Good Usability

Good Usability

Take-with-a-grain-of-salt warning: Bear in mind that my own website does not currently follow all of these examples, but most of them are worth following if you can.

•       Allow users to control their experience.

•       Do not place excessive text inside images.

•       Keep a consistent site design.

•       Have clear navigation.

•       Use alternative text tags with images.

•       Use standards where applicable.

•       Keep file sizes small.

•       Have search or a link to site-level search on every page. On smaller sites (where site search may typically leave visitors empty-handed), a link to a sitemap will work better than a link to site-level search.

Some large brands, like Amazon.com, may not follow some important usability guidelines, but they have the scale, brand and customer loyalty necessary to get away with making changes that offered poorer usability than some of their previous designs.

Allow the User to Control Their Experience

While creating text elements, it is important to remember various people and the means they will use to view your site. Some people are looking at the web through a phone; some can hardly see; some have text read to them.

When specifying the text size or pallet size, it is best to use relative, not exact, values. If you set the text at eight pixels and a guy has large text turned on, he will see your site at eight pixels (which can be hard to see on larger monitors, especially to a blind guy). He will not see your site.

Setting the page width to 800 pixels might make a PDA user immediately switch to another site. Setting width using percentages or keeping the page narrow makes the content accessible on more devices. However, there is an exception to the rule. If the bulk of your income comes from ads, or controlling the exact layout is crucial to earnings, then you may want to use a fixed width design to better control the ad integration into the site.

When you design for different types of users, you not only avoid offending these people, but you also are given extra consideration since you are one of the few who addressed their needs.

Placing text in an image is typically a bad idea since it may appear illegible (or overly large) when the user sees the page on a platform different than the one on which it was designed. Think of search engines as visitors with exceptionally poor vision— they cannot read the text in images.