The User Experience is the key to acceptance. If users feel your website is not easy to learn, not easy to use, or too cumbersome, an otherwise excellent website in terms of content and value could fail. Good User Interface Design can make a product easy to understand and use, which results in greater user acceptance.
Website interface design does not have much in common with paper document design. People don’t just read web documents they interact with them, often in unpredictable ways. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) of a website is used to convey functionality and meaning to what you are looking at on the computer screen. If a GUI is designed correctly users quickly get a sense of how to use it. They can literally see how to accomplish what they want.
A crucial difference between printed pages and web pages is that hypertext links allow readers to access a single web page with no preamble. In other words web pages must be free standing and not dependent upon information from a previous page because a reader may be hyper-linking directly to that page. In fact it may be the only page on the entire site the viewer reads. Because of the nature of the web with people entering sites from all different entry points every web page needs:
• An informative title
• The creators identity (author or institution)
• A creation or revision date
• At least one link to a local home page
• The “home page” URL on the major menu pages in your site
The main interface problem for users in websites is the lack of a sense of where they are within the myriad of information available. Readers need a sense of context, of their place within an organization of information. In paper documents this sense of "where you are" is a mixture of graphic and editorial organizational cues supplied by the graphic design of the book, the organization of the text, and the physical sensation of the book as an object. Electronic documents provide none of the physical cues we take for granted in assessing information. When we see a Web hypertext link on the page we have few cues to where we will be led, how much information is at the other end of the link, and exactly how the linked information relates to the current page.
Graphic and/or text based summary screens are helpful. Users should always be able to easily return to the Home page and major navigation points in the website. This is where consistency is very helpful. These basic navigation links should always be present, familiar, and consistently located. The goal is to be consistent and predictable; your users should feel comfortable exploring your site and confident that they can find what they need. The graphic identity of a series of pages in a Web site provides visual cues to the continuity of information.
Consistency of appearance of structures and their location is very important. Structures include icons, boxes, arrows, etc. No matter where users are in a website structures should look and function the same way, and be located in the same place on the page. The user will quickly become familiar with the functionality and will not waste time looking for a particular structure.
Users are not impressed with complexity that seems gratuitous, especially those users who may be depending on the site for timely and accurate work-related information. Your interface metaphors should be simple, familiar, and logical — if you need a metaphor for information design, choose a genre familiar to readers of documents, such as a book or a library. Highly unusual, "creative" navigation and home page metaphors always fail because they impose an unfamiliar, unpredictable interface burden on the user.
In summary, Graphic user interfaces were designed to give people control over their personal computers. Users now expect a level of design sophistication from all graphic interfaces, including Web pages. The goal is to provide for the needs of all your potential users, adapting Web technology to their expectations and never requiring readers to conform to an interface that places unnecessary obstacles in their paths.
References:
Bruce Tognazzini. http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html
Web Style Guide, Lynch and Horton http://www.webstyleguide.com/interface/
Usernomics http://www.usernomics.com/user-interface-design.html
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