Designing successful Web sites

Rough Notes, May 2001 by Ashenhurst, John

Put usability first; practice simplicity

Scores of books purport to offer insight into successful Web site design. At least one actually does. Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability (published by New Rider, Indianapolis) is accessible (with plenty of color plates illustrating his ideas) but dense with practical and sometimes idiosyncratic advice. It is recommended reading for agency principals and Web managers alike.

Nielsen has been at the Web game since before its invention. He played an important role in the evolution of hypertext (user-directed linking between text sources), a key element of the Web. Of the book's nine sections, the Page Design, Content Design, and Site Design areas are likely to be most useful to an agency.

Some people label Nielsen opinionated, but that's his value. His insights are based on experience and experiments, not simply taste and intuition. You can be as clever as you want with your Web site but once you read Nielsen, you may feel like an idiot. So read him first.

Nielsen's group conducts usability seminars from time to time. The schedule is on the Nielsen Web site (www.useit.com).

What follows are my somewhat arbitrary condensations of three sections of Nielsen's book. He probably wouldn't recognize the content so don't blame him. It's a lot to digest but as you have time, test your Web site against the list of 30 items and see what you find. It could be enlightening.

Page design

1) Aim for page loads of less than five to six seconds. The most popular sites load twice as fast. Web users rank slow download as their greatest annoyance.

2) Keep your page download sizes to 32KB or less. That includes unique graphics. Research indicates that pages under 32KB have a bail-out rate of 7% to 10% and over 40KB, 25% to 30%.

3) Make your page sizes consistent. If some are small/fast and others large/slow, your visitors will lose confidence in the site. They won't know what to expect and they want to be in control.

4) If you use graphics, make them small but decipherable. Try to re-use the same graphics from page to page. Once downloaded into the visitor's browser, they won't need to be downloaded for subsequent use.

5) Be aware of screen real estate. The visitor's browser and operating system consume a significant percentage of the available screen area, so make effective use of what's available. Pages should be dense though easily scanable. The page is for your visitor's benefit. The visitor wants information and isn't interested in your artwork. Keep your links visible at the top of the screen.

6) Respect the variety of browsers (and versions), hardware platforms, and bandwidth your visitors live with. Many of your visitors will be consumers logging on from home. They may use Opera, Macs, WebTV, 800x600 monitors or 56Kb lines.

7) Avoid using frames. It's tempting to provide scrollable regions on your pages but ultimately frames confuse visitors, search engines, and the bookmarking process.

8) Apply Occum's razor to your Web pages. If the page works without an item, leave it off (Occum suggested that all things being equal, the simplest hypothesis wins.)

9) Leave out advertising. It takes up space. It isn't why your visitor showed up. It won't make you any money.

10) Don't try to hold your visitor captive on your site. It's not polite and won't work anyway. When you include outgoing links (and you should, you're part of a larger community) make sure you make it clear where they go-and that it's off your site.

Content design

1) Be succinct. Write your page copy then reduce the number of words by 50%. Focus on what's really important to your visitors. People read via computer monitors at least 25% more slowly than paper.

2) Create visual clarity. Use headlines, bolded words (but not underlined), bulleted lists, tables, and other visual structures to make it easy for the visitor to quickly understand the key points of a page.

3) Expose agency personality. You don't need to write in a dry, academic, or gray business-speak manner. On the other hand, don't be too cute.

4) Edit your copy. Spell check. Grammar check. Fact check. Have multiple people proof your copy before posting it. Have a professional writer clean and tighten your copy. Errors on your site reduce credibility.

5) Use plain language that your audience can understand. Your Web site visitors are not insurance experts. They may not understand technical insurance language. Use metaphors sparingly. People may misinterpret them.

6) Make it easy for your visitors to get to what they care about. Avoid trying to include too many subjects on one page. Provide a conceptual and linking structure so that visitors can get to the content they're seeking without wading through volumes of what is to them irrelevant text.

7) Write meaningful page titles. Remember that visitors may enter your site other than through your home page. Search engines may list a page from your site only by its title. Page titles are used in browser history lists, so make them meaningful and unique page to page.