Nielsen on Navigation
- # Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability - Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult.
- Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful - Breadcrumbs use a single line of text to show a page's location in the site hierarchy. While secondary, this navigation technique is increasingly beneficial to users.
- Avoid Within-Page Links - On the Web, users have a clear mental model for a hypertext link: it should bring up a new page. Within-page links violate this model and thus cause confusion.
- Guidelines for Visualizing Links - Textual links should be colored and underlined to achieve the best perceived affordance of clickability, though there are a few exceptions to these guidelines.
Nielsen on Prototyping
- Paper Prototyping: Getting User Data Before You Code - With a paper prototype, you can user test early design ideas at an extremely low cost. Doing so lets you fix usability problems before you waste money implementing something that doesn't work.
- Testing Whether Web Page Templates are Helpful - WIt is easy to test the usability of individual Web pages: simply have users interact with the pages and see whether they understand them or have trouble. Page templates are another story. In a traditional test two issues overlap and are hard to separate: usability of the layout specified by the template design and usability of the specific content that has been poured into this template on the individual pages
- Screen Resolution and Page Layout - Optimize Web pages for 1024x768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024.
Nielsen on How Users (Don’t) Read
Users are in a hurry
- How Users Read on the Web - People rarely
read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan
the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In
research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our
test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16
percent read word-by-word.
- Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
- Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four
design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical
and reduces the value of advertising networks.
- Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
- One site did most things right, but still had a miserable
14%
success rate for its most important task. The reason? Users ignored a
key area because it resembled a promotion.
- How Little Do Users Read?
- On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the
words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. Revisiting Early Web
Usability Findings
- Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers
- It's better to use "23" than "twenty-three" to catch users' eyes when
they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.
- F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
- Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an
F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
Nielsen on Content
- About Us Information on Websites
- We found a 9% improvement in the usability of About Us information on websites over the past 5 years. But companies and organizations still can't explain what they do in one paragraph.
- Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill?
- Introductory text on Web pages is usually too long, so users skip it. But short intros can increase usability by explaining the remaining content's purpose.
Summary
Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing