• Guidelines are necessary, but insufficient

1. The application of such guidelines has already been proved to have a positive impact on usability.

2. The positive impact does not necessarily imply that a web site that does not consider guidelines is unusable. Nor it is proved that a web site addressing all guidelines is the most usable site.

• Main findings that impact usability for the different aspects of Web design

  o Task flow
  o Interaction design
  o Information architecture
  o Navigation
  o Search
  o Page layout
  o Visual design
  o Content
  o Trust, credibility, and privacy
  

• Key Usability Principles
  • Structure--organize meaningfully
  • Simplicity--make common tasks easy
  • Visibility--all data needed for a task
  • Feedback--keep users informed
  • Tolerance--allow cancel, back
  • Reuse--reduce the users' need to remember

Five criteria for evaluating web pages

• Some web design and usability guidelines

  http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/index.html

  http://www.bunnyfoot.com/freestuff/articles/usability/usabilityguidelinesintro.html

  Jocob Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics

Reference

1. "A framework for organizing Web Usability Guidelines" from http://www.tri.sbc.com/hfweb/scapin/Scapin.html
2. Dr. Tomas Reeves's workshop for IT studio at UGA, 2002 Fall

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