Computers Today, October 2001; Essentials: Bring Home The Surfer

It's difficult to find a Web site that is truly stellar with respect to usability. What are the dos and don'ts of designing your Web site?

Why are so many Web sites so frustrating to use? It isn't the information or the utilities; it's just that too many sites appear to have been sloppily slapped together with little sense of creating genuine usefulness to end-users. When this utility is critical to generating revenues, as it would be in any electronic commerce application, the Web site actually becomes a serious hindrance to business.

However, the good news is that you can in fact improve matters considerably through well-planned and well-executed design. This list will help you avoid the basic mistakes that stymie site utility and user acceptance.

6 Tricks To Attract Visitors

ť Don't put up "under construction" signs all over your site just because you can't wait for its completion. That's a good way to irritate everyone. Consider creating an "under discussion" section instead and invite your current customers to tell you what they really want to see.
ť Do check out your competition. What key words would you use to search for your company's products/services? Use them in search engines to locate your competitors. They may have thought of things that you haven't.
ť Target your market. Who buys your products/services? Research, don't guess; the results may surprise you. Then match the look of your site to your target audience.
ť Content should be your main thrust area. Plan, plan and re-plan. Successful sites don't give just the brochure. They give a brochure, sales letter, FAQs (frequently asked questions), tips on usage and letters from satisfied customers, among others.
ť If you have a product for sale, don't tell the user where they can buy it. Sell it online!
ť Give visitors a reason to return to your site. Change it as frequently as you can. A photograph of your company's president and history of the company won't lure visitors. In fact, it's the surest way to lose lots of potential customers.

The 10 most common sins
When analysing Web design it is easy to identify a number of mistakes that reduce usability.

1 Using frames:
Splitting a page into frames is very confusing for users since frames break the fundamental user model of a Web page. You may not be able to bookmark the current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of the frameset), URLs (uniform resource locators) stop working and printouts become difficult. What is even worse is that the predictability of user actions is lost; who knows what information will appear where when you click on a link.

2 Injudicious use of technology:
Don't try to attract users to your site by bragging about use of latest Web technologies. You may attract a few nerds but mainstream users will care more about useful content and your ability to offer good customer service. Unless you are in the business of selling Internet products or services, it is better to wait until some experience has been gained with respect to appropriate ways of using new techniques. During the initial days of desktop publishing people used 20 fonts in one document. Let's avoid similar design bloat on the Web. For example, use VRML if you actually have information that maps naturally onto a 3-D space, for example, architectural design, shoot-them-up games and surgery planning. It is usually better to produce 2-D (two-dimensional) overviews that fit with the actual display and input hardware available to users.

3 Scrolling text, marquees and constantly running animations:
Never include page elements that move incessantly. Give your user some peace and quiet to actually read the text.

4 Complex URLs:
Even though machine-level addressing like URL should never have been exposed in the user interface, it is there and users actually try to decode URLs of pages to infer the structure of Web sites. Users do this because of lack of support for navigation and sense of location in current Web browsers. Thus, a URL should contain human-readable directory and file names that reflect the nature of the information space. Also try to minimise the risk of typing errors by using short names with all lower-case characters and no special characters.

5 Orphan pages:
Make sure that all pages include a clear indication of what Web site they belong to since users may access pages directly without coming in through your home page. For the same reason, every page should have a link up to your home page as well as some indication of where they fit within the whole structure of your information space.

6 Long scrolling pages:
Recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. But I still recommend minimum scrolling opportunities on navigation pages. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page.

7 Lack of navigation support:
Don't assume that users know as much about your site as you do. They always have difficulty finding information, so they need support in the form of a strong sense of structure. Provide a site map and let users know where they are and where they can go. Also, it is always useful to provide a good search feature since even the best navigation support will never be enough.

8 Non-standard link colours:
Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don't mess with these colours since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most Web browsers.

9 Outdated information:
Budget to hire a Web gardener as part of your team. You need somebody to root out the weeds and replant the flowers as your Web site changes. In practice, maintenance is a cheap way of enhancing content on your Web site since many old pages keep their relevance and should be linked to new pages.

10 Very long download times:
Remember you get only 10 seconds as the maximum response time before users lose interest in your site. Keep design elements to a bare minimum. Even Web sites with high-end users need to take into account download times. Bandwidth is getting worse, not better, as the Internet adds users faster than the infrastructure can keep up.

New mistakes of Web designing
Unfortunately, new technology and new applications for the Web have introduced an entirely new class of mistakes.

