Practical Tips for Improving Web Site and Intranet Usability  

There's a large body of theory available to guide Web and intranet design, but concentrating too much on theory sometimes leads designers to overlook basic things they can do to improve the usability of sites. This article presents, in no particular order, seven simple ways to make your Web site or intranet more usable.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2003). Design>Web Design>Intranets>Usability

Praktisk Aestetik

Først og fremmest er der i relation til æstetik opstillet et ideal i form af princippet om helhed. Konsekvensen af dette princip skulle gerne tegne et portræt af et noget mere alment kendt teoretisk felt; Usability. Det vil herefter være kendetegnet for usability, at det kan afkodes som en bevægelse mod et højere ideal: princippet om helhed.

Quark, The (2002). (Danish) Design>Web Design>Usability

A Preliminary Report on Two Pilot Readability/Usability Studies  

Companies are beginning to conduct readability studies to determine how to provide customers with usable sites. Results have been inconclusive, conflicting, and often contradicting results of printed text studies. To discover how users use web sites, two pilot studies were designed to examine users, their purposes, and their reading processes. Many results parallel those of previous studies. In addition, new results indicate we need to examine several new variables, including amount of usage, site-specific knowledge, conventionalization, print bias, gender and age.

Boiarsky, Carolyn. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability

Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season

Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take five other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce

Public Relations on Websites: Increasing Usability

Compared with a similar 2001 study, a new study of journalists as they looked for information on corporate websites' PR areas showed significant usability improvements: a 5% higher success rate and 15% increased guidelines compliance. Why has guidelines compliance improved so much more than the success rate for actual task completion? Obviously there is more to usability than simply following the letter of a guideline. It's also necessary to follow its spirit, and company websites are still not sufficiently forthcoming: they often fail to use plain language that simply says what they're doing and gets to the point quickly.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Design>Web Design>Journalism>Usability

Putting a Face on B2B Websites

How do you lead your business-to-business clients down the right path without sacrificing every design, usability, and information design principle you’ve ever learned? And how do you make these websites engaging for users? Nancy Carl offers advice for creating successful B2B websites.

Carl, Nancy. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce

Quickness and Usability Keys to Successful Web Sites

Three clicks and that's it. Most Web site users allow only three clicks to be impressed with your product. Most people don't surf the Web; they have an agenda. In specialized fields such as banking, users will stay with sites that give them information quickly and pleasantly. The challenge is to produce a positive Web site experience the first time around. It boils down to one word: usability. Is your Web site user friendly? With 80% of current Web sites falling by the wayside, your home page must be easily accessible as well as eye-catching and informative. The imperatives are point, click and find the right department.

Schaffer, Eric M. TechWeb (2001). Design>Web Design>User Experience>Usability

RBC Royal Bank’s Online Banking Initiatives: Usable Design Now and in the Future

Discuss their initiative to make user-centered design a central part of RBC Royal Bank's Online Banking.

Schaffer, Eric M., Carolyn Burke and Nicole Poirer. Human Factors International (2006). Presentations>Usability>Web Design>E Commerce

Readability

Everyone benefits from clear, readable text content. People with visual impairments benefit particularly.

Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability>Typography

Reality Check

Many would-be e-businesses, seduced by the lure of the emerging 'virtual-world' on the web, have ignored 40 years of accumulated wisdom in how to design usable information systems, and have seemingly forgotten that a satisfying 'user experience' is key to the successful implementation of any information system.

Macefield, Ritchie. UIdesign (2004). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Usability

Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Design>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design

Reflections on Site Usability and the State of Flow

Although the general performance of commercial sites is poor at the moment, increasing awareness of Web-user behaviour and the importance of site usability will improve this situation.

Hudson, Roger. Usability.com.au (1998). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Removing the Ws from URLs

In September 1999, John Rhodes published Are You Creating a Path of Resistance? on WebWord. In the article, John discussed the problem with the Ws - the www prefix before domain names. John rightly recommended that all web sites should be set up to work the same with or without the Ws. In this article, however, I will go one step further and recommend that sites should be set up to work with or without the Ws, but also have the Ws automatically removed from the URL using a server-side technique I will henceforth refer to as 'removing the Ws'. I will detail why I feel this is a more appropriate solution and explain how this can be done.

Lash, Jeff. WebWord (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability

Report From a 1994 Web Usability Study

This reports summarizes results of a usability study of several Web sites I conducted in the beginning of December 1994. Users were observed as they browsed the Web sites of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Time Warner. The report has only been very lightly edited and thus represents my thinking about Web usability in 1994. In fact, the report was originally written for distribution to the rest of the Web team on paper since we were not heavy intranet users in 1994, despite having designed SunWeb a few months before this study.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1994). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Report on the Seminar Understanding Web Readers (and Non-Readers): Creating Usable and Effective Web Content

A report on a presentation by Ginny Redish where she discussed how research from linguistics, as well as cognitive psychology, reading studies, writing studies, and other disciplines could contribute to useful and usable Web sites.

McDaniel, Scott M. Usability Interface (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines

Resources in usable web design for publishing medical research.

Usability.gov. Design>Web Design>Usability

Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines: A Report

The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines were developed by the Communication Technologies Branch (CTB) of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Guidelines were developed to assist those involved in the creation of websites base their decisions on the current and best available evidence. The Guidelines are particularly relevant to the design of information-oriented sites, but can be applied across the wide spectrum of websites.

Usability.gov (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability

Response Time Still Matters

Slow response time remain an issue on the Web even for users with high-speed Internet connections.

Bohmann, Kristoffer. Bohmann Usability (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability

Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability

Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Typography

The Rise of the Subsite

Web users need structure to make sense of the many and varied information spaces they navigate. The fundamental nature of the Web does not support any structure beyond the individual page which is the only recognized unit of information. For information spaces that cannot easily be hierarchically structured, the subsite can be used as a helpful additional structuring mechanism. Subsites can also be used in hierarchical information spaces to give particular prominence to a certain level of the hierarchy which is used as the subsite designator.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design