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Homepage Usability
You might want to read Homepage Usability just for the entertainment of watching web usability guru Jakob Nielsen deconstruct the homepages of fifty major sites. Or you could read it for some invaluable advice on web design -- I learned a lot from it, as I think even seasoned web designers will.
Homepage Usability begins with 113 tips on homepage design, some of them obvious and some not so obvious, and most of them applicable more broadly than homepages. Here are two of the shorter ones:
Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage. For example, use photos of identifiable people who have a connection to the content as opposed to models or generic stock photos. People are naturally drawn to photos, so gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.Nielsen and Tahir then look at some statistics on the fifty sites considered. These statistics are used to make recommendations, following Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience, that "most users spend more of their time on other sites." Here's a sample:Don't use clever phrases and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying. For example, the "Dream, Plan, & Go" category on Travelcity might sound catchy to a marketing person, but it's not as straightforward as "Vacation Planning." Every time you make users ponder the meaning behind vague and cutesy phrases, your risk alienating or losing them altogether. Users quickly lose patience when they must click on a link just to figure out what it means. That isn't to say that homepage text should be bland, but it must be informative and should be unambiguous.
Link FormattingAll this packs a remarkable amount of useful information into the first 50 pages, but the vast bulk of Homepage Usability, some 250 pages more, consists of analyses of the fifty chosen homepages. These follow a standard format. A full-page screen-shot faces a brief commentary, discussion of the page TITLE and tagline (if any), and a pictorial (overlay plus pie chart) breakdown of screen "real estate" into operating system and browser controls, welcome and site identity, navigation, content of interest, advertising and sponsorship, self promotion, and unused/filler. Then follow either two or four pages with detailed commentary: the screen-shots are repeated on the left-hand pages with elements numbered, and the right-hand pages have comments on them. Many of these are trivial and site-specificNext to the use of colored text, the underline is the second-most important cue to users that text is clickable, and 80% of the homepages underlined the links. We continue to recommend that links be underlined, except possibly in navigation bars that use a design that makes it more than commonly obvious where users can click.
Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.
"This Go button's color isn't noticeable enough - there should be much more contrast with the background color."some of them amusingly so
"In general, oil companies would best avoid photos that show large dark shadows in the water next to their rigs."Others are more general
"Don't have a special Shop link when there is a product section. The natural thing for users is to find the product first and then decide to buy it."The sites covered are mostly those of corporates or media organisations - Ebay, ExxonMobil, ESPN, IBM, Victoria's Secret, and CNNfn, to name a few -- but some government departments are included and there's a good sprinkling of English-language sites outside the United States, such as those of the BBC and Australian supermarket chain Coles. The vast bulk of the analysis is, however, just as relevant for other kinds of organisations -- certainly for the university at which I work and the charity for which I do volunteer work, but also for my personal sites.
Finally, a comment on the physical book. A large square volume, 25cm a side, with colour everywhere, Homepage Usability is really nicely laid out. I'm not generally a fan of books with a lot of graphics and screen-shots, but here they are used to good effect, demonstrating how some things can still be done much more effectively in print than online.
You can order this book from Fatbrain. Check out Danny's other Internet and publishing reviews. Want to see your review in this space? Check out our book review guidelines first :)
nothing about pop-ups?
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
hehe... Yes, this is a blatant ad, but I used to work for them, and I still feel a little company loyalty.
For a good service that provides what isn't, strictly speaking, usability data, try http://www.webcriteria.com. They do computerized testing of your web site that checks for "clutter" and fluff. It tells you how long an average user takes to read your page, how long it takes an average user to surf through your site to find a specific piece of information, or for commerce sites, it will even tell you how hard it is to place an order.
Yes, it's a blatant ad, and I don't even work there anymore, I just think it's a great service. (Plus, they have the coolest programmers on the planet, programming AI that does everything.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
This not meant to be flamebait, but this site is over 4 years old, and the interface and usability has not gotten any better (it wasn't that good to begin with).
