This report addresses the 3 concepts relating to usability in web design.
We start the report off with an overview of page layout, one of the most general topics our report covers. Making sure the user avoids staring aimlessly without direction is an imperative feature of a webpage. In the same light, it can be thought of as a golden rule to have uniformity throughout your website, each page matching the rest. With usability in mind, cutting down the clutter can only maximize it. Have a clean simplistic look, non-bloated and displaying only relevant information. We focus on the values of consistency and brevity.
Next, we discuss the importance of speed on the web. Users that have to stare at the hourglass while waiting for the page to load will become frustrated with you.
Finally, we overview the importance of making a website accessible. Ensuring that the site is usable by a wide range of browsers and users with disabilities is essential.
As the Internet gains popularity and the amount of information online increases exponentially, web design and usability are becoming increasingly important.
With the confluence of Web-based and Desktop-based applications slowly drifting into sight, a slew of new architectures and development techniques are beginning to take precedence over their lesser peers. The one technology that has really captured the attention of web developers, because it maximizes the usability of a site, is the newly discovered (although previously implemented – although nameless at the time) web development architecture called AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).
“People often ask me “What’s the most important thing I should do if I want to make sure my Web site is easy to use?” The answer is simple… It’s don’t make me think”We pages, according to Krug, should be self-explanatory. The user should be able to glance at the page and understand how to do what he wants to do. Every second he stares at the page confused is another second he is tempted to click the back button and head to greener pastures. Emphasizing features most users are looking for, like search boxes for example, and de-emphasizing less important features, like copyright notices or support information.
According to Gerry Gaffney, “Consistency is critical” when designing your sites to be more usable for your users (Gaffney). When we talk about trying to make a design, layout, or overall format consistent; CSS is the perfect technology to help you reach that goal. CSS lets you create one file to describe what you want your entire site or specific pieces of the site to look like. Since you can put all of your formatting and design code in one file, you can tell all your pages to look to that file to know how to display its information. This gives your site a consistent look and feel to the entire site, while also letting you change things here and there to mix it up if you need to.
One of the major complaints that users have with large sites is the speed at which the pages load. Even as the average users’ internet speed is increasing, the file size that pages are getting to are getting larger at almost the same rate. One major source of the increased file size is the graphical layout. In the past web designers would create a graphic layout for their site, plug it into a table, then copy and paste it on all of their pages. This worked back when layouts in general were simple because technology was limited. However, now that web technologies have grown and layouts are starting to get highly graphics intensive, loading times are getting unreasonable. It’s one thing to wait an extra bit to load the first page, but it’s completely different when you have to wait on every page to load the same layout with slightly different text. CSS can aid the web designer heavily in this venture. If all of the formatting and graphics are loaded within the CSS file, all of those big files are cached when you load the page. What this means is you only have to load the layout completely once on the first page, and not on each page. Also, “The reduced HTML file size inherent in CSS-based sites results in significantly faster download times (Moss).
Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is an approach to Web application development that uses client-side scripting to exchange data with the Web server. As a result, Web pages are dynamically updated without a full page refresh interrupting the interaction flow. With Ajax, you can create richer, more dynamic Web application user interfaces that approach the immediacy and usability of native desktop applications.” (McCarthy)As McCarthy made quite clear, these new AJAX web applications are allowing developers to expand their horizons by creating faster, more usable environments in their pages. Re-iterating an earlier point, the key objective in AJAX was to somehow give the end user an experience that mimics the clean, concise and most importantly the speediness of an application native to the Desktop environment.
There have already been some amazing breakthroughs in AJAX based applications online. The most notable as of now are GMail and Google Maps, which are the software giant Google Inc.’s Webmail and Online map finder applications, respectively (Google). By utilizing this new technology, Google has succeeded in creating 2 of the most usable web applications currently available. Although Google has seemed to have pioneered this new, as some say “Pattern” of web design, as a result causing the number of “applications to skyrocket” (McCarthy).
Accessibility can be tricky when developing a web application. When using the server side approach (PHP/ASP), you are limited to the abilities of the browser in which the application will be run. This can sometimes lead to clunky awkward interfaces that user must adapt to use. However, when using the client-side approach (Java/Flash), the programmer has the ability to create much more interactive and “native” interfaces for the user to interact with. Such advantages would include not having to open a new web page everytime one needs to view new information, this once again mimicks the native desktop application.
Trenton Moss, in explaining why accessibility makes business sense, makes two major points: “An accessible Website will make your client money” and “An accessible Website will save your client money” (Moss). The first way he discusses accessibility will fulfill those two points is “his website will be easier to manage”. He mentions CSS as the key factor to how this happens. “An accessible website separates the content (HTML) and presentation (CSS) of each page … Now, to adjust the layout of the Website, developers only need to make changes to the CSS file, rather than amending each and every page of the site, saving considerable time (and, therefore, money)” (Moss). This about says it all. If the most important factor affecting you is cost, it is imperative that CSS be used to make designing easier and better. As a result you gain consistency, speed, and accessibility.
Some of the key technologies that have really impacted the web design industry are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language (XML). Each has their own optimizations and ways to improve usability via speedup, accessibility and brevity. When combined, these 3 technologies form the brand new and revolutionary web development technique (AJAX) that mimics the behavior and usability of desktop applications that are used today.