Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Designing an effective Web site part 3 We’re almost finished with the guidelines for designing our e-commerce site’s Web page. In the last two columns you saw how to make sure your site is attractive, clean, easy to read, and not too flashy. We can now finish off with some generic comments about home pages for e-commerce sites. Let’s start with the subject of contrast. Contrast helps draw a reader’s eye and highlight areas we want to draw attention to. Contrast is both aesthetic and functional. You can use contrast to add visual interest to the pages and make documents easier to read. There are a number of ways to add contrast to your web pages, and these techniques can be used individually or in combination for both text and visuals. Shape is an effective contrast technique: purposefully change from serif to sans serif type, or contrast large and small graphics. Size and weight are also useful: change font sizes proportionally to the importance of the item they refer to (without going overboard, of course). Add visual interest to pages by using regular, bold, and italic text and use color to highlight important headlines or short text passages. The use of foreground and background images, patterns and colors can be helpful for contrast, too: emphasize text by putting it against a different color. Finally, use page position for emphasis or de-emphasis of an item. If you browse through successful sites on the Web you will see a common theme among them: navigation bars. Navigation bars sit at the top (and sometimes the left side or bottom) of the window and help move a reader to the most popular areas of the site (such as order desks, search screens, support areas, and so on). Navigation bars help readers move around the site easily and as such simplify the site enormously for both newcomers and veterans. Wherever possible provide "go back" and "go forward" links on your pages, especially when dependencies are involved. Always provide links to different site milestones for those arriving deep in the structure from a search engine like AltaVista and always have links to your home page on every page. This helps the person parachuted into the middle of your site to find the home page easily and quickly, adding to the utility of the site. It’s important for you to consider how your customers will behave when they visit your site. Users of web documents don’t just look at information, they interact with it in a way that has no paper document analog. Graphics and design elements are not there just on a Web page for visual appeal but are integral to the user’s experience and should be considered as important as the text content. Keep in mind that Web pages differ from books and other documents in one important aspect: hypertext links allow users to access a single page with no preamble so each Web page needs to be independent. For example, headers and footers need to be informative and elaborate, more so than in a book (on a web page copyright information, author, and so on are all necessary on almost every page). Most user interactions with Web pages involve navigating hypertext links between documents. The main interface problem in Web sites is the lack of a sense of where you are within the local organization of information. Clear, consistent icons, graphic identity schemes and graphic or text-based overview and summary screens can give the user confidence that they can find what they want without wasting time. A typical user should be able to easily return to the home page and other major navigation points in the site: present these links on every page. To this end you must design the hierarchy of the site to minimize steps through menu pages. (Studies show users prefer menus with at least five to seven links and they prefer a few dense screens of choices instead of many layers of simplified menus.) Remember that most users will not tolerate long delays. Studies show the frustration threshold for most tasks is about ten seconds. Web page designs that are not well tuned to network access speeds of typical users will be frustrating: if the typical browser is surfing with an analog mode, don’t include bitmaps on main pages, for example; if using an intranet with Fast Ethernet connectivity, graphics are no problem and can help the site’s look and feel. Users are usually not impressed with complexity for gratuitous reasons. The best Web designs are the ones users never notice. Use graphic headers as navigation aids and consistently apply them and hyperlink locations on every page. The interface disappears for the users. Build your pages on a consistent pattern of modular units that all share the same basic layout grid, graphic themes, editorial conventions, etc. To convince your readers that you have information that is reliable and accurate you need to design your Web site as carefully as any other type of communication, with the same high standards of editorial and design specs. A sloppy-looking site or one with typos and grammar errors does not inspire confidence. Finally, keep the same design and functionality throughout the site. Keep all links current: check them regularly, especially those to other sites. Make sure content is relevant; remove out of date items or archive them on a separate page. Well-designed sites allow direct links to the site editor’s e-mail or other facility and a method of obtaining feedback (feedback also means being prepared to respond to user inquiries and comments). Next column we wrap up our Web design guidelines and start selling lots of stuff. |
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