Design for the User

Keep your design efforts centered

solely around your user.
Knowing your audience answers
almost all design questions:
If it serves the audience, keep it

If it is potentially distracting or
annoying, eliminate it
 Find out what users
expect from your site.
The overall effect is decidedly similar to television –
familiar territory for E! online’s audiences.
Think about how the user wants to
interact with the information on your
Web page.
Decide for your content type, and
decide if the user will read or scan
your pages.
Suppose your page is a collection of links,
the user would want to interact with your
page by scanning the content.

Suppose your page is an article that contains

large blocks of text, your user is accustomed
to interact with your page by scrolling and
clicking hyperlinked words of interest.
Design your pages by keeping
paragraphs short for online
consumption.
Make reading easier by using a text
column that is narrower than the width
of the screen.
Keep your text legible by providing
enough contrast between foreground
and background colors.
 Provide links that allow the
user to jump quickly to related
content.
Rank the information you want to
display.
Assign the location based on the
relative areas of screen importance.
 2

5 1 3

4
Relative Areas of Importance
 Relative Areas of Importance
1. The most important and current
information.
2. The company logo and main navigation
banner.
3. Featured stories that often change.
4. Reading content.
5. Used for links that appear consistently, but
are of secondary importance.
The user can traverse a page in a
variety of ways.
As you plan your design to guide the
user’s eye, consider the following two
examples of online reading habits.
Paper-reading based pattern
Screen-based viewing pattern
Do not make users navigate through
too many layers of your Web site to
find the information they want.
Provide prominent navigation cues that
quickly take your user to the content
they desire.
Graphical view of Web site’s information structure
Unlike paper-based authors, as a hypertext
author you have the luxury of adding
clickable text and images where necessary to
guide users through information.

With thoughtful hypertext writing, you can

engage readers in a whole new way.
Avoid Click here syndrome, which is the habit of
creating link that consists of the meaningless Click
here phrase, rather than providing helpful textual
clue to the destination of the link.
Plenty of links help the user get around
quickly.
Do not make the user scroll through lengthy
columns.
Provide links that let the users jump to any
part of the page.
Good use of textual links.
Provide hypertext table of contents that lets
the users pick the exact topic they want to
view.
The benefit of hypertext table of contents is
the color-coding that shows the user which
pages they have visited.
Provides alternate methods of linking to
accommodate a variety of users.
It is generally a sound idea to duplicate image
links with text links in case users have their
images turned off in the browser, and vice
versa.
Good use of ALT attribute values.
 You can only crowd so much information
onto any one Web page. Be conscious of the
cognitive load of the user, who often thinks
that Web pages hold too much information.
Dizzying array of choices.
Designed as a scanning page, the user may spend a
few seconds looking for a particular topic before
moving on by selecting a link.