Based on observations of a large number of people using a variety of web sites, we offer this list of maxims for anyone to bear in mind when designing a web site.

1. Users are horribly impatient.
2. People want to go Home.
3. Plain old hyperlinks work best.
4. Fewer and simpler words are better.
5. People hate slow downloads.
6. People hate horizontal scrolling.
7. People want a map, not a picture.
8. The Boardroom Experience hurts the Customer Experience.
9. What you don't know is hurting you.
10. Finding successful web site designs is not hard.

1. Users are horribly impatient.

Understanding this Undeniable Truth makes all of the other Truths clear. Your customers coming to your web site have little tolerance and patience for your site and will ruthlessly abandon it with little justification. For "dot.com" companies, this spells the difference between the life and death of their business.

If you are a web user, you already understand these strong feelings of impatience. How do you feel after going down three or four "wrong turns" on a web site? How willing are you to sit through the huge download of some animated graphics that you really don't care to see?

The younger the web user and the more experienced they are on the web, the greater their impatience. Furthermore, once people find what they want, they want the content to be easy to read.

In real estate, the three most important rules are "Location, location, and location." On the web, the rules are "Speed, speed, and speed."

2. People want to go Home.

It's amazing, but a number of pages on the sites of major organizations do not have a clear link or button for going to the Home page. However, users rely on Home. When they are having problems with your site, which will happen at some point, the link Home provides their first lifeline back to a safe spot. Furthermore, once people recognize that they are consistently offered a way Home, they are more likely to feel comfortable in venturing forth to other parts of the site.

When users can't find Home or a better navigational path, they use the Back button. However, many people find the lack of Home to be very annoying, especially if they have to hit the Back button several times before they become comfortably re-oriented on the site.

3. Plain old hyperlinks work best.

When it comes to providing people with a path to another page, nothing works better than plain old hyperlinks; that is, text that is blue if the destination page has not been visited and text that is purple if the destination page has been visited.

Why do simple hyperlinks work best? Because simple hyperlinks:

• Clearly identify themselves as links to pages not yet visited. Every novice knows what a simple hyperlink looks like. In contrast, people sometimes fail to recognize when an image is serving as a link.
• Clearly identify themselves as links to pages already visited. The value of the purple hyperlink is subtle and under appreciated by many web designers. Customers use the purple color to help them find links to pages that they liked before. When looking for a new page, they also use the purple color to ignore links to pages visited previously. As with many things that work quickly and reliably, purple hyperlinks work without people having to consciously think about them.
• Distinguish themselves from each other. It is usually clear where one simple hyperlink ends and another begins. Graphical links don't always offer such clear boundaries.

This Undeniable Truth flies in the face of the inclination of many designers' to use graphics instead of plain links and to use hypertext colors besides blue and purple. With respect to using graphics for links, especially on the main navigation bar, consider also including smaller, simple hyperlinks elsewhere on the page. Some web sites routinely use the bottom of their pages to provide simple hyperlinks. These simple hyperlinks repeat the graphical links available elsewhere on the page.

As for using non-standard colors, frankly, using anything but the default browser colors for links significantly hurts your web site's success. Avoid doing this if at all possible.

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4. Fewer and simpler words are better.

When people are looking for answers they skim pages on the site very quickly. They want the text to confirm that they are on the right track or to tell them they are off track. When they believe they've come to a page that potentially has the desired answer, they want that page's text to quickly prove itself as being valuable, and to have content that is very easy to read.

Anyone writing for the web needs to realize it is different. Users are jumping from one page to the next, and for the near future the computer monitors they are using are more tiring to read than paper due to the relatively poor resolution of computer screens. Unlike books or magazines, web users are not expecting and do not want eloquence in their text. The words don't even have to form sentences. In fact, where appropriate, lists of statements and tables are preferable.

Web readers disdain text that is not straightforward. They dislike commercial-sounding phrases, and anything that sacrifices clarity for the sake of sounding impressive, especially jargon. The text can become more prosaic at the point where users should clearly have arrived at desired content. However, that is not at an article's beginning, which should provide a summary or an outline. The text can become more detailed later in the article.

One important corollary to this Truth: State who you are and what you do concisely, in concrete terms, and in a conspicuous way. Being very impatient, the user does not want to play detective and hunt through a number of pages to understand you, especially the first time they come to your site. Immediately inform your customers if you and your services are relevant and useful to them, preferably on the home page.

