Website Design, Website Development

Don’t make me think! The unbreakable rules of usable web design

How do you present raw text on a webpage? It’s not as simple as you might think. Let’s start with the two things you should NEVER do :

1. Type clumps of text in the same font, and font size, so that nothing jumps out off the computer screen
2. Use bolds, italics, different colours to highlight a multitude of things

The key here is that in both cases, you are making everything look either equally unimportant or equally important – in other words, they both amount to the same thing: your reader won’t read it because they don’t know what their reading or why they’re reading it!

Visual hierarchy

Now you may be really proud of your site content, and think that everything in it is important. But that’s not how humans work when they take in information. They need a sense of what’s important and how things are organised. Why? Because it makes for a quicker process of scanning the page for revealing words and phrases. It allows the visitor to make their own sense of the content, without reading every single word.

So you can’t have a single dull page of solid, boring text on your website that looks the same wherever the eye settles on the screen. Equally, a page dominated by poorly designed or overly bold graphics and typography will distract and repel visitors looking for cold, hard information.

Short and sweet beats user boredom

Long web pages ask too much of your visitors. They have to remember too much information that scrolls off the screen as they move down through the text. Users easily lose their sense of context and wonder why they are wasting their time on your website. A user-centred website keeps pages as close to the same length as the standard computer screen as possible.

The freestanding web page

You might think of your homepage as the launchpad to the rest of your site. But what about all the other pages? Are they just dead ends? Because dead-ends are like black holes that swallow up all your client and sales prospects.

Not all of your visitors enter your website through your homepage. Depending on what type of keywords they use, search engines can direct them to any number of pages throughout your site. This is why it is so important that each one of your pages is totally freestanding.

Each of your web pages should act as a mini-launchpad to the rest of your site. A web page that doesn’t incite your visitors to another part of your site is simply a dead end, and the browser window that displays it will be shut down in a matter of seconds. Another lost prospect.