I recently gave a talk on website usability to students of the M.Sc. in IT in Education course at Trinity College, Dublin. (You can download the PowerPoint presentation – 954kb. Please link/reference my site if you use it.)
As part of the discussion, I rehashed a point I made on Mediajunk recently: that designers should not rely on the logo as the only homepage link. Not all users know that the logo is a link to the homepage, I argued, despite the popularity of this practice.
It turns out that the practice is even more popular than I'd guessed. A logo that links to the homepage was found on 100% of the sites analysed by Heidi Adkisson for her master’s thesis on de-facto web standards.
De-facto web standards differ from proposed web standards; the latter are proposals and guidelines for designing websites, while the former are the actual practices and conventions that prevail among existing sites.
Among Adkisson’s findings, outlined in her article for Boxes and Arrows were:
- 100% of sites had a logo linking back to homepage displayed in upper left corner
- 93% of sites had a Global Search option, presented as a text field and button.
- 76% of sites used text rendered as graphics for main site menu links.
- 62% of web pages displayed links as underlined text.
- 37% of pages use different colours to differentiate visited and unvisited links.
For me the most surprising of the above findings is that the 76% of sites still use graphical menus. I suspect this number will continue to drop as sites become less graphic-oriented and more usable, and use of cascading style sheets grows.
I am against graphical menus for the following reasons:
- They make pages slower to download, particularly if they are paired with rollover images.
- They work poorly if at all in text-only browsers and screen readers.
- Graphic-rendered text cannot be read directly by search engine bots, lowering the page's findability on what are likely to be relevant keywords.
- Too often text rendered in menu images is difficult to read and appears to “bleed” (this is because anti-alias or dither techniques do not work well at such a small scale).
Heidi’s analyses are useful; let's hope they are the starting point for more in-depth research on her site webdesignpractices.com
She has also made her masters’ thesis available for download (4.2 MB PDF file)
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A similar project, also well executed, is Martijn van Welie’s Web Design Patterns.
Weelie identifies many different types of sites/pages, and groups them in to categories.
For example, in the “e-commerce” category, he lists examples such as:
- Shopping cart
- Login
- Registering
- Product Comparison
- Product Configurator
- Product Advisor
- Case study
- Booking process
… and so on.
He then provides a typical features & functions analysis of each element, along with visual examples.
Both these studies indicate that, after ten years of chaotic growth, the web is finally settling down into conventions and patterns, which will make life easier for designers and users alike.
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