Don’t make me think

What’s the most important thing to make sure that a Web site is easy to use? The answer is simple. It’s... Don’t make me think! It is the first law of usability.

A Web page should be self-evident, obvious, and self-explanatory. Users are able to “get it” without expending any effort thinking about it.

When you’re creating a site, your job is to get rid of the question marks. Users look at a page that doesn’t make them think, thus there are the thought balloons over their head with positive signs. When they’re looking at a page that makes them think, all the thought balloons have question marks in them.

Needless source of question marks over people’s heads is links and buttons that aren’t obviously clickable. Users should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable—or not.

People don’t like to puzzle over how to do things. If the people who built the site don’t care enough to make things obvious and easy, it can erode the confidence in the site and its publishers.

Visitors to a site shouldn’t spend their time thinking about, like: Where am I? Where should I begin? Where did they put _____? What are the most important things on this page? Why did they call it that?

Your goal should be for each page to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user3 will know what it is and how to use it.

If you’re doing something original or ground-breaking or something very complicated, you have to settle for self-explanatory where it takes a little thought to “get it”—but only a little.

If you can’t make a page self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

On the Internet, the competition is always just one click away, so if you frustrate users they’ll head somewhere else.

Some people will tough it out at sites that frustrate them. Many people who encounter problems with a site tend to blame themselves and not the site.

Making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better. Using a site that doesn’t make us think about unimportant things feels effortless, whereas puzzling over things that don’t matter to us tends to sap our energy and enthusiasm—and time.

Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them.

There is a big difference between how we think people use Web sites and how they actually use them.

We create sites as people are going to pore and investigate over each page, while (if we’re lucky) they only glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for.

If you want to design effective Web pages, remember users don’t read pages, they scan them because they’re usually in a hurry; they know they don’t need to read everything; they’ve been scanning newspapers, magazines, and books all their lives to find the parts they’re interested in, and they know that it works.

If you want to design effective Web pages, remember users don’t make optimal choices, they satisfice. As soon as they find a link that seems like it might lead to what they’re looking for, there’s a very good chance that they’ll click it.

Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisficing is more efficient.

On poorly designed sites, putting effort into making the best choice doesn’t really help.

There are still users who weigh options before they click. It depends on things like their frame of mind, how pressed they are for time, and how much confidence they have in the site.

If you want to design effective Web pages, remember users don’t figure out how things work. They muddle through.

Faced with any sort of technology, very few people take the time to read instructions. Instead, we forge ahead and muddle through, making up our own vaguely plausible stories about what we’re doing and why it works.

It’s not important. For most of us, it doesn’t matter whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of caring.

Once we find something that works - no matter how badly - we tend not to look for a better way. We’ll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.

If people manage to muddle through so much, does it really matter whether they “get it”? The answer is that it matters a great deal because while muddling through may work sometimes, it tends to be inefficient and error-prone.

If users “get it”, there’s a much better chance that they’ll find what they’re looking for, which is good for them and for you.

If users “get it”, there’s a much better chance that they’ll understand the full range of what your site has to offer—not just the parts that they stumble across.

If users “get it”, there’s a much better chance of steering them to the parts of your site that you want them to see.

If users “get it”, they’ll feel smarter and more in control when they’re using your site, which will bring them back. You can get away with a site that people muddle through only until someone builds one down the street that makes them feel smart.

If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.

Follow these to make sure they see and understand as much of your site as possible: create a clear visual hierarchy on each page; take advantage of conventions; break pages up into clearly defined areas; make it obvious what’s clickable; minimize noise.

One of the best ways to make a page easy to grasp in a hurry is to make sure that the appearance of the things on the page—all of the visual cues—clearly and accurately portray the relationships between the things on the page.

The more important something is, the more prominent it is. The most important headings are either larger, bolder, in a distinctive color, set off by more white space, or nearer the top of the page—or some combination of the above.

Things that are related logically are also related visually. You can show that things are similar by grouping them together under a heading, displaying them in a similar visual style, or putting them all in a clearly defined area.

Things are “nested” visually to show what’s part of what.

There’s nothing new about visual hierarchies. Every newspaper page uses prominence, grouping, and nesting to give us useful information about the contents of the page before we read a word.

A good visual hierarchy saves us work by pre-processing the page for us, organizing and prioritizing its contents in a way that we can grasp almost instantly.

At some point in our youth, without ever being taught, we all learned to read a newspaper. Not the words, but the conventions. When we know the various conventions of page layout and formatting, it is easier and faster to scan a newspaper and find the stories we are interested in.

Use Web conventions, they’re very useful. Conventions only become conventions if they work. Well applied conventions make it easier for users to go from site to site without expending a lot of effort figuring out how things work.

When you use conventions, don’t follow a great temptation to reinvent it. Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts of time spent reinventing the wheel.

Innovate when you know you have a better idea and everyone you show it to says “Wow!”, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.

