London Web Design & SEO Services

Create a plan

Planning is a way to understand and get agreement on what you are going to do, in what timeframe, with what resources, and at what cost.

By including usability activities in your project plan, you build in the time and resources to carry out those activities. By reviewing the Step-by-Step Usability Guide, you can better understand which fit with your needs so you can put them in appropriately in your plan.

As you begin to plan, think about and get agreement on

• Scope - What are you developing? What is the Web site going to cover? About how many pages will it be?
• Audiences - Who are the major groups you want the site to serve?
• Objectives - What goals should the Web site help your agency or organization to meet?

We provide a brief introduction to these three topics here. More detailed questions to think about are in the article on Hold a Kick-Off Meeting.

Determine project scope

Are you creating a Web site for an entire agency or organization? Part of that agency or organization? On a particular topic? For a particular audience?

You should be able to name the Web site and write a short description of it.

You should also understand the requirements of your Web site. To learn more, see the article on how to Determine Web Site Requirements.

Identify user audiences

List all the different groups that you want to use the site. For example:

• general public
• researchers
• advocates
• students

Also, think about these users’ needs. For example, for many different user groups coming to Web sites, you might want to remember that:

• Users are very busy.
• Users don’t want to read very much.
• Users want to get tasks done as quickly as possible.
• Users may not know a lot of your technical vocabulary.

You may want to learn a lot more about your users. See the articles on Evaluate Your Current Site, Learn About Your Users, and Conduct Task Analysis.

Set objectives

What does your agency or organization want to achieve by having a Web site? You may start by saying “give information,” and that’s fine, but you should also think about your objectives in business terms.

For example, do you want users to get the answers to their own questions without calling the agency? If so, you might have an objective of reducing phone calls by X amount, saving Y dollars.

You can set similar measurable objectives for reducing emails, for increasing customer satisfaction, for increasing subscriptions to online newsletters, and so on. When you set meaningful measurable objectives, you have ways of measuring success after the site is launched.

The list of agency objectives are different from two other types of goals that you should also understand and set as part of a user-centered design process. The others are:

• your users’ goals (These are their scenarios, what they come to the Web site to achieve.) See the articles on Evaluate Your Current Site, Conduct Task Analysis, and Write Scenarios.
• measurable usability goals for users’ scenarios (These are the ways you will tell whether your site is effective, efficient, and satisfying to your users.) See Set Measurable Usability Goals.

Next steps

Another part of your plan is to think about the people who will work on the project. You may want to look at the article on Assemble a Project Team.

What are the Guidelines?

Throughout your Web design or redesign project, you should take advantage of what is already known about best practices for each step of the process. The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, compiled through an extensive process of research and review, bring you those best practices.

This article gives you background information on the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines.

Many topics

The guidelines cover:

• design process and evaluation (PDF - 883KB)
• optimizing the user experience (PDF - 5.3MB)
• accessibility (PDF - 856KB)
• hardware and software (PDF - 880KB)
• the homepage (PDF - 4.8MB)
• page layout (PDF - 4.7MB)
• navigation (PDF - 2.7MB)
• scrolling and paging (PDF - 508KB)
• headings, titles, and labels (PDF - 1.9MB)
• links (PDF - 3.9MB)
• text appearance (PDF - 954KB)
• lists (PDF - 428KB)
• screen-based controls (widgets) (PDF - 2.1MB)
• graphics, images, and multimedia (PDF - 971KB)
• writing Web content (PDF - 2.5MB)
• content organization (PDF - 788KB)
• search (PDF - 383KB)
• usability testing (PDF - 1MB)

Guideline, comments, example, references

Each guideline includes:

• a statement of the guideline
• comments (an explanation)
• an example
• sources (references to relevant research)
• a five-point scale of relative importance
• a five-point scale of strength of evidence

Who should use the Guidelines?

The Guidelines offer benefits to four key audiences: Designers, Usability Specialists, Managers, and Researchers.

Designers

Designers—especially those new to the field—can see the range of issues that they must consider when planning and designing a Web site. Relying on evidence-based guidelines is better than relying on individual opinions that are not substantiated by evidence from research or from usability testing. When team members disagree, they can turn to the Guidelines for evidence-based decisions rather than arguing for personal preferences.

Usability Specialists

The Guidelines help usability specialists evaluate the designs of Web sites and support their recommendations. For example, usability specialists can use the Guidelines as a checklist to aid them during their review of Web sites. Usability specialists can also create customized checklists that focus on the “relative importance” and “strength of evidence” scales. For example, a usability specialist could create a checklist that only focuses on the 25 issues that scored highest for relative importance.

Managers

The Guidelines provide managers with a good overview and deep understanding of the wide range of usability and Web design issues that designers may encounter when creating Web sites. The Guidelines also provide managers with a “standard of usability” for their designers. Managers can request that designers follow relevant portions of the Guidelines and can use the Guidelines to set priorities. For example, when rapid design is required, managers can identify the guidelines that are most important to the success of a Web site—as defined by the “relative importance” score associated with each guideline—and require designers to focus on implementing those selected guidelines.

Researchers

Researchers involved in evaluating Web design and Web process issues can use this set of guidelines to determine where new research is needed. Researchers can use the sources of evidence provided for each guideline to assess the research that has been conducted and to determine the need for additional research to increase the validity of the previous findings, or to challenge those findings. Perhaps more importantly, researchers also can use the Guidelines and their sources to formulate new and important research questions.

Can I customize the Guidelines?

You can customize the Guidelines to meet your needs. For example:

• If you were developing a portal Web site that focuses only on linking to other Web sites, you would probably focus on the guidelines in the “Links” and “Navigation” chapters.
• You can merge selected guidelines with your organization’s other standards and guidelines to reduce the number of different documents that designers must look at.

Do the Guidelines have limitations?

The Guidelines apply primarily to English language Web sites designed for most people between 18 and 75 years of age. The Guidelines may not be applicable to all audiences or contexts. Furthermore, they are guidelines, not fixed rules.

They may not apply to Web sites used by audiences with low literacy skills who have special terminology and layout needs.

A designer may have research evidence, usability testing evidence, or specialized knowledge about designing for a particular audience or context that requires adapting a guideline to that audience or context.

Although considerable effort has been made to base the guidelines on research from a variety of fields, including cognitive psychology, computer science, human factors, technical communication, and usability; other disciplines may have valuable research that is not reflected in these guidelines.

Some strength of evidence ratings are low because there is a lack of research for that particular issue. The strength of evidence scale was designed to value research-based evidence and also to acknowledge experience-based evidence including expert opinion. Low strength of evidence ratings should encourage research on those issues.

Next steps

When you have thought about the process and considered the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, you should Develop a Plan.

1. Motivate
   Design your site to meet specific user needs and goals. Use motivators to draw different user “personae” into specific parts of your site.
2. User task flow
   Who are your users? What are their tasks and online environment? For a site to be usable, page flow must match workflow.
3. Architecture – it’s 80% of usability
   Build an efficient navigational structure. Remember – if they can’t find it in 3 clicks, they’re gone.
4. Affordance means obvious
   Make controls understandable. Avoid confusion between emblems, banners, and buttons.
5. Replicate
   Why reinvent the wheel? Use ergonomically designed templates for the most common 8-12 pages.
6. Usability test along the way
   Test early in design using low-fidelity prototypes. Don’t wait until the end when it’s too late. Know the technology limitations. Identify and optimize for target browsers and user hardware. Test HTML, JavaScript, etc. for compatibility.
7. Know the technology limitations
   Identify and optimize for target browsers and user hardware.Test HTML, JavaScript, etc for compatibility.
8. Know user tolerances
   Users are impatient. Design for a 2-10 second maximum download. Reuse header graphics so they can load from cache. Avoid excessive scrolling.
9. Multimedia – be discriminating
   Good animation attracts attention to specific information, then stops. Too much movement distracts, slowing reading and comprehension.
10. Use a stats package
    Monitor traffic through your site. Which pages pique user interest? Which pages make users leave? Adjust your site accordingly.