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.

Topics

The guidelines cover:

• design process and evaluation (PDF - 1.9MB)
• optimizing the user experience (PDF - 9.1MB)
• accessibility (PDF - 2.4MB)
• hardware and software (PDF - 2.8MB)
• the homepage (PDF - 12.1MB)
• page layout (PDF - 21.9MB)
• navigation (PDF - 13.1MB)
• scrolling and paging (PDF - 4.5MB)
• headings, titles, and labels (PDF - 7.8MB)
• links (PDF - 17.1MB)
• text appearance (PDF - 11.2MB)
• lists (PDF - 6.6MB)
• screen-based controls (widgets) (PDF - 15.1MB)
• graphics, images, and multimedia (PDF - 16.8MB)
• writing Web content (PDF - 11.0MB)
• content organization (PDF - 10.1MB)
• search (PDF - 9.1MB)
• usability testing (PDF - 1MB)

Limitations

The Guidelines may not be applicable to all audiences or contexts and are not fixed rules. 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.