Break up pages into clearly defined areas; it allows users to decide quickly which areas of the page to focus on and which areas they can safely ignore. Users decide very quickly which parts of the page have useful information and then almost never look at the other parts—almost as though they weren’t there.

The largest part people do on the Web is to look for the next thing to click, it’s important to make it obvious what’s clickable and what’s not. When you force users to think about something that should be mindless, you’re squandering the limited reservoir of patience and goodwill that each user brings to a new site.

One of the great enemies of easy-to-grasp pages is visual noise.

First noise is busy-ness. When everything on the page is clamoring for user’s attention the effect can be overwhelming: Lots of invitations to buy! Lots of exclamation points and bright colors! A lot of shouting going on!

Second noise is background noise. Some pages are like being at a cocktail party; no one source of noise is loud enough to be distracting by itself, but there are a lot of tiny bits of visual noise that wear us down.

Users have varying tolerances for complexity and distractions; some people have no problem with busy pages and background noise, but many do. When you’re designing Web pages, it’s probably a good idea to assume that everything is visual noise until proven otherwise.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.

“Number of clicks to get anywhere” seems like a useful criteria. But over time you will see that what really counts is not the number of clicks it takes users to get to what they want but how hard each click is—the amount of thought required, and the amount of uncertainty about whether they’re making the right choice.

Users don’t mind a lot of clicks as long as each click is painless and they have continued confidence that they’re on the right track—following what Jared Spool calls “the scent of information.”

The rule of thumb might be something like “three mindless, unambiguous clicks equal one click that requires thought.”

Make it like a word game Twenty Questions—“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” As long as you accept the premise that anything that’s not a plant or an animal falls under “mineral,” it requires no thought at all to answer the question correctly.

We face choices all the time on the Web and making the choices mindless is one of the main things that make a site easy to use.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Removing half of the words is a realistic goal; you find you have no trouble getting rid of half the words on most Web pages without losing anything of value.

Getting rid of all the words that no one is going to read has several beneficial effects: it reduces the noise level of the page; it makes the useful content more prominent; it makes the pages shorter, allowing users to see more of each page at a glance without scrolling.

Happy talk is the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we’re about to see in the section we’ve just entered. But reading it, can you hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, “Blah blah blah blah blah….”

Happy talk must die. Happy talk is like small talk—content free, basically just a way to be sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get right to the beef. You can—and should—eliminate as much happy talk as possible.

The major source of needless words is instructions; no one is going to read them—at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed. And even then, if the instructions are wordy, the odds of users finding the information they need is pretty low.

Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to the bare minimum.

People won’t use your Web site if they can’t find their way around it.

Looking for things on a Web site and in the “real” world have many similarities. The difference is that on a Web site there’s no one standing around who can tell you where things are. The Web equivalent of asking directions is searching—typing a description of what you’re looking for in a search box.

Some people will almost always look for a search box as soon as they enter a site, while others will almost always browse first, searching only when they’ve run out of likely links to click or when they have gotten sufficiently frustrated by the site.

The decision whether to start by browsing or searching depends on users’ current frame of mind, how much of a hurry they’re in, and whether the site appears to have decent browsable navigation.

Consider that there is no sense of scale. The practical result is that it’s very hard to know whether you’ve seen everything of interest in a site, which means it’s hard to know when to stop looking. Even the people who manage Web sites often have very little idea how big their sites really are.

One reason why it’s useful for links that we’ve already clicked on to display in a different color because it gives us some small sense of how much ground we’ve covered.

There is no sense of location. In physical spaces, as we move around we accumulate knowledge about the space. We develop a sense of where things are and can take shortcuts to get to them.

When we want to return to something on a Web site, instead of relying on a physical sense of where it is we have to remember where it is in the conceptual hierarchy and retrace our steps.

Two of the purposes of navigation are fairly obvious: to help us find whatever it is we’re looking for, and to tell us where we are and. But equally important what’s here. Also it tells us how to use the site. It gives us confidence in the people who built it. We always think: “Do these guys know what they’re doing?”

When we walk we expect to find street signs at street corners, we expect to find them by looking up (not down), and we expect them to look like street signs (horizontal, not vertical). The same we expect with Web navigation conventions.

Can you imagine how frustrating it is when one of the conventions is broken (when magazines don’t put page numbers on advertising pages, for instance). Don’t make your users experience this feeling.

Web designers use the term persistent navigation (or global navigation) to describe navigation elements that appear on every page of a site. Just having the navigation appear in the same place on every page with a consistent look gives you instant confirmation that you’re still in the same site what is very important.

Persistent navigation should include the five elements you most need to have on hand at all times: site ID, a way home, a way to search, utilities, sections.

The Home page is not like the other pages—it has different burdens to bear, different promises to keep and sometimes it means that it makes sense not to use the persistent navigation there.

