Need for maintaining website usability

Rukshan ALEXANDER

Continued from March 15:

Font face guidelines

Some font faces are more legible than others on normal computer screens, and font legibility is not constant across media. Times New Roman is one of the most legible font faces on paper but that is not true on computer screen because it has lot of decorative bits added to letters (serifs), making them more complex to read by dyslexic people. Font face guidelines can be summarised in the following points: * Use sans-serif font face for the small text size.

* Use serif typeface for the bigger text such as heading.

* Use serif font for faster reading. Georgia and Verdana offer excellent legibility.

* Use Time New Roman for the printer version of web pages.

Font size guidelines

The size of the font is important to fast scanning. In order to achieve an appropriate layout with a specific font size for users with average vision, research suggests that web sites should:

* Use font size 14 point (or higher) for headings and displaying text.

* Use font size between 10 and 12 point for body text.

Link specification guidelines

In the literature reviewed a number of restrictions on links appear:

* Number of words in text link: Use two to four words in text link; one to three words in each link.

* Use of internal links should be minimised.

* Avoid using (link, click, click here, more and etc).

* Use default browser colour combinations for links.

Colour management guidelines

Web users can view web pages through different screens with different facilities which affect the appearance of colours. There are more than sixteen million colours available to the vast majority of web users, but many users can only view web pages on monitors with 256 colours. Several colours can be chosen for each web design, and these colours can affect the usability of the web page, i.e. the selection colours can undermine or promote web design usability. The web designer should be careful with the text and background colour combination, as this too can affect the colour usability rate.

Changes in the colour contrast flow between the text and background can reduce the users’ concentration in extracting useful information from the less important data. The right selection of colour contrast can simplify the search process for the users too. In order to determine efficient and effective colour contrast, several guidelines have been published which might help. These guidelines involve the number and type of colours within a web page and how they can influence the web page’s usability.

The following are some of the colour usability principles, those that deal with the colour contrast between text and background colours:

* Get maximum contrast and the highest possible readability by selecting white background with black text as many users with slight deficiency eye problems can at least recognise the difference between these two colours.

* Get less contrast and high readability by using any dark text colour over a white background.

* Select colours with sufficient contrast and which can be read by as many users as possible with different vision deficiencies, because similar intensities are harder to read.

* Avoid red and green, pink and green and blue and yellow colour combinations because they affect the readability of the web page in general and it might be impossible to read for colour blind users

* Avoid light text on a light background and dark text on dark background.

After selecting an efficient colour combination, tuning these colours within the web page is necessary to attract the users’ eyes on the most important data in the web page. The colour alterations can add accent and interest to the display if, and only if, the number of colours and their combination are within reasonable bounds. The following are some of these recommendations:

* Minimize the number of colours used in the web page design.

* Use conservative amounts of colour in each design because many colour can increase the search time.

* Limit the number of colours to four in a single display.

* A good page measure is to have one to three colours within the web page

* Many colours can distract users from the content.

Web contents

A large number of web sites update their contents continuously by removing and adding web pages. If done by different people, it could begin to produce inconsistency and in itself cause a usability problem.

Advertisements

As web pages may be browsed by large number of users, many companies want to have a chance to attract advertising revenue. They divide their web pages into different sections and one of the sections is used for advertisements throughout. Users seem to be annoyed by advertisements and have learned to ignore them. But if the developers insist on including the advertisements within their web pages, they should reserve special places for them, such as a banner area, and never place them next to important web page content.

Furthermore pop-up windows advertisements are considered to be one of the worst choices because they keep the users out of the page and distract their attention from the main content.

Images

Web browsers do not immediately support new publishing technologies, and obviously, old browsers that are still used by many users do not support them. Different solutions can be applied to solve the image download time and browser supporting problems. Some of these solutions are -

* Produce small versions of images.

* Divide a document containing many images into several documents containing fewer images.

* Optimise and use meaningful images.

* Provide a text alternative for each image.

Frames

Frames allow web developers to divide the web page into several sections with each section holding an individual web page. Using frames is in general problematic for users that are not familiar with the technology. It is recommended to substitute layers for frames or to organise the information differently by separating it into several limited web pages.

Need for home page usability

Web site usability is today widely recognized as an important requirement for user acceptance. Nowadays electronic commercial web sites are growing rapidly. The home page impact on a company bottom is far greater than simple measure of e-commerce revenues: the home page is also the company’s face to the world.

As the home page is the most important on any web site, customer dissatisfaction will make customers to go to other sites. Furthermore, while the home page can often be the customer’s first and possibly last chance to attract a customer, rather than the front page of a news paper. Therefore it would be essential to maintain the home page as usable as this page receives the greatest number of visitors.

Presenting a usable web page

All web pages on the web are written in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) code. Several HTML elements such as tags, attributes, values and labels were used to design web pages.

It is necessary to construct the web pages as usability to capture the e-commerce market. A possible solution to maintain web page usability consists in relying on usability guidelines and recommendations to be reviewed and applied by designers and developers as web designers developers play an important role in the construction of websites.