Usability

There are many steps involved in creating a good web page. This section outlines practices that will help you design a successful, useful web page.

Usability & Creating Content

Have a clear purpose for your page. What should it do? Who will use it and how? Determine the purpose. Know your audience.
Readability is an important objective. Readability involves scanability and predictability.
- For scanability, avoid a lengthy page. Depending on the situation, describe useful resources in paragraphs with imbedded links or use lists. When it is necessary to have a long document, use a Table of Contents at the top of the page so it is easy for the reader to scan.
  Create links from the Table of Contents to the corresponding sections. At the end of each section, provide arrows to navigate back up to the Table of Contents.
  Use the following URL for the up arrow:
  <a href="/images/Arrow.GIF" alt="Return to Contents">
- For predictability, group items into clusters. Clusters (or categories) should be logical groupings which are predictable to the users. Clusters do not change very often, although individual information items inside the clusters may be added or deleted.
Place resources in alphabetical order if there is no other arrangement. There might be situations where a short list of resources might be arranged by importance; or where an outstanding resource might be pulled out and listed at the top of the list.
Treat URLs as permanent. Avoid moving or deleting files because links get broken. Think carefully about the directory and filename assigned to a file. A generic file name such as hours.html will always remain appropriate, whereas hours_2001.html will become dated and need to be changed. Therefore, use a generic filename whenever possible.
There are times when a file must be renamed, moved, or deleted. If it is a major file (e.g., index.html), one that is likely to be bookmarked, a redirect page should be created and remain in place for at least 3 or 4 months.
Before publishing, have new pages proofread and tested by someone not responsible for creating the page.
Limit graphics for quick loading. Use only the graphics that are necessary and add value to your page. If you use graphics, make sure you use:
- alt= tag for users who rely on text-based browsers or voice out-put systems that cannot interpret graphics.
Use relative addresses rather than absolute addresses when linking to other pages within the UW Library Web site (See relative vs absolute links) .
Save your file with the extension .html. Use proper naming conventions for all filenames and directory names. (See file names)
Always test a new link.

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July 26, 2006

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Usability