I am wondering for research what type of design functions you guys prefer, whether you be someone who just casually browses the web or somone who designs websites for a living. I am interested what is important in a web design layout to you personally. What are your 10 cardinal rules when it comes down to your web design viewing pleasure. Hope I am making my self clear, 10 points, with reasons if you can please.
1. I want the page to be simple to read. If I can't find out, in 10 seconds or less, what do you want from me, I leave. For instance, if you want donations just say so. Don't put a small link at the bottom of the page, white on yellow. Put a big button, in the upper corner of the page. 2. I need a clear navigation system. I hate to use the "Back" button. Links that emerge out of the blue make me feel uncomfortable. Put the navigation in a place where I can see. Please, don't ask me to stalk the navigation controls. 3. I love standard conventions Make the hyperlink text blue. Use a button that looks like a button. 4. I want useful content. I'm on your site to find what I need, so please give it to me. 5. Don't use special effects, when they are not necessary. Let's say I'm in a meeting and I open your page. I don't want to hear someone singing or any sound whatsoever. If you have a video on the page, allow me to play IF I want. If you do the above, I'm satisfied enough not to care about other things.
First, agreed generally with ForumJoiner (though I don't need my hyperlinks blue). No popups, no Flash, don't tell me I need to enable Javascript to see your PLAIN-TEXT CONTENT <rant> (what, my money isn't good enough for you?? but now you also want to run some slimy script on MY browser solely so that I can get to your plain-text content? because I either turned it off to get rid of your singing dancing mootoolsy garbage, hate chasing fade-in-fade-out Nintardo-generation dropdown menus while a singing paperclip asks me if I want to learn more! or because I'm using a mobile device whose battery drains in seconds due to your bloataceous scriptalicious crapola).</rant> If you have plain text content for me then you will NOT hide it behind Flash or Javascript. Use those things to enhance your page or to show something that is NOT plain text. damn goofy url... Peter-Paul Koch notes on Javajunk from An Event Apart No 9px light-grey text on white background please. Your designer might have though it looked HAWT back in his New York Design School days but it's f*cking impossible to read, which was the point of going to the site in the first, yes? Designers -- http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_dark_background_vs_readability/ Do not make my browser open up a new window please. You'd better have a damn good reason for doing so, and even then, I'm likely to disagree. http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/03/target-blank/ Don't try to disable right click. My freaking browser menu is in there (not that I'd notice, I don't run Java-junk, but Grandma does and will just get confused). http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/dont-disable-right-click When I click submit in your form, use Post-Redirect-Get please. Send my data to you, send a redirect notice to my browser, so it can GET another page. This means my back button won't break, and I can go back without Firefox asking me if I want to resend the data again (I don't) or IE telling me "The page has expired; go lie in a hole and die." http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=RedirectAfterPost Use header tags (h1, h2) and use them properly. In my screen reader I can jump from header to header, and if they're written properly, I know what section of the page I'm in when I do so. I don't want to listen to your entire page, and screen reader users are as impatient as anyone else. We are all monkeys who want to click links and Get There Fast. Try to go in the order of levels as well, not everything in an h1. http://accessibilitytips.com/2008/03/10/avoid-skipping-header-levels/ Don't use images in place of text. Go ahead and place images on top of text (Gilder-Levin image replacement) or go ahead and add some alt text to your images but don't make me try to figure out what the hell this link is supposed to be: <li><a href="/page/cfm?q=f0027hreyx76jf87wer"><img src="4ks873.jpg"></a></li> cause seriously, wtf is that supposed to be? Not everyone loads images, and not everyone can see them anyway, and not everyone who can see images can read the goofy font chosen for those images. Put lists in lists (navigation is a list of links), tabular data in tables, forms in forms (not tables or lists, and use labels with the "for" attribute please), headers in headers. Make your in-text links say where they go to, not ...if you want to find out more about our awesome super-fantastic product <a href="here">click here</a> because I'm not going to read that sentence. Humans are morons who don't read, we are monkeys who want to click on things. ...<a href="here">learn more about our fantastic new product now!</a> and if you're selling a product I'm likely to just ask for all the links on the page in my screen reader or my browser and a bunch of links called "click here" don't help me. Context-free links. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/click.html As ForumJoiner said, if you want a donation, say so in huge freaking letters on the main page with the donation form or a link to it right there!!! Yadda yadda, helping starving Russian AIDS victims whatever, if I came there to donate make it easy on me, I'll read about some individual sob-story in the "About Us" or "What We Do" section. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/nonprofit-donations.html If you want me to buy your product, have the product on the main page and let me click on it and fill in everything and buy it! If I gotta click 1700 links to get to it I'm going to go buy it at your competitor's. Why I buy books at Amazon even though it costs more to ship all the way here to the Netherlands. Amazon is moron-proof. Hope those are some ideas. (no I'm not a screen-reader user but I do test my pages in JAWS and have surfed around in it... lord the number of crappy pages seems to grow exponentially!)