Follow Research - Based Guidelines

• What are the Guidelines?
• Who should use the Guidelines?
• Can I customize the Guidelines?
• Do the Guidelines have limitations?

What are the Guidelines?

Throughout your Web design or redesign project, you should take advantage of what is already known about best practices for each step of the process. The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, compiled through an extensive process of research and review, bring you those best practices.

This article gives you background information on the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines.

Many topics

The guidelines cover:

• design process and evaluation (PDF - 883KB)
• optimizing the user experience (PDF - 5.3MB)
• accessibility (PDF - 856KB)
• hardware and software (PDF - 880KB)
• the homepage (PDF - 4.8MB)
• page layout (PDF - 4.7MB)
• navigation (PDF - 2.7MB)
• scrolling and paging (PDF - 508KB)
• headings, titles, and labels (PDF - 1.9MB)
• links (PDF - 3.9MB)
• text appearance (PDF - 954KB)
• lists (PDF - 428KB)
• screen-based controls (widgets) (PDF - 2.1MB)
• graphics, images, and multimedia (PDF - 971KB)
• writing Web content (PDF - 2.5MB)
• content organization (PDF - 788KB)
• search (PDF - 383KB)
• usability testing (PDF - 1MB)

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Guideline, comments, example, references

Each guideline includes:

• a statement of the guideline
• comments (an explanation)
• an example
• sources (references to relevant research)
• a five-point scale of relative importance
• a five-point scale of strength of evidence

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Who should use the Guidelines?

The Guidelines offer benefits to four key audiences: Designers, Usability Specialists, Managers, and Researchers.

Designers

Designers—especially those new to the field—can see the range of issues that they must consider when planning and designing a Web site. Relying on evidence-based guidelines is better than relying on individual opinions that are not substantiated by evidence from research or from usability testing. When team members disagree, they can turn to the Guidelines for evidence-based decisions rather than arguing for personal preferences.

Usability Specialists

The Guidelines help usability specialists evaluate the designs of Web sites and support their recommendations. For example, usability specialists can use the Guidelines as a checklist to aid them during their review of Web sites. Usability specialists can also create customized checklists that focus on the "relative importance" and "strength of evidence" scales. For example, a usability specialist could create a checklist that only focuses on the 25 issues that scored highest for relative importance.

Managers

The Guidelines provide managers with a good overview and deep understanding of the wide range of usability and Web design issues that designers may encounter when creating Web sites. The Guidelines also provide managers with a "standard of usability" for their designers. Managers can request that designers follow relevant portions of the Guidelines and can use the Guidelines to set priorities. For example, when rapid design is required, managers can identify the guidelines that are most important to the success of a Web site—as defined by the "relative importance" score associated with each guideline—and require designers to focus on implementing those selected guidelines.

Researchers

Researchers involved in evaluating Web design and Web process issues can use this set of guidelines to determine where new research is needed. Researchers can use the sources of evidence provided for each guideline to assess the research that has been conducted and to determine the need for additional research to increase the validity of the previous findings, or to challenge those findings. Perhaps more importantly, researchers also can use the Guidelines and their sources to formulate new and important research questions.

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Can I customize the Guidelines?

You can customize the Guidelines to meet your needs. For example:

• If you were developing a portal Web site that focuses only on linking to other Web sites, you would probably focus on the guidelines in the "Links" and "Navigation" chapters.
• You can merge selected guidelines with your organization's other standards and guidelines to reduce the number of different documents that designers must look at.

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Do the Guidelines have limitations?

The Guidelines apply primarily to English language Web sites designed for most people between 18 and 75 years of age. The Guidelines may not be applicable to all audiences or contexts. Furthermore, they are guidelines, not fixed rules.

They may not apply to Web sites used by audiences with low literacy skills who have special terminology and layout needs.

A designer may have research evidence, usability testing evidence, or specialized knowledge about designing for a particular audience or context that requires adapting a guideline to that audience or context.

Although considerable effort has been made to base the guidelines on research from a variety of fields, including cognitive psychology, computer science, human factors, technical communication, and usability; other disciplines may have valuable research that is not reflected in these guidelines.

Some strength of evidence ratings are low because there is a lack of research for that particular issue. The strength of evidence scale was designed to value research-based evidence and also to acknowledge experience-based evidence including expert opinion. Low strength of evidence ratings should encourage research on those issues.

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Next steps

When you have thought about the process and considered the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, you should Develop a Plan.

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