He notoriously overcompensates on a strictness in useability which typically mandates sucking all of the fun out of your web pages. Jakob seems to be stuck on information delivery in its distilled form, which simply isn't paying the bills for many sites out there.
most of the time people who determine what is and what is not good for web design dont have a clue, or are obsessed with old standards and old browsers. (ie you shouldnt use frames)
I will say the suggestions mentioned here however are not bad.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Especially the sections regarding Americans with Disabilities act compliance... Something lacking in most current websites.
As for the author's credits, Nielsen is widely acknowledged to be a guru in the field. Check out his website, UseIt, for lots of more usability-related stuff.
is not the cheapest place you can buy this book. Check out AddAll for a price comparison.
I think this book, or something similar, should be standard issue when you reg a domain name. Whether or not you follow the advice given, it is good for ppl to know when they are straying off the path of what an average webuser (note: not a slashdotter) would grasp. They may still choose to do this, but at least they will then know that they could be alienating general users.
One example is that Slashdot does not follow much of these guidelines. Thats okay, cause they know their target audience is tech, but most sites aren't.
I really think a lot of sites put too much time into making something neat, and not enough into making it easy to use. This book could really help. I plan on buying it.
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
Is it just me, or does Jakob Nielson say less and less with the same amount of words as time goes on? We've heard his trip before, over and over. Do we really another book from him telling us not build sites using any post-1996 technology?
Over the years, I've slowly developed an active dislike for the man. Should we really keep from using current technology in order to be backwards compatible with the 2.3% of all users who are incapable of upgrading their browser? How can innovation occur if we confine ourselves to Nielson's 256 color, 1995 view of the web? Can you really trust someone who includes the string "discount usability engineering" in the meta keywords on his site to give you good advice on web design?
Certainly there are applications for which the most minimal distillation of information is preferable (yes, I use lynx from time to time as well - put your flame thrower down), but come on - let's move forward.
I write trance music.
Of course they are common sense. Unforunately, few people in ANY field have common sense, they are too busy worrying about having the latest greatest product.
/.. They have the common sense to know that the layout works for the site and not to change it JUST to make the site look newer or cooler.
I read above someone complaining about the layout here on
Most markettoids don't have that common sense...at least with this book you have tangible prrof that these guys don't know about UI and shouldn't be dictating it...and that goes along with graphic designers that now think that writting a web page is as easy to do as using Quark or Illustrator, ya shouldleave it to the experts.
So yeah, it should be common sense, but it ain't.
clif
I think of claris homepage, which makes me think of the good old days of tags and animated rainbow horizontal rules.
Which brings up a reasonable point: most people aren't going to do a damned thing about usability unless their silly authoring tools support it. If you take away the intimacy with your site's workings that hand coding brings, people think a lot less about what it is they're building, and how it should work. When you grab the table tool and create a jazzy layout in a few clicks, you distance yourself from the logical process of building a page. H1 just means bigger font, right?
Dreamweaver and such should enforce good practices, but they don't.
there's more than one way to do me.
People are naturally drawn to photos, so gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.
Phsaw. Like most homepages have "critical content."
Is it just me, or does the majority of the comments made by the author point out rudimentary common sense ideas?
/. wouldn't fall into this description, but I would imagine that many (or even most) Web developers do not fall into the /.-reader category.
First off, if you haven't read the book (neither have I), you can't comment on the depth of the information in it, since the review is very brief. On the other hand, go out and surf the Web a bit. The sad fact is that most people don't know these fundamentals.
The problem is that most Web designers, who, it seems, have little or no knowledge of HCI issues are taking the same approach to Web pages that TV producers take to TV. Flashy, little content, lots of bright shiny things to look at. The problem is that TV is totally passive, all a TV program needs to do is make you look at it, and stay there slack-jawed and glassy-eyed while a puddle of drool collects in your lap.
Web sites are delivering information, and more and more, allowing people to do things. It is an interactive format that is far more sophisticated than TV, particularly when you start doing things like commerce.
If you want flashy, dumb pictures to mesmerize and bedazzle your audience toss out the Web site and replace it with a single Flash animation. If you want to provide real information and allow your users to accomplish something useful and productive, study Human-Computer Interface design and actually learn something, because you are ultimately providing a computer application.
