113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group) While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high. Your homepage is often your first — and possibly your last — chance to attract and retain each customer, rather like the front page of a newspaper.
One of the biggest values of a newspaper's front page is the priority given to top news items. All homepages would benefit from being treated like a front page of a major newspaper, with editors who determine the high-priority content and ensure continuity and style consistency. About These Guidelines Even small changes to homepages can have drastic effects. While we encourage you to use these guidelines as a checklist when designing your homepage, recognize that they are written in an abbreviated manner here. All said, these are just guidelines, not axioms. What's Not in These Guidelines Determining Homepage Content General Web Design Vertical Industry Segments Accessibility Search. 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design - PSDTUTS. Usability.gov. Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) 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? Top 10 Web Design Mistakes. Summary: Sites are getting better at using minimalist design, maintaining archives, and offering comprehensive services. However, these advances entail their own usability problems, as several prominent mistakes from 2003 show. Here's my list of ten ways that websites have been particularly annoying recently. 1. Unclear Statement of Purpose Many companies, particularly in the high tech industry, use vague or generic language to describe their purpose.
A strong mental model can grow from small seeds, as each additional design element adds to the user's existing understanding of a site. 2. Archives add substantial value to a site with very little extra effort. Changing the URL when archiving content causes linkrot. 3. Without dates on articles, press releases, and other content, users have no idea whether the information is current or obsolete. 4. It's great that websites are now using smaller pictures. The left photo is from the whitehouse.gov site. When using photos on the Web: 5. 6. 7.