Basic Website Usability Tips

Website Usability

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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.

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