The design of your web site is critical to its success, so it's important to make sure that it's well designed. For eBusinesses, the user interface can also have a direct effect on your bottom line. But how do you know if the user interface works?
Evaluating designs using known success factors
Users quickly learn techniques that allow them to efficiently navigate the web, and designs that accommodate typical user behavior tend to be easy to use. As usability consultant Jakob Nielsen states, "users prefer pursuing their own goals to navigating idiosyncratic designs." You can make your site easy to use by following the lead of established sites.
Here's a technique that can help you know if your web design will work. It involves comparing a potential design to known features of successful sites. Use this test early in your development to ensure you're on the right track, or use it to see how well your existing site stacks up.
Create printouts of proposed designs. You'll need a full-sized color printout on letter-sized (or A4) paper. The printouts should be vertical (portrait) orientation. If a design spills onto multiple printed pages because of its page size, only use the first printed page for your review.
Here are some questions you can use to evaluate each printout, based on users' expectations:
1. Can you see important interface features? Graphic designers often have large monitors, and it's common for them to design page layouts that are too wide because of this. If any important element is not visible on the printed page, that element is positioned poorly, because it will not show up on an average user's screen. Here are some items that should be visible and legible on the printout:
- Your logo or identifier
- Site-wide navigation
- Persistent tools (i.e., help, about us, search, site map, and privacy)
- The page title
- Page content area
- Links related to the current page's content
- Current news
This list will vary based on the purpose of your site.
2. Are any key navigation elements only partially visible? Examples of this problem include overly general tabs, drop-down menus and mouseovers. These navigation devices can all be useful in certain instances, but have to be avoided for important navigation elements. It's inefficient for your users to have to click around the screen to figure out how to get to major areas of your site. If you can't see a place on the printout that you could click to get to all major areas, the design has a navigation problem.
Go To Page: 1 2
