useit.com

This might be a bit cheeky, to evaluate the site of the world-respected Jakob Nielsen, but I thought it might be a good idea to see just how good his site is, compared to Krug’s rules. (I was going to bring the book with me today, but decided not to, so I’m mostly working from memory).

When you first approach the site, it feels a bit bland – but with a site of this nature, where the important part of it is the information it contains, blandness is very soon forgotten.

Within seconds of first approaching the site it’s obvious that the homepage is split into two diffrent sections – ‘Perminant Content’ on the left with a dirty yellow background, and ‘News’, on the right, with a light blue background. This very quickly allows for a distinction between the two seperate areas of the site, and allows for an easy decision as to where you should look, depending on what want.

As you look further down the page, within the permanent content section, it’s separated by carefully worded headings, each highlighting what content can be found within it. This is not as good as it could be, however, as many of the links listed within the sections lead to different sites, without any notification that the links would do so.

A glance to the top-right hand corner of the site reveals a search box. This is easily identiable because of two reasons – firstly, because it is in the top-right hand corner, a web convention that has existed for a while now – and secondly, because it clearly uses the word “Search”, leaving no cause for confusion.

Finally (as we’re running out of time), if you navitate to a page deeper within the site, such as this one, a breadcrumb at the top of the page clearly indicates that you’re looking at a page about the Macintosh, and the fact it’s been around for 25 years now (happy birthday), which is contained within the Alertbox section of the site.

So that’s a few good things, but I have some gripes about the site too – such as the fact there is no global navigation, meaning if you’re on one page, and want to find another, you’re forced to return to the homepage. It’s also quite hard to find archived content – content which is no doubt not archived, like this – but so far as I can see, the only way it’s accessable is via the search box – which isn’t very good for people that don’t know what they want – until they see it.

The number one rule for easy to use sites: Don’t make me think!

I’ve started to read a book called Don’t make me think by Steve Krug. In the introduction he explains how, as a web designer – his fellow web designers would ask him for his number one tip for making usable sites – the answer of which is highlighted above.

The concept behind the tip (and the book) is that sites should be built to be as intuative as possible. By using convention, recognised keywords, and just a dash of common sense, website designs and layouts should be so comfortable to use, that a new visitor to the site should be able to automatically achieve their aims without even thinking about what they’re doing.

I’m only about a 3rd of the way though the book so far, so I’ve still got a lot to learn – but so far it’s covered some very interesting things, such as:

• Number of words used on a page – as Krug himself says (if I remember correctly) “you should remove about half of the words on every page of the site, and then remove half again”.
• Tabs – people understand tabs and other visual indicators which help highlight where in a site someone currently is.
• Keyword conventions – if people want to search on a site – provide them with a input field labeled “search” – not “quick-search”, not “find”, or anything else.

There is far more to good design than just these examples, but I think that taking a comon sense approach, and trying to not be too flashy, should end with good results.

Here is my sexy blog, ready to be inspected by Rowland and gang!

As you can see, I’ve gone for a self hosted WordPress site – I had one running at this address anyway, so before the session I upgraded it to the latest version, then found a nice theme for it (isn’t it pretty ).

Anyway, I feel that I’m fairly advanced in my general web creation ability. I’ve spent a number of years working with PHP and MySQL, with my current focus on learning concepts such as OOP and MVC via the use of a PHP framework such as CakePHP.

Regarding my client side skills, I’m not great – but I’m not bad. I don’t feel that I’m as good at XHTML and CSS as some people, but am learning new techniques everyday. I’ve just discovered CSS frameworks, and have decided to use BlueTrip as I feel it best fits my needs as a developer.

I’m looking to learn something new in this module. I’ve got basic CSS knowledge already – even a few advanced techniques – so I’m looking to explore other, more advanced, techniques. I’m looking forward to the idea of learning about XML and XSLT as I’ve not yet played with them.

Well… it’s been a VERY long time since I’ve done anything on this site – so I figured I might as well give it another go. (That, and the fact that I need a blog for one of my modules).

I’d not expect too much excitement from this blog if I were you, I’ve tried blogs before, but they’re just not me – oh well – but feel free to check it out of you’re interested in how I’m doing on my Advanced Web Design module.