On pages where a form needs to be filled in, the persistent navigation can be a waste distraction. For instance, when you’re paying for your purchases on an e-commerce site you want only to finish filling in the forms. The same when you’re registering, giving feedback, or checking off personalization preferences.

The Site ID or logo is like the building name for a Web site. When users go next page they need to see the name on their way in, whether they are still here or different site.

In the same way that we expect to see the name of a building over the front entrance, we expect to see the Site ID at the top of the page—usually in (or at least near) the upper left corner. Readers of Arabic or Hebrew pages might expect the Site ID to be on the right.

The Site ID represents the whole site, which means it’s the highest thing in the logical hierarchy of the site.

Since you don’t want the ID to be the most prominent element on the page (except, perhaps, on the Home page), the best place for it—the place that is least likely to make me think—is at the top, where it frames the entire page.

The Site ID needs to look like a Site ID. This means it should have the attributes we would expect to see in a brand logo or the sign outside a store: a distinctive typeface, and a graphic that’s recognizable at any size from a button to a billboard.

The Sections—sometimes called the primary navigation—are the links to the main sections of the site: the top level of the site’s hierarchy. In most cases, the persistent navigation will also include space to display the secondary navigation: the list of subsections in the current section.

Utilities are the links to important elements of the site that aren’t really part of the content hierarchy. These are things that either can help me use the site (like Help, a Site Map, or a Shopping Cart) or can provide information about its publisher (like About Us and Contact Us).

Like the signs for the facilities in a store, the Utilities list should be slightly less prominent than the Sections.

Having a Home button in sight at all times offers reassurance that no matter how lost I may get, I can always start over, like pressing a Reset button or using a “Get out of Jail free” card.

Given the potential power of searching and the number of people who prefer searching to browsing, unless a site is very small and very well organized, every page should have either a search box or a link to a search page. And unless there’s very little reason to search your site, it should be a search box.

Keep in mind that for a large percentage of users their first official act when they reach a new site will be to scan the page for something that matches a simple formula: a box, a button, and the word “Search.” Don’t make it hard for them—stick to the formula.

Avoid fancy words. They’ll be looking for the word “Search,” so use the word Search, not Find, Quick Find, Quick Search, or Keyword Search. (If you use “Search” as the label for the box, use the word “Go” as the button name.)

Avoid instructions. If you stick to the formula, anyone who has used the Web for more than a few days will know what to do. Adding “Type a keyword” is like saying, “Leave a message at the beep” on your answering machine message: There was a time when it was necessary, but now it just makes you sound clueless.

Avoid options. If there is any possibility of confusion about the scope of the search (what’s being searched: the site or the whole Web; by all means, spell it out. But think very carefully before giving options to limit the scope and providing options for how I specify what I’m searching for (author, or product name).

If you’re going to provide options, you need to make sure that they actually work.

It’s vital to have sample pages that show the navigation for all the potential levels of the site before you start arguing about the color scheme for the Home page.

Page names are the street signs of the Web. Just as with street signs, when thingsare going well users may not notice page names at all. But as soon as they start to sense that they may not be headed in the right direction, they need to be able to spot the page name effortlessly so they can get their bearings.

Every page needs a name. Just as every corner should have a street sign, every page should have a name.

The name needs to be in the right place. In the visual hierarchy of the page, the page name should appear to be framing the content that is unique to this page.

The name needs to be prominent. You want the combination of position, size, color, and typeface to make the name say “This is the heading for the entire page.” In most cases, it will be the largest text on the page.

The name needs to match what users click. Even though nobody ever mentions it, every site makes an implicit social contract with its visitors. In other words, if they click on a link or button that says “Hot mashed potatoes,” the site will take me to a page named “Hot mashed potatoes.”

Sometimes you have to compromise, usually because of space limitations. If the words users click on and the page name don’t match exactly, the important thing is that (a) they match as closely as possible, and (b) the reason for the difference is obvious.

If you’re a designer and you think a visual cue is sticking out like a sore thumb, it probably means you need to make it twice as prominent.

Like “You are here” indicators, Breadcrumbs show you where you are. Done right, Breadcrumbs are self-explanatory, they don’t take up much room, and they provide a convenient, consistent way to do two of the things you need to do most often: back up a level or go Home.

Breadcrumbs are most valuable when used as part of a balanced diet, as an accessory to a solid navigational scheme, particularly for a large site with a deep hierarchy, or if you need to tie together a nest of sub-sites.

Breadcrumbs seem to work best if they’re at the top of the page, above everything. When Breadcrumbs are farther down on the page they end up contending with the primary navigation. Result? It makes users think.

Trial and error seems to have shown that the best separator between levels is the “greater than” character (>). The colon (:) and slash (/) are workable, but > seems to be the most satisfying and self-evident—probably because it visually suggests forward motion down through the levels.

Use tiny type for Breadcrumbs, to make it clear that this is just an accessory.

Use the words “You are here.” Most people will understand what the Breadcrumbs are, but since it’s tiny type anyway it doesn’t hurt to make them self-explanatory.

