Posted by Offer Tsuriel on October 26, 2009
Nielsen (2000c) suggests that the designer of navigation systems should consider the following information that a site user wants to know:
- Where am I? The user needs to know where they are on the site and this can be indicated by highlighting the current location and clear titling of pages. This is context. Consistency of menu locations on different pages is also required to aid cognition. Users also need to know where they are on the web. This can be indicated by a logo, which by convention is at the top or top left of a site.
- Where have I been? This is difficult to indicate on a site, but for task-oriented activities such as purchasing a product it can show the user that they are at the nth stage of an operation such as making a purchase.
- Where do I want to go? This is the main navigation system which gives options fo~ future functions.
Posted by Offer Tsuriel on
According to Lucy Carruthers, usability consultant at Foviance (www.foviance.com), the benefits of eyetracking are as follows:
Usability evaluations typically involve think-aloud protocols -whereby users describe their thoughts and actions as they carry out a set of tasks. This gives the facilitator a good view of the reasoning and driving factors behind the participant’s actions.
However, some types of behaviours are difficult to measure efficiently with think-aloud alone because participants may not be able to verbalize part of their thought processes and/or because some behaviours never reach consciousness.
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Fast loading website
Research from Akamai (2006) shows that content needs to load rapidly -within four seconds otherwise site experience suffers and visitors will leave the site. The research also showed, however, that high product price/shipping costs and problems with shipping were both considered more important than speed. However, for sites perceived to have poor performance, many shoppers said they were less likely to visit the site again (64%) or buy from the e-retailer (62%).
These practical tips for designers developed by accessibility specialist Trenton Moss of Webcredible (Webcredible, 2004) show how approaches to coding pages can make a difference. So make sure your site designers optimize for speed, not simply focusing on visual design.
- Layout your pages with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)’ not tables
- Don’t use images to display text
- Call up decorative images through CSS
- Use contextual selectors (use classes to format)
- Use shorthand CSS properties
- Minimize white space [within code]. line returns and comment tags
- Use relative call-ups Remove unnecessary META tags and META content Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents Use / at the end of directory links.