Even sites from people who should know better, like Netscape and Microsoft have lots of real usability problems.
The crowd here on
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"Discount usability" is a term Jakob uses for a specific method of usability testing.
I'm not a big fan, but I wouldn't discount his whole approach just because he puts that term in his site keywords.
If you have a large list of links on one page, PLEASE use different colors for visited and unvisited links. This is helpful for forgetful people like me who accidentally click on the same link twice.
Also, make it so you, the user can resize the font. NOt sure how it works, but I've seen my share of pages where moving the font size up and down doesn't work at all. People with poor eyesight will be thankful.
Also, do not have links open up in a new browser window unless absolutely necessary. If I want to click on a link to open in a new window, I'll do shift-click. You don't have to do it for me. I guess people assume they want their website to be on everyone's browser at all times, so links away from the website open up yet ANOTHER window(or in any case of a site on cjb.net, you'll get about 20 pop up windows in addition).
And don't try to jam links to everything on the index.html page. Spread it out a bit, in a logical manner. Every gaming site(which all look the same) love to do this.
Don't have excessive amounts of porn banners just to make a few bucks you won't see in referrals. You'll lose out on the audience of people who surf at work.
Not that I'm surprised or anything, but 75% of the serious posts so far dismiss the ideas in the book as common sense.
Have any of you actually read the book?
Come one, people.
As for this book...it's pretty, but it's not aimed for developers and professionals. It is, as many have pointed out, very common-sense. This however makes it perfect for Marketing people who make a big deal out of lots of pretty pictures and gratuitous animation. Internet common sense is often lacking in those who grew up designing for paper and print. For better guides for techies, try Neilen's other books: Designing Web Usability and Usability Engineering (a very technical guide to designing interfaces). Both of those show that while he's an extremist, he knows what he's talking about. Additonally, the book Don't Make Me Think! is an excellent reference for designing usable web sites and applications (and it's a damn amusing read).
On the other end of the spectrum is the book Fresh Styles for Web Designers which is basically some guy collecting a bunch of pretty websites and telling you that they're cool and don't sacrifice usability (he's lying - 90% of them are almost totally unnavigable). Pretty pictures, though.
Reality is somewhere in the middle.
It's a tough field right now. On one hand you've got Joe Corporate-User who believes that if he's got MS Word's "Save as HTML" feature, he's as good a web developer as you are. You've got software engineers who would, given the chance, make every web interface beveled and battleship grey. You've got web designers who are still stuck in the 1996 mode of "if the website looks cool that will be enough to bring in users." The real challenge in web development is juggling these people and producing something that satisfies users and manages not to be mind-bogglingly dull.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
If they can figure out the site then its ok... of those people, only one has a web site.
the most common sense thing to do is run it by people who will give constructive critisism
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Jakob Nielsen has always perplexed me. I remember reading Flash: 99% Bad and being totally confused. If Flash is so "bad", why does everyone use it? Slashdot just linked to the flash-enabled iSee project by Applied Autonomy today, and no one complained.
One of Nielsen's famous complaints is that every web site should be compatible with the "Back" button - this is absurd, not even Slashdot is compatible with the Back button. Try posting a comment, hitting Preview, and then hitting back - Slashdot erases the contents of your comment window.
Admittedly, some of his ideas are very good. We DO need a way to deliver rich web content to dialup users, and right now a 100K web page is the wrong way to do that. Some of his other ideas - banning Flash for example - make less sense.
And why the obsession with this "any browser" business. Let's face the facts: some versions of Netscape 4 don't render Style Sheets at ALL. Their miserable failure of an attempt to implement CSS was noble but it just didn't work out. If I publish a browser with the ability to read nothing but the letter "Q", do you need to rewrite slashdot to be compatible with me? Of course, this is an absurd argument, but it cuts directly to the point: it's OK for web sites to prefer browsers that are more standards compliant. Slashdot, for instance, gets over 85% of its' hits from Internet Explorer - for good reason.
