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the180 - Ten Undeniable Truths of Web Design
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Ten Undeniable Truths of Web Design

1. Users are horribly impatient.
  • Your customers will abandon your site for little reason.
  • As a web user, you already know this.

 

2. People want to go Home.

  • Their first lifeline back to a safe spot.
  • With Home, they are comfortable going to other parts of the site.
  • Some people don't recognize Home unless it is spelled out.

 

3. Links should not be guesswork.
  • The clearest links are regular blue hypertext.
    • However, most people recognize non-standard link colors.
  • Maintain consistent standards throughout your site for link colors.
    • One color for all unvisited links.
    • Another color for all visited links.
    • A clearly different look for text that does not belong to a link.

     

4. Fewer and simpler words are better.
  • People skim pages quickly.
  • Text must quickly tell them if they are on the right track.
  • Text must be easy to read.
  • Web users do not want eloquent text.
  • Where appropriate, lists of statements and tables are preferable.

5. People hate slow downloads.

  • Most people don't have a T1 line.
  • Unrequested large animations and images are very aggravating.
    • In tests, users shake their heads.
  • Long downloads do make sense in some cases.
    • Movies, close-ups of pictures, software downloads, radio archives, etc.
    • Next to the link for the large image or file, show users the file size or a time estimate.
6. The more they Search the worse it gets.
  • If users don't find something via Search in the first couple of tries....
    • They quit.
    • Or they get into a frustrating cycle of trial and error.
  • First create your design as if you will not have a Search feature.
  • Test and refine your early design with a quick prototype.
  • Then go ahead and add Search, but don't make it the most obvious way to try to find things.

 

7. People want a map, not a picture.

  • Most navigation schemes portray a picture faithful to how organizations see themselves.
  • But customers need a good map.
  • Orient it for 'tourists' to easily find their way to popular destinations.
  • Omit most details
  • Exaggerate the easiest and most common paths.

 

8. The Boardroom Experience hurts the Customer Experience.

  • The Customer is Always Right.
  • But demos in boardrooms promote designs that sacrifice the needs of customers.
  • The real business of the web site occurs not in the boardroom, but with the customer.

 

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

  • Most site managers lack meaningful customer feedback.
  • The best businesses depend on user-centered design methods for their web sites.

10. Finding successful web site designs is not hard.

  • Have you ever heard of Yahoo!? Amazon? Ebay? Edward Jones or Charles Schwab?
  • Their web site designs generally provide good examples of how to treat customers.

 

Posted March 8, 2002
By Joe Grant

A full version of this the180 topic can be found at the St. Louis Web Developers web site. The content is an update of an earlier article posted on August 3, 2000.

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