Website Usability

For a Web site to be usable, it must be convenient and practical for its intended audience. The content, images, navigation, and placement of these elements need to match what the visitor is expecting. Visitors can easily become frustrated and quickly go to another Web site.

Designing Your Web Pages

We really don’t read Web pages – we scan them. When was the last time you read everything on a Web page? Most visitors scan a Web page, looking for specific words or phrases. When they find an item that matches, they try to click that object to get more information. If it isn’t what they want, the visitors simply click the back button and look for something else. The concept of scanning Web pages is similar to how we "read" a newspaper – quickly scanning titles, reading a few lines here and there.

Here are five important things you can do to make sure your visitors see and understand as much as possible about your Web pages:

Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page.

Take advantage of conventions.

Break pages up into clearly defined areas.

Make it obvious what’s clickable.

Minimize noise.

Evaluating Your Web Site

How do you know your Web pages are easy-to-use and match your users’ expectations? Evaluate them! This sounds easy, but even many veteran Web designers forget to properly evaluate their Web sites. You can have a colleague or friend help with the evaluation process.

Determining which criteria to use in your evaluation can be a cumbersome task. Fortunately, there are many free sites on the Web that contain a list of criteria on which to review your Web site. Don’t forget to evaluate the sites you link to from your Web pages. Here are a couple of excellent resources that can assist you in evaluating your Web site:

Checklist for rating Web sites - http://www.cyberbee.com/design.pdf

Criteria for evaluating Web pages (good for reviewing resources linked from your Web pages) http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/webcrit.html

EXERCISE 1 Evaluating Web Sites

Using the WWW Cyberguide Ratings for Web Site Design, help your group evaluate a site from the list below of sample Web sites.

  1. The Daily Sucker site linked from http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com. Click the link to the company’s site from The Daily Sucker Web page.
  2. The Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov
  3. The Department of Accountancy at The University of Notre Dame at http://www.nd.edu/~acctdept

Web Resources

Checklist for rating Web sites

http://www.cyberbee.com/design.pdf

Criteria for evaluating Web pages

http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/webcrit.html

Review of good and bad Web design

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com

Web design style

http://www.webstyleguide.com