Boldface the last item. The last item in the list should be the name of the current page, and making it bold gives it the prominence it deserves.

Don’t use Breadcrumbs instead of a page name. There have been a lot of attempts to make the last item in the Breadcrumbs list do double duty, eliminating the need for a separate page name.

Tabs are one of the very few cases where using a physical metaphor in a user interface actually works. They divide whatever they’re sticking out of into sections. And they make it easy to open a section by reaching for its tab.

Tabs are self-evident. You’ll never see anyone—no matter how “computer illiterate”—look at a tabbed interface and say, “Hmmm. I wonder what those do?

Tabs are hard to miss. Because tabs are so visually distinctive, they’re hard to overlook. And because they’re hard to mistake for anything but navigation, they create the kind of obvious-at-a-glance division you want between navigation and content.

Tabs are slick. Web designers are always struggling to make pages more visually interesting. If done correctly, tabs can add polish and serve a useful purpose.

Tabs suggest a physical space. Tabs create the illusion that the active tab physically moves to the front. It’s a cheap trick, but effective because it’s based on a visual cue. Somehow, the result is a stronger-than-usual sense that the site is divided into sections and that you’re in one of the sections.

Tabs should be drawn correctly. For tabs to work to full effect, the graphics have to create the visual illusion that the active tab is in front of the other tabs. To create this illusion, the active tab needs to be a different color or contrasting shade, and it has to physically connect with the space below it.

A large percentage of users just aren’t very aware of color coding in any useful way. Color is great as an additional cue, but you should never rely on it as the only cue. Moreover, Some people (particularly over the age of 40) simply can’t detect some color distinctions because of color-blindness.

If the page is well designed, you should be able to answer these questions without hesitation: What site is this?; What page am I on?; What are the major sections of this site?; What are my options at this level? (Local navigation); Where am I in the scheme of things?; How can I search?.

To develop your own sense of what works and what doesn’t, choose a random page in the site. Print it. Hold it at arm’s length, so you can’t study it closely. Quickly find and circle as many items in the list as you can: Site ID, Page name, Sections and subsections, Local navigation, “You are here” indicator(s), Search.

Creating Home page, just when you think you’ve covered all the bases, there’s always just one…more…thing.

Home page has to accommodate site identity and mission. Right off the bat, the Home page has to tell users what site this is and what it’s for - and if possible, why they should be here and not at some other site.

Home page has to accommodate site hierarchy. The Home page has to give an overview of what the site has to offer - both content (“What can I find here?”) and features (“What can I do here?”) - and how it’s all organized. This is usually handled by the persistent navigation.

Home page has to accommodate search. Most sites need to have a prominently displayed search box on the Home page.

Home page has to accommodate teases. The Home page needs to entice users with hints of the “good stuff” inside. Content promos spotlight the newest, best, or popular pieces of content. Feature promos invite users to explore additional sections of the site or try out features like personalization and email newsletters.

Home page has to accommodate timely content. If the site’s success depends on users’ coming back often, you need to have content that gets updated frequently. And even a site that doesn’t need regular visitors needs signs of life - even if it’s only a link to a recent press release - to signal that it’s not moribund.

Home page has to accommodate deals. Home page space needs to be allocated for whatever advertising, crosspromotion, and co-branding deals have been made.

Home page has to accommodate shortcuts. The most frequently requested pieces of content (software updates, for instance) may deserve their own links on the Home page so people don’t have to hunt for them.

Home page has to accommodate registration. If the site uses registration, the Home page needs links for new users to register and for old users to sign in, and a way to let me know that I’m signed in (“Welcome back, Eleonora”).

On Home page show me what I’m looking for. The Home page needs to make it obvious how to get to whatever I want—assuming it’s somewhere on the site.

The Home page needs to expose users to some of the wonderful things the site has to offer that visitors might be interested in - even though they’re not looking for them.

The Home page should show where to start. There’s nothing worse than encountering a new Home page and having no idea where to begin.

The Home page should establish credibility and trust. For some visitors, the Home page will be the only chance your site gets to create a good impression.

Home page is a page almost every visitor sees - and the only page some visitors will see - things that are prominently promoted tend to get significantly greater traffic.

The Home page is the waterfront property of the Web: It’s the most desirable real estate, and there’s a very limited supply. Everybody who has a stake in the site wants a promo or a link to their section on the Home page, and the turf battles for Home page visibility can be fierce.

Because the Home page is so important, it’s the one page that everybody (even the CEO) has an opinion about.

Unlike lower-level pages, the Home page has to appeal to everyone who visits the site, no matter how diverse their interests.

Designing a Home page involves compromise. And as the compromises are worked out and the pressure mounts to squeeze in just one more thing, some things get lost in the shuffle. The one thing you can’t afford to lose is conveying the big picture which makes it clear enough what the site is.

