Basic Website Usability Tips
Website Usability
Posted by Adam Hayes
Here is a good list of important basic design usability tips.
I'm doing a massive cleanup of my bookmarks, and realized that tons of really good content just disappears off the web. So, I'm going to put the content where I know it won't disappear. Here are some great usability tips I grabbed from Jens Meiert.
- Use of whitespace between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increases comprehension by almost 20 %
- A format of 95 characters per line is read significantly faster than shorter line lengths; however, there are no significant differences in comprehension, preference, or overall satisfaction, regardless of line length.
- Narrative presentation enhances comprehension and memory. Narrative advertisements produce more positive attitude about the brand and a higher incidence of intent to purchase.
- Users will wait longer for better content. Users will wait between 8-10 seconds for information on the web, depending on the quality of the information. Most of the time we tell people that they have 7 seconds to convince the user that they have found what they are looking for. It appears that sites that have proven that they have great content, gain an extra 1-4 seconds if the user knows that the content is going to be good.
- Consumer purchase behavior is driven by perceived security, privacy, quality of content and design, in that order. This is a no brainer in my book. No matter how nice or "functional" a website is, if their "SSL or HTTPS" website is broken because of insecure items on the page, I don't buy. Period. I've purchased from websites that are plain ugly because they are the only company that provides the items that I am looking for, but I could still tell that they secured their site.