Website Usability By Design - A 1-Day Course
Synopsis
This is a short course teaching website usability through the application
of engineering principles to web site design. Its primary objective is
enable organisations to formulate and implement a web site strategy which will
raise their website's productivity well above the norm.
This web site usability training course is inspired by, and organised around
a critical reading of Jakob Nielson's book,
Designing Web Usability, New Riders, 2000.
The course is, however, written and delivered by a team of experienced web
site design professionals, with their own perspectives on technical good
practice and commercial feasibility.
Suitable for
- Web site design professionals who want attract more visitors to their web
site and convert a higher proportion of those visitors into paying
customers.
- Technical managers and commercial directors who want to know why their web
site is under-performing and how to dramatically raise its return on
investment, through the pragmatic application of web usability techniques.
- Web site content providers and editors who want to build usability methods
into their everyday practice.
Delivery
This usability seminar is, like all of our web site design training, an
instructor-led course which can be delivered for in-house company groups or for
individuals on public courses.
Unlike our purely technical web site design courses, its emphasis is on
discovery, discussion and evaluation of the technologies and concepts involved
rather than on practical/craft skills.
Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices
London — £375 (+VAT)
- 27 Sep 2010
- 25 Oct 2010
- 29 Nov 2010
Contents:
Introduction to web site usability
- Pragmatism and methodology
- Art versus engineering
- Why everyone gets web site design wrong the first time
Page design issues in web usability
- Screen space: the scarcest resource
- User controlled presentation
- Screen resolution
- Standard and non-standard content
- Application versions
- Data lifetimes
- Response times
- Connections and partial downloads
- Link descriptions
- Link titles
- Link colours
- Link consistency and site structure
- Link expectations
- Outbound links
- Inbound links
- Linking to subscriptions and registrations
- Linking from adverts
- Stylesheets for consistency
- Stylesheets for separating content from presentation
- Fonts and font sizes
- Text size
- Frames: just say no
- Frames: more reasons to say no
- If you must use frames
- Printing issues
Content issues in web site usability
- Content is critical and web content is different
- The value of an editor
- Discursive style
- Keeping texts short
- Checking and copy editing
- Scannability
- Plain English
- Managing long texts by chunking
- Page titles
- Headings, sub-headings, and pull quotes
- Legibility
- Understanding image formats
- Reducing image file sizes
- Multimedia and plugins
- Animation
- Animation pitfalls
- Video
- Audio
- Downloading and streaming
- 3D
- Conclusion: the attention economy
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Navigation and searching in web site usability
- From page design to site design
- Homepages are over-estimated
- Splash screens — just say no
- Navigation: the three big questions
- Where am I?
- Where have I been?
- Where can I go?
- Creating and revealing site structure
- Reducing navigational clutter
- Managing subsites or sections
- Search-dominant versus link-dominant users
- Implementing searching
- Presenting search results
- Search term usage
- Search destination design
- Presenting URLs and domain names
- Archival and old URLs
- Executable links and URLs
Web usability testing
- Statistics and methods
- Whom to test
- When and where to test
- The test cycle
- Conducting a test
- Observing a test
- Interpreting and using results
- Using results
Intranets, accessibility, internationalisation and usability
- Extranets
- Intranets
- Accessibility
- Visual disabilities
- Auditory and speech disabilities
- Motor and cognitive disabilities
- Internationalisation and cultural difference
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