Best practices on the Web

UXify Eindhoven 18.02.2014

Tatiana Sidorenkova Elvira Arslanova

Julia Malyk

Google

LinkedIN

Ryanair

Reddit

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com The culture of Reddit (video)

What are the best practices?

A best practice is...

➢ a method or technique ➢ that has consistently shown results

superior to those achieved with other means,

➢ and that is used as a benchmark. It can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered.

The elements of UX by J.J.Garrett

Further reading Heuristics: Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design by J.Nielsen First Principles of Interaction Design by B.Tognazzini 20 Guiding Principles for Experience Designers by H.Whitney List of Style and Product Guidelines Web: ISO Standards W3C Standards including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (2008) Web Style Guide by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton (2009)

Gestalt Principles

Similarity

Continuation

Closure

Proximity

Figure

Main Message §  Short and clear

§  Straight to the point

Call to action

Main principles of call-to-action: Color Position White space improved legibility fresh feel drawing attention higher comprehension (stop worrying about fold) Shape Size Secondary action (http://eu.marketo.com/) Tell users what they will get

Navigation

success of navigation system is that the user will click through it with a high degree of confidence

Choose the logic for navigation

•  Understand your users and your content. •  Understand the content properly, make wireframes •  Find “lists” of things in the content •  Create diagrams (hub & spokes, card sorting, post

notes, word association games etc.) •  Find individual things •  Create diagrams •  Group “logically” to your user ( according to the

research that you have done). Iterative, tests. •  Give names to the “clumps”

Find space in your content

Do not conflict with local navigation

Understand the behaviour of your user

What screens are most often visited? Do they jump between the pages often?

Now it’s time to be creative.

Choose a widget. Iterate. Examples:

Rijksmuseum Couchsurfing

Dataveeys Ultranoir

Further Reading Web User Interface (UI) Elements Web Design Elements: Examples And Best Practices Web Forms: Luke Wroblewski Modern Web Form Design,

Web Form Design in Action, Web Form Design Best Practices, Designing for Today's Web

Social Login Accounts Good UI UI Patterns Libraries: UI Patterns Welie Quince PatternTap Patternry Responsive Patterns Motion Graphics Transitions and Animations Dark Patterns

Content

Purpose Why and for whom am I writing this?

vs.

Metadata

•  meta titles

•  meta description

•  meta keywords

+ alt tags

Language Consider type of user and context

Skip the “happy talk”

•  Objective

•  Short

•  Concise

× 1 idea

per paragraph

AIDA Principle Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

Structure –  Heading

–  Subheadings

–  Paragraphs

–  Bullet points

–  Links

×

Pictures & Layout

Home page •  establishes the brand;

•  sets the tone; •  gives the push in the right direction.

Important to:

–  spell out the big picture;

–  create a good tagline;

–  put contacts and call to action upfront.

Web Typography in 4 simple steps

and it’s not about choosing fonts

1. Contrast

2. Size

3. Hierarchy

4. Negative space

Getting a little more professional

Quotes

Dashes

Alignment

How? Typography layout

There’s more

Fascinating kerning game

Further reading

–  Web Is All About Typography

–  Smashing Magazine

–  A List Apart

–  I Love Typography

Links from the discussion Awesome website Bootstrap is a front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first

projects on the web. Foundation is an advanced responsive front-end framework. inuitcss is a powerful, scalable, Sass-based, BEM, OOCSS framework. HAL (Hypertext Application Language) is a simple format that gives a

consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API (very technical).