Anyway, Nielsen is certainly a vast improvement over "HTML for Dummies" and let's hope he gets past his own reactionism and continues to provide a valuable resource to the Web Design community.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
1. this is a $45 book ,and amazon has 21 souls looking to unload theirs at $15... sounds like a one time read at best.
2. make it an ebook - what is it with all these people - negroponte leading the charge - extolling electronic/cyber/wired life and grinding trees to pass out their gospels? dymitri or no dymitri, people pay for ebooks.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
While its good to see Jakob Nielsen not just recommending Mosaic-era web pages this doesn't really seem different from anything he's written about online or published in the last few years. As an information architect I've read a lot of Nielsen and just see him as way to strict. Not all web pages have the sole purpose of efficiently distributing content. For a lot websites (like www.pepsi.com) reinforcing the companies brand is the primary goal and just about every website has it as a strong second or third.
Usability experts and designers like Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, and Bruce Tognazzini seem to me to be a lot more realistic in their mixing of user goals and business goals. If the business goals don't get met there is no company to meet the users goals. I wish Jakob would stop issuing these outdated proclamations ("If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.") and start taking a more realistic view of what it takes to get a site to achieve both the users and the businesses goals.
However, I think Nielsen has a point with the links, so I'm not sure I'm going to use it when I redesign some stuff.
You have a important point about changing all colors. However, that makes a problem, because instead of insisting on that the links should be blue, I think that the important point there is that you shouldn't change the user's default (which will, in most cases, indeed be blue). But what the heck, does the visuall design really matter that much... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Actually, one of the reasons slashdot is so popular is that it is so usable. I know Jakob made that point in his last book _Designing_Usability_ that the most popular websites are often the most usable.
Okay...lets try to use some of Jacob's principles on Slashdot. Look at the homepage. First of all, you got the Slashdot logo and text in the upperleft-hand corner. Its obvious where you are. This is a news site so the news should be the most obvious part of the page. It is. In fact the news takes what looks like 75% of the width of the page, probably more.
Next, Slashdot makes great use of what Jakob calls scanning. Jakob has noted that visitors don't often read all the text on the page but that they rather they scan for the information they want. So the important information should be underlined, italicized, bolded, or put in a different color. This happens on the Slashdot homepage. The headings are the most obvious in that they are white with a green background which contrasts with the text which is black on white. Then at the bottom of the news entries you have "Read More" (which is an active verb, BTW). And its highlighted.
Another principle that Jakob explains is that visiters like to have an idea of where they are going before they get there. At this, Slashdot seems to excel at. For instance, before the main body of the homepage loads, you already get an idea of what topics today's news covers by the icons in the upper right hand corner. Today I get an icon for The Internet, Linux, Microsoft, News, and Privacy. While it would be a little better for these icons to have titles the tooltips serve well for if you don't know what the icon is for. Also, these icons correspond directly to the icons next to the news items. In addition, each link in the news stories have relevant text underlined so you have an idea on where that link will take you.
Slashdot is also fast and for me takes under a second to load. It has little use of graphics and these graphics are cached to improve load time for other visits.
People who feel comfortable coming to this website have good reason, from Jakob's principles. To an online friend of mine I showed a post I made. Next thing I know, he replied to it. He told me he never used this website before.
So if there's a usability problem with this website, I would be interested in knowing what it is. Because I'm not finding anything.
(before posting this I notice a bold heading below the comment window that says "Important Stuff:" that says what comments should be like. These kinds of things make slashdot such a usable site)
Timothy, if it's "your own home page", it probably doesn't have to be usable to anybody except you, so all the usability standards in the world don't mean jack squat.
"Your company's home page" might make sense as a target for this, but 99% of the people reading this (including me, I admit) don't have anything to say on their OWN home page that's that crucial.
How do you improve homepage usability, if your homepage is useless? (like mine)
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Well thats kinda my point...Quark is NOT easy, but graphic designers pick it up all the time. It takes work to learn how to use.
HTML is the same way. Just because you know how to make a pretty table, doesn't make you a Web Expert any more than being able to construct a sentence out of a dictionary gives you the ability to be a good writer.
