Human Factors International published a great post outlining some important usability principles folks should practice when building an app, a website or a product. A friend of ours recently asked us for some tips and examples of a few of these principles. Instead of emailing them back to him, we decided to share the actual examples of each of these in a quick blog post. Here they are:
1. Motivate
The goal of your site or app is to meet specific user needs and marry them with your business goals. Using motivators helps draw different types of users into specific parts of your site. Understanding the triggers that prompt people to take an action is the key step before you can add these motivators to your site or app.
How the 7 Deadly Sins Are Used To Motivate
2. Page Flow Must Match User Workflow
HFI uses out some good questions to define this one: Who are your users? What are their tasks and online environment? The page flow of your site must match the user workflow.
Why Workflows Work Better Than Sitemaps
3. Nail the Navigation and Search
The ability to find something a user is looking for is 80% of usability. You've got to nail the navigation structure and search. As HFI points out: if they can't find it in 3 clicks, they're gone.
How to Create Simple and Effective Sub Navs
10 Ways to Turn Hyperlinks into Hyper-Clicks
4. Obvious Calls To Action
Make your controls understandable. Think through where you want people to click and when. Avoid confusion between emblems, banners, and buttons.
Great Example of How WSJ Snubbed It's Users
How An Early "Neat" Idea Can Take a Turn for the Worse
5. Identify & Optimize for Target Browsers and User Hardware
Not only does Google punish you for slow load times but your website visitors tend to leave your site if they are "on hold" for a long time.
How to Speed Up Your Site with Backbone.js
Our JQuery Talk on Speeding up Interactions on Pageless Apps
Bonus: Usability test along the way
Test early in design using low-fidelity prototypes. Don't wait until the end, when it's too late.
How a Quick Test Helped Increase Click Through Rate by 12%
Getting Feedback While You Build
Takeaways From a Quick Test of Search Fields on Consumer Electronics Websites
Got some good examples of usability practices to share? Shoot them our way. We love this stuff.
