Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability
Friday, 14 November 2008 - 9:00 – 17:00

Instructors: Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice

Full-day tutorial with lectures, extensive video highlights from user testing and eyetracking, and some exercises.

Which of the 1,549 documented Web usability guidelines are most important? This tutorial focuses on the key insights into people's website behavior and on the resulting top guidelines for making your website easier and more enjoyable to use.

Understanding these general principles will help you think through design problems, analyze usability challenges specific to your own project, and make the correct trade-offs when you have conflicting considerations.

This course distills the findings from our testing of 776 websites with 2,403 users in 16 countries across 4 continents, including usability tests, field studies, and eyetracking research.

What you will learn

In this session, you'll learn:
• How users behave when using the Web, and how to design your site to survive their rough treatment
• The relative importance of search and navigation—and how to improve both so people can find stuff on your site
• How to describe products and services so that your customers understand them
• How to combine Internet presence, search, navigation, and content into a pleasant user experience that makes people want to do business with you
• The key points that users care most about: Where to spend your money to get maximum improvements in user experience metrics 

Who should attend?

This course is suited both for usability veterans and people new to Web usability. For novices, the tutorial offers the most basic and important guidelines for improving Web designs. For attendees familiar with some guidelines, the tutorial offers the chance to learn the principles and research that underlie the recommendations. Understanding the foundations of usability will let all attendees use principles to analyze their own unique design problems.

Course Outline

Characteristics of the Web user experience

• How people visit sites
• Why and when they leave

Simplicity and feature choice

Navigation and information architecture

• Category and link names
• Link design
• Clickability and perceived affordance
• Persistent navigation
• Pop-ups
• Opening new browser windows
• Breadcrumbs
• Site maps

Page layout

Enhancing credibility and trust

Information foraging

• User attention
• Scrolling
• Information scent

Search

• Query strings ¨
• How people use search engine results pages (SERP)
• Improving site-specific search 
• Visibility in external search engines (organic and sponsored listings)

Homepages

Illustrations and graphics 

Advertising

Forms design

• Registration and collecting personal information
• Error handling

Content usability

• How users read online
• Writing for the Web
• Low-literacy users

International users

Trends in Web user experience