Thursday, November 20, 2008

Don't Make Me Think? - Usability Guidelines

I was able to finish the book Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug in 3 day. It is an easy to read and short book with lots of practical usability guidelines. Author's web site has some more usability tips and a sample chapter of the book at http://www.sensible.com/.
Some of the usability guidelines are following,
  1. Don't make user think even for a fraction of millisecond with irrelevant details.
  2. Make things obvious in page design. If you can't make a page self evident then at least make it self explanatory.
  3. Page Design
    Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page using prominence, grouping, or nesting techniques
    Take advantage of the common conventions as it reduces users learning curve.
    Break pages into clearly defined areas
    Make obvious what is clickable
    Minimize visual clutter & noise
  4. For Navigation, putting navigational elements at standard places helps to find quickly.
  5. For Page Names,
    Every page needs a name
    Name needs to be at the right place
    Name needs to be prominent
    Name needs to match what the user clicked
  6. Use Visual indicator and Breadcrumbs to highlight where the user is. The difference between them is that Visual indicator points out the user location in the context of the site hierarchy while breadcrumbs points out the location from the home page.

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