A Big List of User Experience Best Practices
I promised some user experience best practices in the latest episode of The Expert Eye, Thinking Like A User, and I intend to make good on that promise.
There are all kinds of lists of best practices out there, ranging in size from small (like Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics) to gigantic (like Usability.gov’s Guidelines), and there will always be debate about what’s most important, valid, easy, or any number of other adjectives. But there is one thing that I think most UX specialists will agree on: if you are aware of these best practices, you can at least evaluate whether they apply to your situation. As Karl likes to say, you don’t know what you don’t know.
So while I make no claims that my list is complete or ordered correctly, keeping these things in mind will force you to think like your potential customers and help you create a better user experience.
Match your site to the real world
- Write in the same language your users use. And I’m not talking English. I mean leave out all the technobabble and marketing fluff.
- If something is clickable, make it look clickable. Conversely, if it’s not clickable, don’t make it look clickable. This principle is called “affordance”.
- Build on previous successes. Unless your audience is a bunch of Internet noobs, they’re going to have some expectations about how your site will perform.
- Don’t go over the top and try to build metaphorically accurate sites. Chances are people don’t want to navigate your online shopping mall in the same way as a real shopping mall. But you could test that out.
Talk with your users, not at them
- Write in the second person (you, your), not the third person (they, their).
- Content should focus on their needs and pains, and how your solutions can benefit them.
Help the user create a mental map of your site
- Where they are – you can help users know where they are by including things like a very obvious company logo (probably in the top left corner), nicely-written title tags (also good for SEO!), and content that makes use of a nice visual hierarchy (watch Writing for the Web, Part II for more on that). Other handy things like breadcrumb navigation are good too.
- Where they’ve been – breadcrumb navigation is also handy for showing users where they’ve been (depending on the way you implement it). And consider changing that visited link color.
- Where they can go – links are the bread and butter of the web. Make sure that they stand out from the surrounding content by formatting them differently, and use anchor text that explicitly tells the user what will happen when they click on it (“click here” needs to die).
Don’t make them think
- Don’t make the user remember data from one page to the next. This means you, product catalogs – if a user clicks on a “Buy Now” button on a product page and is taken to an order page that asks them for the model number, you’ve failed. (Of course, this doesn’t just apply to product catalogs)
- Remember what I said earlier about affordance and useful link anchor text? That applies here too.
- If the system has to do some sort of processing, show the user that something is going on. Progress bars, status messages, a spinning hourglass… something to stop them from clicking the same link 37 times in a row.
Guide them toward what to do
- Provide an obvious, concrete call to action on every page. It doesn’t always have to your ultimate desired conversion, but show your user what you want them to do next.
- Use active words, rather than passive words.
Make the content easy to absorb
- Front load content so that people can easily figure out what each paragraph or section is about and skip what’s not relevant.
- Use high contrast text – black text on a white background is typically best. Avoid red on blue (or vice versa) pretty much at all costs.
- Use a sans-serif font like Arial or Verdana.
- Don’t use a teensy tiny font size. Start around 11 or 12 pt, generally.
- Increasing the line spacing can make text more readable. Start around 1.3 em and adjust from there.
- Lists are really good for displaying a bunch of related information.
Don’t let errors happen, and if they do, make it easy to recover from them
- Do as much error checking and prevention behind the scenes as you can. This means stuff like form validation, confirming actions, spelling suggestions for site search, and so on.
- When errors do happen, make it easy for the user to notice (e.g., on a form, highlight the box with the error), understand what happened (e.g., avoid things like Error: 18291), and fix the problem (e.g., provide suggestions of potentially relevant content and a on a 404 page).
Ian: “Write in the same language your users use. And I’m not talking English. I mean leave out all the technobabble and marketing fluff.”
Michael: “It’s easy to get wrapped up in your industry and become accustomed to the inside jargon, but you shouldn’t try to use those essentric words to try and impress your customers. They will be turned off and will look for someone else who will treat them more like a friend instead of making them feel like an idiot.”
Michael, thanks for your eloquent and spot-on rewording!
[...] http://ask.enquiro.com/2010/a-big-list-of-user-experience-best-practices This entry was written by Biz Success Digest, posted on June 18, 2010 at 3:00 pm, filed under Advice, Internet, Marketing and tagged Ian Everdell – User Experience Practitioner. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. [...]
Ian! “eloquent”? You’re making me feel like an idiot. I thought we were friends.
I wondered if I’d get in trouble for that word…
“essentric”? Is that like, eccentric? You’re making me think!
[...] Read the companion post – A Big List of User Experience Best Practices [...]
Wow, you have managed to cover the contents of an entire book in this single post. This is awesome stuff and should be included in every web design manual out there. I have found that people are willing to put up with all kinds of layouts as long as they know where to find the links. I think it is important to be different in your approach but do the essential stuff in a way people are accustomed to.
Thanks for the comment – totally agree! There are some basic principles that you generally can’t go wrong with, and as long as they’re there, you should have a fair amount of license to play around with the look and feel. Of course, I’m an advocate of testing anything you design, so you could have all the best practices in place and still not do so well with real uses… always test!
Great article. And a good reminder that the links and validation need to be checked. I somehow consistently forgot this as I place a link and don’t really double check spelling etc then find out through my 404 error page that I spelled the link wrong, so great reminder.
[...] A Big List of User Experience Best Practices – Ask Enquiro Talk with your users, not at them [...]
[...] If you need some ideas on what to test or how to optimize parts of your site, check out user experience best practices, form best practices, landing page testing ideas, call to action best practices, and some of our [...]