Essential Design Considerations in Website Design and Development: Usability to Navigation
Web Usability
‘Don’t make me think’ is the phrase used and it means that your design should make it easy for a visitor to use the site, and not needlessly have to think. The alternative is
- get rid of half the words on each page
- then get rid of half of what is left
What makes us think? Things like unfamiliar and technical names. Your wording and the vocabulary that you use, especially for navigation, should be obvious and easy for the user to understand.
What users really see. We design as if the reader will go through all of the text on a wbpage but that does not happen. The user has a goal and uses a limited time to try to find what they are looking for, nothing else is noticed.
Design for scanning
- Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page
- Take advantage of conventions
- Break pages up into clearly defined areas
- Make it obvious what is clickable
- Minimize noise
- Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page
- appearance portrays the relationships between parts
- 1 – more important = more prominent
- –headings larger, bolder, distinct, near top
- 2 – related logically = related visually
- –group
- –defined area
- 3 – visually nested
- –what is part of what
- –“computer books”
Conventions
- larger text = headline
- story is beneath the headline
- page layout / formatting known
- easier & faster
Reduce noise
- too busy
- too much trying to get the users attention
- background noise
Web Design
- establishing the purpose of the site,
- who it is aimed at, and
- how it fits into the organization’s overall publicity strategy
Web site design is also concerned with
- information design and,
- navigation design.
- Vital to the success of a website, of course, is the content.
Navigation
- structure and content of the site and to find their way to a particular part of the site is the key issue.
- Information architecture is an area of study devoted to designing websites and helping people to answer questions such as:
- –Where am I?
- –Where can I go?
- –Where have I been?
- –What is nearby?
Design Principles
- Consistency is important and a clear design language should be developed including interaction patterns for the main recurring interactions.
- If it is not desirable to use the standard blue underlined links then ensure that links are consistent so people will quickly learn them.
- Many sites confuse people by not making links sufficiently visible and distinguishable from other text in the site.
- Provide people with feedback on where they are in the site and clarify contexts and content.
- Using meaningful URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, i.e. Web addresses) and familiar titles will help people find what they are looking for and understand what other content is in the site.
- A good design guideline for websites is to minimize the need for scrolling and
- plan for entry at (almost) any page, as not all your visitors will go in through the front page.
- Different people have different strategies on websites.
- –Half of all site visitors are ‘search dominant’,
- –20 per cent ‘link dominant’
- and the rest mixed (Nielsen, 1993).
- Ensure that it is clear what has been searched when designing the search facility.
- Search-focused people are task-centred and want to find what they want, whereas the others are more happy to browse around.
Design WireFrame
- designers need to identify the key components of the design for each different type of page, then place them on a layout.
- It is very important to consider not just the type of object – navigation bar, search box, banner headline, advert, text box, and so on
- – but what content that item can have.
- It is no use having a very small text box, for example, if there is a lot of text to go in it.
- It is no good having a drop-down menu if the user has to search through hundreds of items.
Information Architecture
- Information architecture is concerned with how the content is classified and organized.
- Techniques such as affinity diagrams and card sorts are used to understand how people conceptualize content.
- Getting an information architecture that is robust enough to serve such multiple interests is difficult and website ‘information architects’ are in great demand.
- Information architecture for websites is to do with how the content of the site is organized and described:
- how to organize the content (i.e. create a taxonomy),
- how to label the items and categories,
- how to describe the content in the site and
- how to present the architecture to users and to other designers.
Web Navigation
- getting from one place to another, and
- figuring out where you are
- The design of navigation mechanisms is the second main pillar of information architecture.
- There are three key features of a good navigation design for websites:
- –labelling,
- –navigation support and
- –searching mechanisms.
Labeling
- Labels are used for internal and external links,
- headings and sub-headings,
- titles and related areas.
- Paying attention to good, consistent, relevant labels is a critical part of information architecture.
Information architects must develop a clear and unambiguous preferred vocabulary
Searching
- One of the significant features of the Web as an information space is that many sites support searching.
- The first is knowing exactly what sort of documents the search engine is searching.
- The second is how to express combinations of search criteria.
Navigation
–search-dominant
- always look for the search box as soon as they enter a site
–link-dominant
- will always browse first, only use the search when run out of links
Search Engine Optimization
consistency
- the big things
- titles, H1, subheadings (H2), key terms, synonyms
- the small things
- images, alt text, link text
- the big things
- linking, structure, IA / vocab, navigation, site map, footer
- why successful
- DA (domain authority) – good site people stay
- TA (topic authority) – good related content
- user intent
- users choose to visit the site
- users choose to stay on the site
changes
- more content = >DA,
- all about key terms
- now about user intent
- changing
- what shortcuts & seo tricks ‘beat’ google
- AI is cheap but poor quality
- less money, less time, less effort – can it succeed?
what you can do now
- start
- page, content, socials, internal links
- plan, monitor performance
- gain skills & knowledge
what can you do over time
- authority / brand building
- use targeted marketing & socials to get visitors
- external links
tools
- free tools – not good enough
- good tools – too expensive
seo plugins
- I haven’t seen any benefits (early days)
what has worked
- speed
- images
- ‘good’ targets
- based on research & hard work