Category: Web Design

Happy New Year! Ahhhhh, yes. The time of year where we examine where we’re at and where we want to go… and the often lengthy bridge between the two. Instead of denying yourself second helpings and spending 4 hours at the gym, why don’t you consider making your resolutions website design related? Let yourself off the hook for the rest of your resolutions! You can thank me later.

All silliness aside, here are some design resolutions that will improve your website’s quality and ease of use. Each recommendation is based on research studies.

1. Improve your content.

• Users don’t read, they scan. Make it easily scannable by chunking information and using short paragraphs.
• Write in simple language and avoid technical jargon. Avoid cute terms and marketing lingo.
• Place important content on the left – this is the area your end users focus on.

2. Improve your visual design

•  It takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an aesthetic opinion of a website. A positive impression of order, novelty, beauty and creativity increases your user’s confidence in your website’s credibility and usability. Don’t trust your visual design to your neighbour’s teenaged nephew. Hire a professional to make sure it’s got visual appeal.
• Use plenty of white space – it has a significant impact on readability. Create visual clues based on groupings; related items or links are grouped together while unrelated items are separated.
• Use headings and subheadings to allow visual scanning of content. Font size should correspond to information hierarchy.
• Avoid animations. Users have what’s called “banner blindness” and tend to ignore anything that looks like an ad.

3. Improve your site’s usability

• The best way to measure and improve usability is to test your site with users. Testing with even one user is 100% better than testing with none. Have your users attempt to complete tasks, then fix the areas of the design where they run into problems.
• Follow standard usability principles or heuristics. These are the “low hanging fruit” of the usability tree, and following them is of value. The most common list of usability principles was written by Jakob Nielsen, and you can find it here: 10 Usability Heuristics
• Determine what your users’s top tasks are and make sure the site design supports them. For example, on an commerce site, a top task may be “search for a product”. Go through each step of that process and see where you can make it easier, simpler, faster and more enjoyable for your users. The Howto.gov site has a good summary on how to determine and design to support top tasks. Contact me if you’d like to learn more.

Good luck! Let me know how these work for you!

Sources and further reading:

• How Users Read on the Web
• How Little Do Users Read
• Horizontal Attention Leans Left
• Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make Your First Impression
• Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts
• Fancy Formatting Looks Like an Ad
• Supporting Top Tasks – Learn From the Universities
• Usability Testing: Oh The Things You Can Learn