Home page needs to answer the four questions at a glance, correctly and unambiguously, with very little effort: What is this? What do they have here? What can I do here? Why should I be here - and not somewhere else?

When you’re involved in building a site, it’s so obvious to you what you’re offering and why it’s insanely great that it’s hard to remember that it’s not obvious to everybody.

Very few people will avoid a site just because they see the same explanation of what it is every time they go there - unless it takes up half the page. Think about it: Even if you know what JAMA is, will you be offended by seeing “Journal of the American Medical Association” next to the logo in small print?

It’s tempting to think that the people who don’t “get” your site right away probably aren’t your real audience, but it’s just not true. When testing sites, it’s not at all unusual to have people say, “Oh, is that what it is? I’d use that all the time, but it wasn’t clear what it was.”

Even if people understood your TV, radio, and print ads, by the time they get to your site will they remember exactly what it was that caught their interest?

If the site is very complex or novel, a prominent “New to this site?” link on the Home page is a good idea. But it’s no substitute for spelling out the picture in sight since most people won’t click on it until they’ve already tried and failed. And by then, they may already be hopelessly confused.

Everything on the Home page can contribute to our understanding of what the site is. But there are two important places on the page where we expect to find explicit statements of what the site is about: the tagline and the welcome blurb.

The tafline is one of the most valuable bits of real estate is the space right next to the Site ID. When we see a phrase that’s visually connected to the ID, we know it’s meant to be a tagline, and so we read it as a description of the whole site.

The Welcome blurb is a terse description of the site, displayed in a prominent block on the Home page that’s visible without scrolling.

Not everyone will probably notice the tagline and the welcome blurb. Most users will try to guess what the site is first from the overall content of the Home page. But if they can’t guess, you want to have someplace on the page where they can go to find out.

Use as much space as necessary. The temptation is to not want to use any space because (a) you can’t imagine that anybody doesn’t know what this site is, and (b) everyone’s clamoring to use the Home page space for other purposes.

Don’t use any more space than necessary. Keep it short - just long enough to get the point across, and no longer. Don’t feel compelled to mention every great feature, just the most important ones (maximum four).

Don’t use a mission statement as a Welcome blurb. Many sites fill their Home page with their corporate mission statement that sounds like it was written by a Miss America finalist.

You can’t trust your own judgment. You need to show the Home page to people from outside your organization to tell you whether the design is getting this job done because the “main point” is the one thing nobody inside the organization will notice is missing.

A tagline is a pithy phrase that characterizes the whole enterprise, summing up what it is and what makes it great.

Taglines are a very efficient way to get your message across, because they’re the one place on the page where users most expect to find a concise statement of the site’s purpose.

Good taglines are clear and informative. They convey differentiation and a clear benefit. Sound generic. Good taglines are just long enough. Six to eight words seem to be long enough to convey a full thought, but short enough to absorb easily.

Don’t confuse a tagline with a motto. A motto expresses a guiding principle, a goal, or an ideal, but a tagline conveys a value proposition. Mottoes are lofty and reassuring, but if users don’t know what the thing is, a motto isn’t going to tell them.

Good taglines are personable, lively, and sometimes clever. Clever is good, but only if the cleverness helps convey - not obscure - the benefit. Bad taglines are vague.

The handful of sites that have already achieved household word status and sites that are very well known from their offline origins can get by without a tagline.

Some sites don’t need tagline, however, even these sites would benefit from it. No matter how well known you are, why pass up a chance to tell people why they’re better off at your site? Even if a site comes from a strong offline brand, the mission online isn't the same and it’s important to explain the difference.

Once users know what they’re looking at, there’s still one more important question that the Home page has to answer for them, “Where do I start?”

When users enter a new site, after a quick look around the Home page they should be able to say with confidence: Here’s where to start if I want to search; Here’s where to start if I want to browse; Here’s where to start if I want to sample their best stuff.

Since the Home page has to reveal as much as it can of what lies below, you may want to add a descriptive phrase to each section name, or even list the subsections - something you don’t have the space to do on every page.

The Home page often requires a very different layout from all the other pages, so it may be necessary to use horizontal instead of vertical navigation, or vice versa.

The Site ID on the Home page is usually larger than in the persistent navigation, like the large sign over a store entrance, and it usually needs some empty space next to it for the tagline, which may not appear on every page.

The Home page navigation and the persistent navigation need to have enough in common so users can recognize immediately that they’re just two different versions of the same thing.

The most important thing is to keep the section names exactly the same: the same order, the same wording, and the same grouping. It also helps to try to keep as many of the same visual cues as possible: the same typeface, colors, and capitalization.

Since Home page real estate is in such short supply, designers are always looking for ways to create more of it. One common approach is using pulldown menus. There’s no doubt about it: pulldowns definitely save space.

The disadvantage of pulldown is that you have to click on it to see the list, so there’s no chance for items on the list to catch your eye as you scan the page.

