Eye-tracking studies can be extremely revealing about how your users are using your site in the real world. Unfortunately, they can also be extremely expensive and time-consuming to conduct. Not everyone in charge of a website has those kind of resources.Luckily for us, some organizations have made some of their information public, giving us the chance to do gain some insights about our own pages.
Splash pages and Flash intros—just don’t.
Not that many people are even doing this these days, but I just ran into a couple of them and suddenly feel it’s worth mentioning again. Splash pages are pure evil.
(Okay, maybe not pure evil. But some kind of evil, for sure, even if it’s just the annoying kind.)
What is a splash page, you ask? You’ve probably seen them. It’s a sort of front door to a website, and they are often made with Flash. Here’s an example:
Posted under: Web Design | 1 Comment »Web interfaces: how not to confuse your visitors away
Though it can be easy to think otherwise, web design is much more than just putting content on a site and calling it a day. And, because people interact differently with the web than with printed materials such as newspapers and magazines, we can’t treat it the same when we design for it. There are many facets to good web design, and this article is about one of the most important we need to think about when we design…. Keep reading »
Posted under: Educational Psychology, Web Design | 1 Comment »Organizing Information
Last week’s discussion about visuals and interfaces really got me thinking about user interfaces. One of the biggest and most important challenges of user interface design is to organize your information in the best possible way—you can’t just put it on the screen and assume your visitors will know what to do with it.
Reading on the Web is Different
For instance, studies show that the majority of web users don’t stop to read every word on the screen. (See this … Keep reading »
What is Web Design?
Though it can be easy to think otherwise, web design is much more than just putting content on a site and calling it a day. And, because people interact differently with the web than with printed materials, it’s also not just another way to distribute your printed stuff.
Unlike other forms of media (such as print), web design focuses on three things:
The Look
This is the part that most people think of when they think about web design, but it’s not the … Keep reading »
On the Internet, looks can be everything.
Your mother probably told you not to judge a book by its cover. While this is certainly sound advice, it turns out it just isn’t practical—at least not when it comes to the Internet. While many web designers, developers, and content managers have heard the expression that substance trumps presentation, research done at Stanford University suggests that a website’s appearance may have a bigger impact on user impressions than one might think. What this suggests is that, while content … Keep reading »
Posted under: Web Design | No Comments »Watch the effects of design in action!
If you’re having trouble deciding how to best organize your information, why not check out EDU Checkup. Host Nick DeNardis guides watchers through higher education websites, showing us instead of just telling us what works and what doesn’t. Whether your site is related to education or not, you can learn a lot from seeing real sites under the gun.