1 Breaking of slowing down the 'back' button:
The 'back' button is the lifeline of Web users and the second-most used navigation feature after following hypertext links. Users know that they can try anything on the Web and always be saved by a click or two on the 'back' button to return to familiar territory. Except, of course, for those sites that break the 'back' link by committing one of these design sins: Opening a new browser window; using an immediate redirect (every time the user clicks back, the browser returns to a page that leads the user to an undesired location); and preventing caching such that the back navigation requires a fresh trip to the server.

2 Opening new browser windows:
Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner salesperson who starts his demonstration by emptying an ashtray on a customer's carpet. Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users glued to their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over users' machines, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the back button through which users return to previous sites.

3 Non-standard use of GUI widgets:
Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles-when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it.

Currently, the worst consistency violations on the Web are found in use of graphical user interface widgets, like radio buttons and checkboxes. Their appropriate behaviour is defined in the Windows, Macintosh and Java user interface standards.

Which of these standards to follow will depend on the platform used by a majority of your users. However, it hardly matters which widget you are employing since all these standards have close-to-identical rules.

For example, the rules for radio buttons state that they are used to select one among a set of options but that the choice of options does not take effect until the user has confirmed the choice by clicking on an OK button. Unfortunately I have seen a number of Web sites where radio buttons are used as action buttons that have an immediate result when activated. Such wanton deviations from accepted interface standards make the Web harder to use.

4 Lack of biographies:
Users want to know about the people behind information on the Web. Biographies and photographs of authors help make the Web a less impersonal place and increase trust. Personality and point of view often win over anonymous bits coming over the wire.

Yet many sites still don't use columnists and avoid bylines in their articles. Even sites with bylines often forget the link to the author's biography and a way for users to find other articles by the same author. It is particularly bad when a byline is made into a "mailto:" link instead of a link to an author's biography.

There are two reasons for this: First, it is much more common for a reader to want to know more about an author, including finding the writer's other articles, than it is for the reader to want to contact the author.

Second, it breaks the conventions of the Web when clicking on blue underlined text spawns an e-mail message instead of activating a hypertext link to a new page. Such inconsistencies reduce usability by making the Web less predictable.

5 Lack of archieves:
Old information is often good information and can be useful to readers. Even when new information is more valuable than old information, there is almost always some value to the old stuff. Having archives may add about 10 per cent to the cost of running a site but they increase the site's usefulness by about 50 per cent. Archives also help eliminate broken or dead links and thus encourage other sites to link to your site.

6 Moving pages to new URLs:
Anytime a page moves, you break any incoming links from other sites. Why hurt people who send you free customer referrals?

7 Headlines that make no sense out of context:
Headlines and other micro content must be written very differently for the Web than for old media; they are actionable items that serve as UI elements and should help users navigate. Headlines are often removed from the context of the page and used in tables of content and in search engine results. In either case the writing needs to be very plain and to meet two goals: Tell users what's at the other end of the link with no guesswork required; and protect users from following the link if they would not be interested in the destination page.

Most Internet buzzwords have some substance and might bring small benefits to those few Web sites that can use them appropriately. You can be sure that in most cases the latest buzzwords do not go down well with users. Opportunity cost is high from focusing attention on a fad instead of spending time, money and management bandwidth on improving basic customer service and usability.

9 Slow server response times:
Slow response time is the worst offender against Web usability. Bloated graphic design was the original offender in the response time area. Some sites still have too many graphics, too-large graphics or use applets where plain or Dynamic HTML would have been enough. The growth in Web-based applications, e-commerce and personalisation often means that each page view must be computed on the fly. As a result, the experienced delay in loading the page is determined not simply by the download delay but also by a server's performance. Sometimes building a page also involves connections to back-end mainframes or database servers, slowing down the process further. Users don't care why response times are slow. It pays to invest in a fast server and get a performance expert to review your system architecture and code quality to optimise response times.

10 Anything that looks like advertising:
Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. Unfortunately users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. Therefore it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. The exact implications of this guideline will vary with new forms of ads but it is safe to follow these rules: Banner blindness means that users never look at anything that resembles a banner ad due to shape or position on a page; animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations; and pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windows before they have even fully rendered, sometimes with great viciousness.

Better Web design
It is much harder to say what good things to do since I have never seen a Web site that was truly stellar with respect to usability. These are design elements that have the potential to increase usability of virtually all sites:

Finally, always test your design with real users as a reality check. People do things in odd and unexpected ways, so even a carefully planned project will learn from usability testing.

Alay Pankaj Jhaveri is a Web Developer and IT Consultant. e-mail: jhaverialay@yahoo.com