A real drawback of a pulldown they’re hard to scan. If designers use the standard HTML pulldown menu, they have no control over the font, spacing, or formatting of the list to make them more readable, and there’s no really good way to divide the list into subgroups.

A problem with pulldown they’re twitchy. Somehow the fact that the list comes and goes so quickly makes it harder to read.

Pulldowns are most effective for alphabetized lists of items with known names, like countries, states, or products, because there’s no thought involved.

Some users love pulldowns because they’re efficient; others won’t touch them. In most cases, the drawbacks of pulldowns outweigh the potential benefits.

The rewards and the costs of adding more things to the Home page aren’t shared equally. The section that’s being promoted gets a huge gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it gets more cluttered is shared by all sections.

All of us who work on Web sites have one thing in common - we’re also Web users. And like all Web users, we tend to have strong feelings about what we like and don’t like about Web sites. And when we’re working on a Web team, it turns out to be very hard to check those feelings at the door.

Designers want to build sites that look great, and developers want to build sites with interesting, original, elegant features. These differences in perspective often lead to conflict - and hard feelings - when it comes time to establish design priorities.

The belief that most Web users are like us is enough to produce gridlock in the average Web design meeting. But behind that belief lies another one, even more insidious: the belief that most Web users are like anything.

Finding some way to determine what most users like or don’t like is to figure out what the Average Web User is really like. The only problem is, there is no Average User.

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts are futile and counterproductive. Good design takes this complexity into account.

There are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need - carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

It’s not productive to ask questions like “Do most people like pulldown menus?” The right kind of question to ask is “Does this pulldown, with these items and this wording in this context on this page create a good experience for most people who are likely to use this site?” One way to answer the question: testing.

When you want to launch your site and do “usability testing”, first it needs time (far not 2 weeks and sometimes even not 2 months), second remember that focus group testing is not usability tests.

A focus group, a small group of people, sit around a table and react to ideas and designs that are shown to them. It’s a group process, and much of its value comes from participants reacting to each other’s opinions. Focus groups are good for quickly getting a sampling of users’ opinions and feelings about things.

A usability test, one user at a time is shown something (whether it’s a Web site, a prototype of a site, or some sketches of individual pages) and asked to either (a) figure out what it is, or (b) try to use it to do a typical task.

Focus groups can be great for determining what your audience wants and likes - in the abstract. They’re good for testing whether the idea makes sense and proposition is attractive; to find out how people feel about your competitors. But they’re not good for learning about whether your site works and how to improve it.

The kinds of things you can learn from focus groups are the things you need to learn early on, before you begin designing the site. Focus groups are for EARLY in the process. But don’t mistake them for usability testing. They won’t tell you whether people can actually use your site.

If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.

Testing reminds you that not everyone thinks the way you do, knows what you know, uses the Web the way you do. And at the same time, you realize that a lot of things that you take for granted aren’t obvious to everybody.

Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none. Testing always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site.

Testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end. If you make it into a big deal, you won’t do it early enough or often enough to get the most out of it. A simple test early - while you still have time to use what you learn from it - is always more valuable than a sophisticated test later.

The importance of recruiting representative users is overrated. It’s good to do your testing with people who are like the people who will use your site, but it’s much more important to test early and often.

The point of testing is not to prove or disprove something. It’s to inform your judgment. People think they can use testing to prove whether navigation system “a” is better than “b” one. Wrong. Testing provides you with input which makes it easier to choose wisely - and with greater confidence - between “a” and “b.”

Testing is an iterative process. Testing isn’t something you do once. You make something, test it, fix it, and test it again.

Nothing beats a live audience reaction. One reason why the Marx Brothers’ movies are so wonderful is that before they started filming they would go on tour on the vaudeville circuit and perform scenes from the movie, doing five shows a day, improvising constantly and noting which lines got the best laughs.

Usability testing has been around for a long time, and the basic idea is pretty simple: If you want to know whether your software or your Web site or your VCR remote control is easy enough to use, watch some people while they try to use it and note where they run into trouble. Then fix it, and test it again.

When people decide to test, they often spend a lot of time trying to recruit users who they think will precisely reflect their target audience. But the best-kept secret of usability testing is the extent to which it doesn’t much matter who you test.

Try to find users who reflect your audience, but don’t get hung up about it. Instead, try to make allowances for the differences between the people you test and your audience.

We’re all beginners under the skin. Scratch an expert and you’ll often find someone who’s muddling through - just at a higher level.

It’s not a good idea to design a site so that only your target audience can use it. If you design a site for accountants using terminology that you think all accountants will understand, what you’ll probably discover is that a small but not insignificant number of accountants won’t know what you’re talking about.

You need to be addressing novices as well as experts; if your grandmother can use it, an expert can.

If your site is going to be used almost exclusively by one type of user and it’s no harder to recruit from that group, then do it. For instance, if your audience will be almost entirely women, then by all means test just women.