I have to disagree with UseIt.com. It isn't just ugly, but its practically unusable. Very little use of white space and everything is cluttered. It reminds me of reading footnotes in an encyclopedia. I gave up trying to get through this after a few lines of text.
Anywho, not to knock graphic designers, but I think any professional site should have a usability specialist managing all others within the site, be it HTML experts or the designers.
Looks OK to me with Mozilla 0.9.6. It uses Flash, though. Many web designers who use Flash neglect to provide an alternate non-Flash page.
- "Sections" and "Topics" are confusing. I have yet to find a good reason why both subgroupings need to exist. Also, the fact that some Sections and Topics have different page colors than the homepage while others don't is annoying and confusing. Color should be used consistently the same or consistently different.
And let you think I have nothing positive to say:I've always been a fan of usability. I kept a copy of Psychology of Everyday Things on my bedside table. However, I've noticed some unpleasant patterns over the past couple of decades:
Alas, all the evidence is that, even if usability is on the list of criteria for purchasing (which it seldom is at all), it is way low on the list. It may even be a de facto negative.
Vincent Flanders asserts that web pages are different: that if people don't like it, they're gone. Well, maybe, but is there any evidence that usable commercial web pages sell better than less usable ones? Has anyone done a study? I thought the value of usability in commercial products was self-evident, too, until the evidence built up that I was flat-out wrong.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
(/me imagines John Ashcroft pronouncing <blink> to be a terrorist act)
- undoware.ca
Slashdot is not the pinnacle of anything, especially not commercial site design. Arguing that "/. isn't 'back-button-compatible'" means nothing.
324006
On your concern of page fonts being small, have you ever used the Opera web browser?
There's a little pull-down menu in the toolbar that lets you resize pages. It's similar to the zoom pull-down that you'll find in Word or any modern word processor. It's really convenient. Opera also carries many other little features that can make reading poorly-designed pages more pleasant, like buttons to toggle images or page formatting on/off.
Granted, this doesn't fix the problem of dumb webmasters, but it does help in reading poor pages.
I like when I can plug my favorite underused web browser.
-Grant/JimTheta
My stupid web site
It'd sure be nice to see a summary of the list of flaws from the beginning of the book? I wanted to see if my pet peeves were in there:
Load Time
I hope Nielsen made prominent comments about load time. If I were the guy approving the design of the company's external web site, I'd do the final review offsite where one would have to use a dial-up connection to view the site. That would go a lo-o-o-ng way to reduce the amount of gratuitous graphics that most corporate web sites shove onto their homepages.
Not Testing with Popular Browsers
Not testing with all the popular browsers should be a misdemeanor, at least. (IE dominance aside, would it kill 'em to at least try out the top three or four?) True story: Compaq's home page used to have a link to text-only version of the same page. Unfortunately, all the links on the ``text-only'' page pointed to pages that were lousy with graphics and tons of Java/Javascript that crashed the browser that they shipped with their UNIX workstations. So much for text-only. The day after I called their office to point out that I was unable to view their web site using the software they shipped with their OS, the text-only link disappeared from their home page. I can only imagine the conversation between the manager and web page maintainer:
Boss: ``Hey! People that follow the text-only link from the home page have their browsers crash. Fix it.''
Maintainer: ``Sure, boss. Just take a few seconds.... Done!''
And Compaq people who I have to deal with wonder why I laugh when they suggest ``you know, this information is available on the web site''. The thing that pissed me off the most about this incident was that the pages wouldn't load using a browser that they were shipping on the OS CDs. Web pages on the CDs had links to pages on the corporate site that would crash your browser. Pathetic.
Teeny, Tiny Fonts
Then there are the web sites whose designers have 20/5 vision (or better) and force you to view the site with the smallest possible font that your browser is capable of displaying. Guess visitors will actually be able decide for themselves what font size is best for the viewer sometime before the heat death of the universe. If we want the ability to choose in our lifetimes, though, I'm betting that it'll only happen after someone shoots all these arrogant designers (``Listen! I'm an artiste! What school of design did you attend?'') and pry their pet style sheets from their cold, dead fingers. (BTW, the line forms behind me.)
