Web usability guidelines
Here are some points taken from Designing Web Usability, by
Jakob Nielsen.
General points:
-
follow widespread user expectations
- keeps things simple and fast
- keep download times as short as possible; enabling zip compression on your server is almost always a good idea
Rendering:
-
don't hard-code font size
-
don't disable the browser's ability to change font size
-
don't hard-code absolute pixel sizes
-
rendering must be reasonable for a wide range of screen resolutions
-
if using tables, use the COLGROUP and COL tags to define
both the number of columns and their relative percentage widths - this
allows a smart browser to start rendering a single table before it has
received all of its content
-
include width and height for images - allows faster rendering
-
include ALT text for images
-
break up blocks of text with lots of white space
Navigation:
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use standard colours for links
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avoid horizontal scrolling
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don't use frames
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half the users will go directly to the search box, without examining the
structure of the site in any way
-
store the text entered by users into the search box, for later examination
-
the attention of many users will initially go to the center of a page,
not the top
-
high quality page titles and metadata are important for bookmarks and search
engines
See Also :