If your audience is split between clearly defined groups with very divergent interests and needs, then you need to test users from each group at least once. If you’re building a university site, you recruit two students, two professors, two high school seniors, and two administrators.

If using your site requires specific domain knowledge (e.g., a currency exchange site for money management professionals), then you need to recruit people with that domain knowledge for at least one round of tests. But don’t do it for every round if it will reduce the number of tests you do.

Keep the invitation simple. “We need to have a few people look at our Web site and give us some feedback. It’s very easy, and would take about forty-five minutes to an hour. And you’ll be paid $___ for your time.”

Avoid discussing the site (or the organization behind the site) beforehand. You want their first look to tell you whether they can figure out what it is from a standing start.

Don’t be embarrassed to ask friends and neighbors. You don’t have to feel like you’re imposing if you ask friends or neighbors to participate. Most people enjoy the experience. It’s fun to have someone take your opinion seriously and get paid for it.

Almost anyone can facilitate a usability test; all it really takes is the courage to try it. With a little practice, most people can get quite good at it. Try to choose someone who tends to be patient, calm, empathetic, a good listener, and inherently fair.

Before you even begin designing your site, you should be testing comparable sites. They may be actual competitors, or they may be sites that are similar in style, organization, or features to what you have in mind.

“Get it” testing is just what it sounds like: show them the site, and see if they get it—do they understand the purpose of the site, the value proposition, how it’s organized, how it works, and so on.

Key task testing means asking the user to do something, then watching how well they do.

As you begin designing your own site, it’s never too early to start showing your design ideas to users, beginning with your first rough sketches. Designers don't like to show work in progress, but users may actually feel freer to comment on something that looks unfinished.

Whenever you build a new kind of page—particularly forms—you should print the page out and the person in the next cubicle and see if they can make sense out of it. This kind of informal testing can be very efficient, and eliminate a lot of potential problems.

After each round of tests, you should make time as soon as possible for the development team to review everyone’s observations and decide what to do next. Do three or four tests in a morning and then debrief over lunch.

You’re doing two things at the meeting: Triage—reviewing the problems people saw and deciding which ones need to be fixed; Problem solving—figuring out how to fix them.

A problem you’re going to see most often when you test: users are unclear on the concept. They just don’t get it. They look at the site or a page and they either don’t know what to make of it, or they think they do but they’re wrong.

One more problem you’re going to see when you test: The words users are looking for aren’t there. This usually means that (a) the categories you’ve used to organize your content aren’t the ones they would use, or (b) the categories are what they expect, but you’re just not using the names they expect.

Another problem you’re going to see when you test is that sometimes what users are looking for is on the page, but they’re just not seeing it. Thus, you need to either (a) reduce the overall noise on the page, or (b) turn up the volume on the things they need to see so they “pop” out of the visual hierarchy more.

You can see several cases where users go astray but manage to get back on track almost immediately without any help. Since everyone who has the problem notices that they’re no longer headed in the right direction, and they manage to recover without help, and it doesn’t seem to faze them, you can ignore the problem.

Resist the impulse to add things. When it’s obvious in testing that users aren’t getting something, most people’s first reaction is to add something, like an explanation or some instructions. The right solution is to take something away that is obscuring the meaning, rather than adding yet another distraction.

Take “new feature” requests with a grain of salt. People will often say, “I’d like it better if it could do x.” It always pays to be suspicious of these requests. If you probe deeper, it turns out that they already have a perfectly fine source for x; they’re just telling you what they like.

Grab the low-hanging fruit. First, when the problem and the solution were obvious to everyone the moment they saw the first user try to muddle through, you should fix them right away. Second, try to implement any changes that require almost no effort, or require a little effort but are highly visible.

Like any good design, successful Web pages are usually a delicate balance, and it’s important to keep in mind that even a minor change can have a major impact.

Sometimes the real challenge isn’t fixing the problems you find—it’s fixing them without breaking the parts that already work.

Whenever you’re making a change, think carefully about what else is going to be affected. In particular, when you’re making something more prominent than it was, consider what else might end up being de-emphasized as a result.

Doing the right thing—being considerate of the user. Besides “Is my site clear?” you also need to be asking, “Does my site behave like a mensch?”

Some people have a large reservoir, some small. Some people are more suspicious by nature, or more ornery; others are inherently more patient, trusting, or optimistic. The point is, you can’t count on a very large reserve. It’s idiosyncratic.

If a user is in a huge hurry, or has just come from a bad experience on another site, his expendable goodwill may already be low when he enters your site, even if he naturally has a large reserve. It’s situational.

You can refill it. Even if you’ve made mistakes that have diminished user’s goodwill, you can replenish it by doing things that make him feel like you’re looking out for his best interests.

Sometimes a single mistake can empty it. For instance, just opening up a registration form with tons of fields may be enough to cause some people’s reserve to plunge instantly to zero.