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5. People hate slow downloads.

This Undeniable Truth is closely related to the first Truth that Users are horribly impatient. With regard to download time in particular, a lot of web site decision-makers forget that everyone doesn't have a T1 line. For those that use 14K or 28K modems - and there are many that still do - unrequested, large animations and images are very aggravating. The common reaction from people forced to sit through the loading and playback of a large Flash animation is to shake their heads, and perhaps laugh in exasperation. Not the best way to start off a visit from a customer.

This doesn't mean that large files, images, or animations shouldn't be on web sites. For example, people going to a movie review site want to see trailers of movies of interest. Radio sites that provide archived programs and museums that provide large, high-resolution images are giving people what they want. However, don't make the user sit through the large download until they indicate that they want it and you've informed them about what to expect. Provide the user with files size and time estimates located immediately next to the link of the large image or file. If a large document is available on PDF, also provide a straight HTML version. PDFs are not always wanted and browsers do not always have the appropriate plug-in. The last thing users want to do is to download a plug-in, or even worse, another browser, just so they can view your particular web page.

In summary, slow download times aggravate customers and greatly increase the likelihood that their visit ends in failure from your company's perspective.

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6. People hate horizontal scrolling.

This Undeniable Truth is simple enough, and true for any computer interface. To explain, this web page is too long for you to see on one screen, so you have to scroll down to read it. That scrolling is vertical. In contrast, you can see an example of horizontal scrolling with the "Open" or "Save" dialog in Windows. If you have a good number of files or folders in the current directory displayed by the "Open" dialog, you will have to use the scroll bar on the bottom to move the file display to the left or the right.

People have a very common, strongly negative reaction to horizontal scrolling on web pages. Most web pages designs do not intentionally require horizontally scrolling, though some surprisingly do. For most web sites, horizontal scrolling occurs because a large table or image does not fit completely across low-resolution screens, such as those with 600 x 800 resolution.

Stay away from horizontal scrolling when possible. At the least, do not go out of your way to include it in your design.

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7. People want a map, not a picture.

On company web sites, many organizations have a natural impulse to essentially publish a picture that is faithful to how that organization sees itself. But that is not the best scheme for customers. Instead, they want a good map oriented for novices easily finding their way to popular destinations.

Good maps omit most details and exaggerate the easiest and most common paths. The generalizations of fact and omissions of detail necessary in good map-making will not be welcomed by everyone in an organization, especially any parts of the company that don't make the home page. However, if a company truly wants their web site to serve a business function with their customer, then the company must accept the need to communicate simply and clearly from the customer's mindset.

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8. The Boardroom Experience hurts the Customer Experience.

The Customer is Always Right is one of the oldest maxims in business. Unfortunately, the Boardroom Experience (or the Demo Experience) often sacrifices the needs of the true customer, the people using the web site. The Boardroom Experience occurs for top management and decision-makers of a web site when they watch a demo staged by the people that develop the site. In contrast, the Customer Experience occurs for actual customers when they use the site. Of course, the real business of the web site occurs not in the boardroom, but with the customer.

Let's compare the two experiences:

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9. What you don't know is hurting you.

Most decision-makers of web sites don't really know how the site is doing. Or, in some cases, they don't understand why it is not doing very well. For example, an e-tailer may wonder why so many users abandon the site once they take the "shopping cart" to the checkout area.

Many site managers lack meaningful customer feedback. Without using methods that realistically allow for them to observe what happens with customers using their web sites, they will continue to operate in the dark. They are effectively operating a business blindly.

The whole web site and e-business phenomena is still very new. In the end, the best businesses depending on user-centered methods for web design will thrive. Those that do not know what is going on with their customers will simply not be around in the long run.

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10. Finding successful web site designs is not hard.

Have you ever heard of Yahoo!? What about Amazon? Ebay? While there is some danger is assuming that whatever the most visited web sites do is the right thing to do, these designs generally provide good examples of how to treat customers.

There is no mystery as to why these sites do well. People can use them, and come back to use them again and again. Review the Undeniable Truths against the sites of these multibillion-dollar companies that have tens of millions of users, and then review the Truths against your web site design.

Undeniably, the truth is most web site designs could be far more successful. It all starts with putting the design focus on your customer.

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Grant Consulting, Inc. located in metro St. Louis, MO, USA	1013 Bradington Court Columbia, IL 62236	info@grantconsulting.com (314) 581-0384

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