Main reasons and explanations are in the article from Jakob Nielsen: 10 Heuristics of User Interface.
Recently, got myself into Usability fighting with the redesign of some web applications. The more advanced the project is becoming, the harder it comes to handle usability issues. Finally, it ended up with the full re-design having in mind key concepts from different web sources.
1. Proper Search
If the navigation sucks, it might be the only way how the user can find the required content. Statistically, the user uses search maximum twice, then he leaves the site if he didn’t find anything.
2.Design your Links
It’s quite hard to navigate over the complex website and afterword find yourself on the main page without a guess where you’ve been. So, do mark links as visited!
3. Banner site
With overwhelming number of banners, or any image/text advertisement of different features of the site/sites, do keep “an air” between the blocks, if you want to have lots of info on the front page, otherwise – think again about your content placement. It’s really hard to read something when the rest of the content blinks/flashes/jumps/etc. However, if you have to keep these jumping/flashing block – try to keep them far away from the content and each other.
4. Image data over Text and vice versa
The link is worth of a thousand words
5. And finally, don’t do this!
Yeah, this!
CakePHP session flash messages is one of the most useful things for usability, and user notification. Trying to make it more fancy, I came to jQuery framework with its HighlightFade plugin.
Adding just a couple of lines, we can get nice effects, looking the same as Wordpress messages in Posting/Editing:
var $j = jQuery.noConflict(); //I'm using Prototype as well, so we don't need conflicts
$j(document).ready(function() {
if( $j("#flashMessage") ){
$j("#flashMessage").highlightFade({color:'#24F273',speed:2000, iterator:'exponential'});
}
});
Thus, next time you will pass $this->Session->setFlash('Foo');, your flash message with default
will be used with above HighLight effect.
The appearance of new front page of Apple usually bring new vibes of design on the Web. Mac fans collected everything from 1997 year up to now.
Surfing around some usability websites, I’ve found a great article about eyetracking statistics collected by Nielsen and Tara Pernice Coyne(the Nielsen/Norman Group’s director of research), which provided the designers with some basic understandings of proper information placement.
“[With eyetracking] we can see that a user may navigate the page of an interface that houses the info she wants,” she said, “but if the text is poorly presented, or the navigation is cluttered, or there are too many superfluous images so she cannot easily find what she needs. This is a lost opportunity.”
They’ve summarised some of the main points of information distribution, according to its types, like: image usage, content development etc.
Some of the results were even a bit funny in image analysing test due to gender difference of questioned audience, anyway it’s worth of reading for everyone, since most of us, knowing these basics, like to forget about them, of simply underestimate their importance.
Justing Fox – great photography & art
Top Web Development Companies via BrainFuel
GillespieFox – photography, web design, illustrations
Five Principals of Design from Bokardo.com
Elixirgraphics – Clarity, Simplicity, in other words – I’m loving it!