Hiding information that I want. The most common things to hide are customer support phone numbers, shipping rates, and prices. The usual effect is to diminish goodwill and ensure that they’ll be even more annoyed when they do find the number and call.

Users should never have to think about formatting data: whether or not to put dashes in their Social Security number, spaces in their credit card number, or parentheses in their phone number. Don’t make them jump through hoops just because you don’t want to write a little bit of code.

Most users are very skeptical of requests for personal information, and find it annoying if a site asks for more than what’s needed for the task at hand.

We're always on the lookout for faux sincerity, and disingenuous attempts to convince me that you care about me can be particularly annoying. Think about what goes through your head every time you hear “Your call is important to us.”

Putting sizzle in my way. Having to wait through a long Flash intro, or wade through pages bloated with feel-good marketing photos makes it clear that you don’t understand—or care—that I’m in a hurry.

Your site looks amateurish. You can lose goodwill if your site looks sloppy, disorganized, or unprofessional, like no effort has gone into making it presentable.

It’s usually not hard to figure out what people want to do on a given Web site. The problem is, making things easy doesn’t always become the top priority it should be. If most people are coming to your site to apply for a mortgage, nothing should get in the way of making it dead easy to apply for a mortgage.

Tell me what I want to know. Be upfront about things you’d rather not be upfront about. For instance, you may lose points if your shipping rates are higher than I’d like, but you’ll often gain enough points for candor and for making it easy for me to make up the difference.

Save me steps wherever you can. For instance, instead of giving me the shipping company’s tracking number for my purchase, put a link in my email receipt that opens their site and submits my tracking number when I click it.

Put effort into it. Generate the information users need to solve their problems; make sure that it’s accurate and useful; present it clearly; organize it so they can find it. Thus a majority of problems users can sort out themselves.

Know what questions I’m likely to have, and answer them. Frequently Asked Questions lists are enormously valuable.

Provide comfort like printer-friendly pages. People love to print stories that span multiple pages with a single click. Drop the ads (the possibility of a banner ad having any impact other than being annoying is even bigger when it’s just taking up space on paper), but don’t drop the illustrations, photos, and figures.

Make it easy to recover from errors. If you actually do enough user testing, you’ll be able to spare a user from many errors before they happen. But where the potential for errors is unavoidable, always provide a graceful, obvious way for me to recover.

When in doubt, apologize. Sometimes you can’t help it: You just don’t have the ability or resources to do what the user wants. If you can’t do what they want, at least let them know that you know you’re inconveniencing them.

The fact that it’s not a perfect world at the moment doesn’t let any of us off the hook, though. Even with current technology and standards, it’s possible to make any site very accessible without an awful lot of effort by focusing on a few things that will have the most impact.

If something confuses most people who use your site, it’s almost certain to confuse users who have accessibility issues. The single best thing you can do to improve your site’s accessibility is to test it often, and continually smooth out the parts that confuse everyone.

The best way to learn how to make anything more usable is to watch people try to use it. Most of us have no experience at using adaptive technology, let alone watching other people use it. Locate one or two blind Web users and spending a few hours with them observing how they actually use their screen reader software.

Most blind users are just as impatient as most sighted users. They want to get the information they need as quickly as possible. They do not listen to every word on the page—just as sighted users do not read every word.

Cascading Style Sheets are now so well supported by most browsers that it doesn’t make any sense to create a site without them, because the advantages are enormous: infinitely greater control of formatting, flexibility, consistency among browsers.

Serialize your content. Unlike table-based layout, with CSS you can put your content in sequential order in the source file—which is how a screen reader user will hear it—and still position things where you want them on the page.

Allow your text to resize. CSS makes it easy to make your text resizable, which is enormously helpful for low-vision users (and people old enough to need bifocals).

Add appropriate alt text to every image. Add an alt attribute for images that screen readers should ignore, and add helpful, descriptive text for the rest. All of the Web accessibility books have very good explanations of how to do this.

Make your forms work with screen readers. This largely boils down to using the HTML label element to associate the fields with their prompts, so people know what they’re supposed to enter.

Create a “Skip to Main Content” link at the beginning of each page. Imagine having to spend 20 seconds (or a minute, or two) listening to the global navigation at the top of every page before you could look at the content, and you’ll understand why this is important.

Make all content accessible by keyboard. Remember, not everyone can use a mouse.

Don’t use JavaScript without a good reason. Some adaptive technologies don’t support it very well yet.

Use client-side (not server-side) image maps. Alt tags don’t work with server-side image maps.

If your boss is asking you to add or change something what you think could make it worse, you shouldn't be doing any of them if you know what you're doing, you have a good reason, and you are going to test it when you're done to make sure you've managed to make it work; you're not just going to intend to test it.

Realize that your boss is probably not just being perverse. There is almost always a good (or at least not-so-awful) intention lurking behind insistence on a bad design idea. Trying to understand that good intention is often the best way to figure out how to make your case for a different approach.