is the whitelist to GD’s blacklist...

Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and Best Practices
Excerpt: The horizontal navigation menu has become a mainstay in Web design. It is safe to say that nowadays most websites use some form of horizontal navigation to facilitate content browsing. The dominance of horizontal navigation over vertical navigation (i.e. down a sidebar) is obviously due to the design and content limitations of the latter. Notably, CNN discovered those limitations before switching from vertical to horizontal a few years back... There are, however, many styles of horizontal navigation in modern Web design. Some offer usability advantages for certain types of websites, while others are aesthetically better... In this article, we will focus on a variety of techniques and best practices to improve the usability of horizontal navigation bars, and we will note less effective styles. We’ll also look at several trends that developers can choose from when working on the navigation design for their next project...

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines
Excerpt: Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites...

Search Results Design: Best Practices and Design Patterns
Excerpt: The search results page is the prime focus of the search experience, and can make or break a site’s conversion rates... The responsibility to design an effective search results page is best considered after a thorough examination of some of the features and functions found on search results pages from a number of popular niches... In this article, we’ll look at a number of trends and practices incorporated on a variety of websites. From this examination, we’ll conclude with a summary of the best practices learned from the examples those sites have set...

Search Results Design: Best Practices and Design Patterns
Excerpt: Here’s a list of 15 valuable Usability Papers in PDF form that you might not have heard of, but should know and can use... I thought I’d list a few helpful papers I use from time to time when going about my usability work... They are all free, and are publicly available...

Online Marketing: 10 Usability Findings To Increase Sales And Customer Loyalty
Excerpt: If you are into wanting to learn and understand more about what you can do to further improve the impact of your online communication strategy while adding new useful components to it, the best thing to do may be to find the time to carefully study what some of your competitors have already done before you...

Usability.Edu: 25 Incredibly Useful Usability Cheat Sheets & Checklists
Excerpt: Is your Web site primed for any viewer? How do you know... The other side to usability is that it can increase your search engine standings so more people can find your Web site... The following list of cheat sheets and checklists are fairly recent; however, some older usability checklists are also useful for older sites that haven’t been upgraded. You can find cheat sheets and checklists for forms, blogs, and more here... in alphabetical order...

11 Striking Findings From an Eye Tracking Study
Excerpt: If you’ve got a spare 10 minutes today check out Eyetrack III who have published some great findings in their latest eye tracking studies of news and multimedia content sites (found via Direct Creative Blog)... There’s loads of juicy goodness in the full article but here are 11 of the main points that grabbed my attention...

Web Design: 15 Important Research Findings You Should Know
Excerpt: Small selection of web design, usability, and accessibility related results of research, most of them derived from Human Factors International (newsletter). Fortunately, some of them are relatively popular, while others will surely enrich professional self-conception... 1. Design is a key determinant to building online trust with consumers. For motivated users of an information site, bad design (busy layout, small print, too much text) hurts more than good design helps...

Web Design: 10 Additional Research Findings You Should Know
Excerpt: Following up on last year’s post on web design research, here’s a new collection of research results, this time featuring further reading as well... 1.It is important to establish trust with users from their very earliest experience with your site. This is particularly true in commerce, medical, and insurance, where the first impression of trust has a lasting effect. Also, a complex design can mean substantial differences in initial trust, contrary to a simple design...

Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guides
Excerpt: PDFs packed with study results: Chapter 1 – Design Process and Evaluation; Chapter 2 – Optimizing the User Experience; Chapter 3 – Accessibility; Chapter 4 – Hardware and Software; Chapter 5 – The Homepage; Chapter 6 – Page Layout; Chapter 7 – Navigation; Chapter 8 – Scrolling and Paging; Chapter 9 – Headings, Titles, and Labels; Chapter 10 – Links; Chapter 11 – Text Appearance; Chapter 12 – Lists; Chapter 13 – Screen–Based Controls (Widgets); Chapter 14 – Graphics, Images, and Multimedia; Chapter 15 – Writing Web Content; Chapter 16 – Content Organization; Chapter 17 – Search; Chapter 18 – Usability Testing...

Introduction to Good Usability
Excerpt: Why Read it? This guide is especially handy if you haven’t done a lot of webdesign yet or if you are involved in webdesign but don’t do any of the real work. I hope to shed some light on some common interface elements and mistakes people often make with them... Why Write it? The reason for writing is because many people (definitely myself included) make many mistakes when making their first website. A lot of books have been written in the past but the threshold for reading them, especially if you have never built a site, is quite big, hence this short guide. This is by no means a complete guide or solid set of rules, but it is definitely a good start...

Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study
Excerpt: Forms can be found on almost every website; from contact or feedback forms in small websites to bank details in commerce websites, from registration to communication, from banking to searching... we have designed and tested numerous new and existing forms for websites from different companies. We use a set of golden rules that we use as a reference for form design that we have developed over the past six years... We wanted to validate these rules and seek further insights into various aspects of web form design. This led us to carry out an eye-tracking study to observe how people react to different form designs, and to find out where users look when they are presented with a big list of text boxes... We also wanted to find out how we can optimise our layouts when designing a form, to ensure users understand what they have to fill in and ensure users focus on their primary task(s) when filling in a form...

Quick Website Usability Checklist
Excerpt: After reviewing websites for a few months, I’ve begun to see general patterns emerge that make a site more or less usable. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of the more common problems designers should address on their own sites in a Usability checklist of sorts... Not all of these items will apply to every website, these are just suggested things to look for in your own site design. Along the way I’ll share some sites that illustrate different items effectively...

Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and Best Practices

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Best Practices & Usability Studies for Web Design

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Web Design: Best Practices, Website Usability

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