UX Booth: User Experience Blog & Free Website Usability Test. Guidelines. 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine. Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. 1. Form Labels Work Best Above The Field A study by UX Matters1 found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. 2Tumblr3 features a simple and elegant sign-up form that adheres to UX Matter’s recommendation. Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels?
2. People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study4. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Advanced Common Sense Home. Alertbox: Jakob Nielsen's Newsletter on Web Usability. 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design April 24, 1994 | Article: 2 minutes to readJakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design.
They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines. When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods October 12, 2014 | Article: 8 minutes to readModern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process. Usability 101: Introduction to Usability January 4, 2012 | Article: 4 minutes to readWhat is usability? How, when, and where to improve it? 247 web usability guidelines. Web usability guidelines Home page usability: 20 guidelines to evaluate the usability of home pages.
Task orientation: 44 guidelines to evaluate how well a web site supports the users tasks. Navigation and IA: 29 guidelines to evaluate navigation and information architecture. Forms and data entry: 23 guidelines to evaluate forms and data entry. Download an Excel workbook containing all 247 web usability guidelines You can also download translated versions of this checklist (in French, Spanish and Russian). How to use these guidelines Work through each of the guidelines in each list and mark your site as either conforming or not conforming to the guideline. Remember that all guidelines are context specific. The guidelines are purposefully expressed as positive statements, so that when you feed the results back to the design team you can identify some strengths of the design before you launch into the problems.
And remember that guidelines can get you only so far. About the author Dr. Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study | cxpartners. Forms can be found on almost every website; from contact or feedback forms in small websites to bank details in commerce websites, from registration to communication, from banking to searching. What we wanted to do, and why we wanted to do it At cxpartners, we have designed and tested numerous new and existing forms for websites from different companies. We use a set of golden rules that we use as a reference for form design that we have developed over the past six years. We wanted to validate these rules and seek further insights into various aspects of web form design. This lead us to carry out an eye-tracking study to observe how people react to different form designs, and to find out where users look when they are presented with a big list of text boxes.
We also wanted to find out how we can optimise our layouts when designing a form, to ensure users understand what they have to fill in and ensure users focus on their primary task(s) when filling in a form. Relevant research Yahoo! 1. 20 Websites to Help You Master User Interface Design - Six Revis. By Jacob Gube As web technologies progress, websites and web applications are becoming more responsive, providing us with more ways and techniques to interact with the users.
Form, more than ever, has been superseded by function. The following websites deal with interface design, user experience, user-centered design, usability, and everything in between – all with the goal of enhancing the user’s interface. 1. Boxes and Arrows Boxes and Arrows is a peer-written journal and a premier source for information on interaction design, usability, and information design. 2. UX Magazine deals in the topic of user experience. 3. UXmatters is a non-profit web magazine devoted to sharing information on effective user experience techniques and becoming a leading resource for User Interface (UX) professionals. 4. A List Apart – the leading resource on standards-based design and development articles – has a User Science topic that covers various parts of designing the user’s interface. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Usabilitypost.com | Design and usability blog. Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)