| Usability and websites are sometimes mutually exclusive terms. You've no doubt seen pages that are difficult to navigate, outdated, slow, or just plain ugly. Not surprisingly, these sites were probably never seen by a software tester. A programmer or someone with little or no design experience (or maybe too much design experience) created the pages and uploaded them for the world to see without considering how usable they were. As described in Chapter 11, "Usability Testing," usability testing is a difficult process to define. What looks bad to you might look great to someone elsesome people think that Elvis on velvet is art. Fortunately, following and testing a few basic rules can help make websites more usable. Jakob Nielsen, www.useit.com, a respected expert on website design and usability, has performed extensive research on website usability. The following list is adapted from his Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design: Gratuitous Use of Bleeding-Edge Technology. Your website shouldn't try to attract users by bragging about its use of the latest Web technology. It may attract a few nerds, but mainstream users will care more about useful content and the site's ability to offer good customer service. Using the latest and greatest technology before it's even released is a sure way to discourage users; if their system crashes while visiting your site, you can bet that many of them won't be back. Unless you're in the business of selling Internet products or services, it's better to wait until some experience has been gained with the technology. When desktop publishing was young, people put 20 different fonts in their documents; try to avoid similar design bloat on the Web. Scrolling Text, Marquees, and Constantly Running Animations. Never allow page elements that move incessantly. Moving images have an overpowering effect on human peripheral vision. A web page shouldn't emulate Times Square in New York City in its constant attack on the human sensesgive your user some peace and quiet to actually read the text! Long Scrolling Pages. Users typically don't like to scroll beyond the information visible onscreen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Recent studies have shown that users are becoming more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web, but it's still a good idea to minimize scrolling on navigation pages. Non-Standard Link Colors. Hyperlinks to pages that users haven't seen should be blue; links to previously seen pages should be purple or red. Don't mess with these colors because the ability to understand which links have been followed is one of the few navigational aids that's standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean. Outdated Information. Your development team should have a web "gardener"someone to root out the weeds and replant the flowers as the website changes. Unfortunately, most teams would rather spend their time creating new content than doing maintenance. In practice, maintenance is a cheap way of enhancing the content on your website since many old pages keep their relevance and should be linked into the new pages. Of course, some pages are better off being removed completely from the server after their expiration date. Overly Long Download Times. Traditional human-factor guidelines indicate that 0.1 second is about the limit for users to feel that the system is reacting instantaneously. One second is about the limit for a user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted. Ten seconds is the maximum response time before a user loses interest. On the Web, users have been trained to endure so much suffering that it may be acceptable to increase this limit to 15 seconds for a few pages. But don't aim for thisaim for less. Lack of Navigation Support. Don't assume that users know as much about your site as you do. They will always have difficulty finding information, so they need support in the form of a strong sense of structure and place. Your site's design should start with a good understanding of the structure of the information space and communicate that structure explicitly to users. Provide a site map to let users know where they are and where they can go. The site should also have a good search feature because even the best navigation support will never be enough. Orphan Pages. Make sure that all pages include a clear indication of what website they belong to since users may access pages directly without coming in through your home page. For the same reason, every page should have a link to your home page as well as some indication of where they fit within the structure of your information space. Complex Website Addresses (URLs). Even though machine-level addressing like the URL should never have been exposed in the user interface, it's there and research has found that users actually try to decode the URLs of pages to infer the structure of websites. Users do this because of the lack of support for navigation (see above) and sense of location in current web browsers. Thus, a URL should contain human-readable names that reflect the nature of the website's contents. Also, because users often type in a URL, the website author should try to minimize the risk of typos by using short names with all lowercase characters and no special characters (many people don't know how to type a ~). Using Frames. Frames are an HTML technology that allows a web page to display another web page within itself, hence the name framelike a picture frame. Splitting a page into frames can confuse users since frames break the fundamental user model of the web page. All of a sudden they can't bookmark the current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of the frameset), URLs stop working, and printouts become difficult. Even worse, the predictability of user actions goes out the doorwho knows what information will appear where and when they click a link? Many website authors, to avoid problems, forego the use of frames and simply open another window.
If you're testing a website, take advantage of your tester's license to report bugs on usability. Read up on basic user interface design techniques and learn what makes for good usability. A good source of information is a Microsoft research document titled, "Improving Web Site Usability and Appeal." Its web address is msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/management/planning/improvingsiteusa.asp. This document provides a list of best practices that Microsoft discovered while designing content for its MSN websites. Don't be put off by the date, 1997, on the document. Good design is timeless. |