Why do I mention these? Because it appears that 99% of the companies with these broken web pages couldn't care less whether users have an easy time accessing their sites. If they actually gave a damn, they'd stop creating web sites that didn't appear to purposely antagonize their visitors.
Gotta wonder: Who was it that posted the web page ``Why Web Sucks''? Hopefully it's still around. IMHO, it's still relevant.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
What browser are you using? I just ask because I'm stuck with Netscape 4.7 on my Sun at work, and it loads lots of pages very slowly because its HTML rendering engine is super slow (and sucks especially with tables). But I know that if I move to a Windows machine elsewhere in our T1-connected lab, it won't have a problem at all.
-Grant/JimTheta
My stupid web site
And TV commercials interrupt the flow of my favorite shows.
Life can be hard sometimes.
The dot.coms are gone, but they left us one legacy. That's the idea that those who write websites are developers. If that's true, then they should start treating their websites as software engineering projects.
Software engineering in a nutshell:
1) Analysis. What are your project requirements? Who is your market? What are their needs? If it's not addressed here it shouldn't be in the final website. If your site is going to adhere to web standards, req them here. If it's going to support specific browsers instead, req it here and say why.
2) Design. Before you write one byte of HTML or PHP you need to get the design down on paper. Document all pages, modules, classes, databases, interfaces, etc., before you move on to the next step.
3) Coding. This is more than just knowing your language. Code review. Unit testing. Etc.
4) Verification and Validation. No go an test your website. Does it meet all requirements? Does it work for the Konqueror, Mozilla and Opera? Does it work on a monochrome monitor, or for Lynx? If not you had better have that in the requirements. Without looking at any of the design or code, a tester should be able to formally validate the website.
5) Maintenance. You may actually get bug reports! Fix them when you do and don't just tell the reporter to get a bigger monitor, switch to a different OS, or to use a different browser.
6) Repeat. Websites are dynamic beasties. Much more so than applications. Go all the way back to step one.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You mean an actual *book* with pages and all?
How retro...
How oxymoronic...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
The Homepage Usability book has many guidelines that would make the web a much better place. About half of them are "Don't" guidelines, like:
A portion of the book is about what they call the site's "Tag Line". They claim that all homepages should have the company/organization name or logo near the top of the page, with a breif description of exactly the company/site actually does. They say that people who've never been to the site need to be able to quickly look at the top and see what company/organization this is, and what they can expect to get from the site. I hadn't really thought about this much, but it seems to make a lot of sense, particularly for a smaller site like mine where nobody would be familiar with the name. Robin and I talked about it for about an hour over Thansgiving and we came up with "PJRC: Electronic Projects, Resources and Open-Source Code, With Components Available For Worldwide Delivery". I've shown the site to some people over the years, and usually they initially ask some questions about what it is. I showed it to someone just the other day, and this tag line at the top made the site's purpose immediately obvious.
Another really insightful part of the book is about what to put into the title. They say you must begin with the most important word, and never something like "Welcome" or "The".
They claim that all sites should have search on the homepage, and they give some suggestions about how to make it appear. They don't go into detail much about the search, probably because Neilson's company sells a report about search usability.
They have some other really insightful suggestions... here is a short list of some:
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I count seven distinct fields on the top of the /. homepage and several more as you scroll down. I have been using /. for several years and have never used any of sidebars except "Freshmeat."
Actually, your beef with the right side of the is not that there are so many Slashboxes but that there's no way close by to turn them on or off. You have to go into your preferences to do that. In fact, you can even disable Slashboxes entirely.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It may seem like common sense, but good page design is hard to implement. In our classes, we make sure that we always have representatives from at least two firms registered for any class. The students then do a usability analysis on pages that they did not create.
When the first student makes "dumb mistakes" on a page, the designer is sure that it's a fluke. When the third person makes the same "mistakes", it's funny to see the designer's jaw drop. Usability is not about being pretty, nor is it about what is expected.
