In Your home page is NOT your index; it's your store front, I discussed some of the goals of homepage design and navigation. Today we'll consider how users navigate within the site. As my friend and fellow developer Wayne Smallman correctly surmised—when commenting and following up on that entry, the pages inside your site are like the aisles or departments within a store. Each page needs to be identified so that users know both where they are and where they can go.
Port of Entry: Not everyone uses the front door.
In a real world store, visitors typically enter through one or two main doors then follow the signs or clues to the department they need. But in the online world, they may enter through the front door, crawl in a side window, shimmy down the chimney or teleport in via Google. Each page on your site is a potential entrance. In some cases, you may get less traffic through the front door than through other pages. For example, last month 58% of those who visited http://www.case.edu/visit/ entered through the main page. The other 42% entered the site through one of 44 other pages. Here on the Web Development Blog, visitors entered through 152 different pages—only 8.6% came in through the main page.
To serve these users we need not replicate the experience of the home page, but we can offer wayfinding tools that will help them and other users browse the site.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
On Aesthetics and Usability in Design
I hope everyone enjoys this (in my opinion) very useful video podcast. The parent site WebProNews has an entire series of these (mostly dealing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This one is less than ten minutes long, deals with usability issues, and is definitely worth watching.
Some of the things I found most useful for Case Web site maintainers is the concept of "don't do what YOU want, do what's best for the client [or in this example the university]!" Also, when she talks about friends who ask her to evaluate their Web sites, she comes out and says "What difference does it make what I think about their website?" Usability rules: The most important consideration for her is, "can I properly use the web site"?
Another thing I found particularly interesting was regarding her opinion on use of images in a website. The host asks her to comment on particular problem or issues with the use of images on a Web site, and she responds "One major problem would be, too many... the other is not enough". Timely, considering a recent post by Heidi that talked about the importance of using graphics to illustrate a point -- even if using merely a thumbnail. Check out THAT earlier post by the way, if you haven't already.
One key point, and in some ways the most important thing; making something visually compelling doesn't necessarily make it better. Sure, pretty is nice, but does it "convert"?
Some of the things I found most useful for Case Web site maintainers is the concept of "don't do what YOU want, do what's best for the client [or in this example the university]!" Also, when she talks about friends who ask her to evaluate their Web sites, she comes out and says "What difference does it make what I think about their website?" Usability rules: The most important consideration for her is, "can I properly use the web site"?
Another thing I found particularly interesting was regarding her opinion on use of images in a website. The host asks her to comment on particular problem or issues with the use of images on a Web site, and she responds "One major problem would be, too many... the other is not enough". Timely, considering a recent post by Heidi that talked about the importance of using graphics to illustrate a point -- even if using merely a thumbnail. Check out THAT earlier post by the way, if you haven't already.
One key point, and in some ways the most important thing; making something visually compelling doesn't necessarily make it better. Sure, pretty is nice, but does it "convert"?
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