Good usability incorporates page purpose, site purpose, and user expectations to make it easier to accomplish the purpose for the user. If I can't get to my desired item easily, return to it, and help other people find it, the site is not usable for me. End of story.
That thing about oil rigs and shadows in the water? It may seem trivial, but if a major purpose of the website is improved public relations with a potentially hostile audience, little things take on bigger meaning....
I think a lot of people really neglect the usefulness of their home page, in that they can make it into a really quality Start Page for themselves, in addition to the typical home page information for others.
Here is a temporary link to my home page. Some of the functions aren't working. My ISP got hosed.
The top section has the stuff that I want others to see and use. Nothing too special. The box on the right is filler material (that displays a funny movie when working correctly). The left hand side is all the different links I usually go to in an average week.
That's right. Instead of using bookmarks, this comes up as my home page, and I can easily select my favorite destinations that I use on a regular basis. (And, at the same time, endorse them for others to use.)
Bottom left is some articles I wrote (mostly on Segfault, which is currently down).
I think the idea though is that people should customize a page that they use, if not just for themselves, which contains all the links they commonly use. It really makes surfing through your favorites easier. (And marking something as a "real" favorite versus a bookmark, which could be anything.)
(Freshmeat has had the same problem ever since it switched to its new software a few months back.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Make the title (that which appears in the title bar of your browser window) describe what the page is. At least on my browser, when you bookmark a page, this title is what appears in the bookmarks list. In this context, "Welcome", "Home", "Buy Online" etc. are very unhelpful, but "Acme Products Mail Order" lets me find your site again.
Others have commented on font - I'll just point to an example of how not to do it. Here is a story from Aviation Week. Notice how, having used a minscule font, they then add to the effect by using mid-grey for the text on a white background.
Checkout also the interface hall of shame, although this is aimed more at applications than web pages.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
If I go to a website that tries to override my browser's colors, I leave. Fuck them and whatever product they were trying to sell me.
Why? Because people who have any variation of color blindness will set their browser to use colors which they, the users, can distinguish. Most web sites never even consider this fact, and suddenly the users are faced with links, text, images, etc, which all look the same. (Consider a user with red-green color blindness going to a website that tries to "get in the Christmas spirit" by making the links red and green.)
Those websites need to die. I will not support them, visit them, nor refer them to others. I encourage everyone reading to do the same. The inconsiderate I-will-decide-what-you-display designers of those websites also need to die. I will torture them on sight with big flashing migraine-inducing strobe lights, and I encourage everyone reading to do the same.
The whole freaking point of HTML was to allow the end user to specify layout and appearance. The website designer specifies content, nothing else.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Here's how it works ... a web designer who thinks everyone who will visit their site is as artsy and as ably bodied as themselves suddenly gets into his trendy head that a teeny tiny font will be good so he can fit more whizz-bang widgets on a page.
Not being familiar with the use of "font-size: xx-small;" and similiar CSS attributes, they instead specify an absolute font size (eg, 6pt).
Then a visitor comes along whose browser doesn't allow font resizing. Internet Explorer foolishly will not scale absolute font sizes and will only scale relative font sizes. This shortcoming is what you are noticing. On the other hand Opera's zoom and Mozilla's font size increase (Ctrl + +) ride roughshod over what the designer wanted and display what the user wants.
That's the way the web works: The user sees what he wants to see, and how he wants to see it ... which is why absolute font sizes are a sign of a small-minded designer (and a broken user agent that can't scale them).
Now regarding his target demographic ... it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he (and a few of his friends) end up being the only people visiting the site.
Maximum Stories:
The default is 30. The main column displays 1/3rd of these at minimum, and all of today's stories at maximum.
Try making yours lower and see if it improves.
Not using Nested will speed you up as well.
I also submitted a review of this book to Slashdot a week or two ago, but mine got knocked back. My review was substantially more in-depth, but far less complimentary.
Anyway, you can read my review of Homepage Usability here.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
are really the only things that I think could be improved, and that's really because regular and new readers of slashdot need different things.
I think a link above Topic and Section on the story submission page would make it more understandable for first time submitters.
Sections (from what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong) is more about which Editor will look at your submission, as they have different sections as their responsibility, just like a newspaper. (as for those colours, I have no freakin idea, except that I do think Ask Slashdot should look a little different, as it's questions, not direct information)
Topics are really related to the subject matter, which I think can be a little intimidating for first time submitters, as there are a lot of variables on some submissions.
I recently submitted a story that was accepted, that would have fit under a couple of Topic headings.
It was News, but a lot of stuff is News. It was more important to people following Linux news, so that's what I submitted it under. But is also could have gone under Science or Technology.
I think it would be useful to have a little blurb to help submitters choose the most accurate Topic for Slashdot purposes.
With the navigation links, I'd like to see those become customised. For a new user, most of those links are useful. But for regulars, some of it is not so useful.
If I could tick boxes on what I want, I'd retain:
preferences
submit story
And below that I'd dump the section box altogether.
And I'd like a search box up high, above all links on the left, or just under them (I'd only have two if I could choose).
But for a new person, visiting the site for the first time (especially if they have never heard of it), different stuff is needed.
As for all the delightful goodness in Slashdot, I think most people have mentioned it all, aside from what I really love, which is news I can't always get ahold of easily and quickly. Slashdot gave me really great (fast, accurate, important) information on the American Attacks, I never had any trouble loading it during that time, when I was almost unable to use a lot of overseas sites like CNN (I know they said it didn't go down, but when it times out because it's so slow, it's the same thing to the viewer).
And if you spell like that, I'd say your brand comes across as illiterate and unobservant. It's Jakob, not Jokob, as any previous post could tell you. Your grammar could also do with some polishing.
Branding isn't usually information, except to marketroids.
A useful shopping or gaming site would:
Something which branding doesn't cover, if you just don't have what it takes.
Most sites don't have what's mentioned above.
Work on that and then start your branding.
Do you see people raving about their site? I never have. In fact I've been there a few times, looking for reports on their human rights abuses, but they're not on there.
I would guess a lot of hits Nike gets are from being in the news for their slave labour practices.
A hit count won't tell you whether your site is good or bad, only how many people have visited it.
If lots of people go to a filthy public toilet that could give you any disease of your choice, it doesn't mean it's a great public toilet, it just means they needed to go.
Your site can have graphics, but if it's heavy, people will leave before they fall asleep, waiting for it to load.
I can't really think of any time to use this design. If I have to wait around for a site to load, I'm off doing something else, and I won't be back.
Not necessarily. Both services have different objectives.
Bobby [http://www.cast.org/bobby/] is a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities. From their test homepage [http://bobby.cast.org/], a Bobby-approved website must:
* provide text equivalents for all non-text elements (i.e., images, animations, audio, video)
* provide summaries of graphs and charts
* ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color
* clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions) of non-text content
* organize content logically and clearly
* provide alternative content for features (e.g., applets or plug-ins) that may not be supported
The W3C validator [http://validator.w3.org/], on the other hand, ensures your webpages are syntactically correct and conform to their prescribed standards, such as XHTML 1.0 Strict. It does not place so much emphasis on accessibility, though it isn't ignored.
I would advise you to develop your webpages with the disadvantaged in mind. Make the web a better place for them and they will be grateful.
Cheers
CD
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Why didn't you just hit CTRL-N to open the offending page in a new normal window with scrollbars etc.? Seems a lot easier...
...because Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience doesn't apply to Slashdot. After all, most /. users spend 98% of their time on this site...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I noticed that when the changes first went up. Don't you think that's kind of ironic, when you think about the software development ideas many /. readers support and believe in, and the fact that one of their biggest benefits is rapid evolution of the product?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
even if you don't think it exists.
when a story is on slashdot, there's a lot of links to the items being discussed.
that's a lot of opportunities for someone to visit Nike when they are in the news so much.
you said:
Do you really think that they would get as many visitors to there site if it wasn't a flashy site? No way. and that's just not accurate
a lot of hits are first time visitors, they've never seen it before, so they don't know it's flashy.
branding is why Nike gets hits, it has nothing to do with their site.
but it could be aided by their frequent news items