Research-Based
Web Site Guidelines
After
surveying the internet for guidelines about web design,
Boling, Bichelmeyer, Squire and Kirkley [1]
identified
the following problems:
- guidelines
are often derived from studies of paper-based materials,
or they are not based on research at all
- guidelines
are inconsistently named and organized
- guidelines
tend to focus on single elements rather than integration
of elements
- standard
guidelines are difficult to apply to the context of web
page design
- guidelines
often do not address cross-cultural & international
diversity
These
researchers then proceeded to carry out research designed to
organize these guidelines into a meaningful framework.
Focussing on the function of web sites, they identified
seven
profiles for web sites
based on a matrix of high information, high motivation to
low information, low motivation. For each profile, they
provided guidelines for site design. A quick summary of
their profiles are as follows:
Profile
1: No Expectations
-
very low need to motivate users or deliver content - eg.
personal home pages (As an example, here's my personal
home
page.
I use it to tell others about myself and the projects I
am working on.
Profile
2: All Motivation
- high need to motivate users to view site - eg.
promotional commercial sites (Here's a link to a movie
site which demonstrates this type of site -
Meet
Joe Black)
Profile
3: All Content -
high need to deliver content where site may be the only
provider of this information or users are highly
motivated to use site already- eg. search engines or
research results (Jakob
Nielsen's Use-It.com Site
is a good example of this type of site)
Profile
4: High Motivation
- a need to provide some content along with motivating
factors, at same time users must be able to distinguish
between content and glitz - eg. Bill
Nye, the Science Guy
Profile
5: High Content -
need for content outweighs the need for high motivational
factors but an attractive site is necessary - eg.
government agencies, universities (Check out our
university - the University
of Saskatchewan
Profile
6: Mixed Elements & Profile 7: Great
Expectations
- "in both these profiles the need to deliver specific
content and the need to motivate users to a specific
response are highly interdependent and interrelated" -
eg. commercial catalogue sites, sites devoted to
charitable or political causes, or educational sites such
as the Prince
and I
The
authors also include some universal guidelines for web
design which include the need to eliminate distracting
elements from a design, the need to follow web conventions
to ensure consistency, and the need to consider the
low-bandwidth or low-end system users when designing a
site.
Genres
Another
method of categorizing web sites was developed by
Shneiderman [4].
He used the literary categorization of genres to classify
web sites. This idea of genres has also been used by other
authors of web design texts. For example, the Web Design
Wow! Book [2]
classifies web sites according to whether they are for
Fleming
[3]
classifies web sites as:
and
suggests the differences necessary to each type of
site.
[1] Boling, E.,
Bichelmeyer, B., Squire, K., & Kirkley, S. (1997).
Visual design profiles: Making sense of web site
design guidelines. [Online].
Available: http://www.indiana.edu/~iirg/ARTICLES/AMTEC/lit.html
[2] Davis, J.
& Merritt, S. (1998). The web design wow! book:
Showcasing the best of on-screen communication.
Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.
[3] Fleming,
J. (1998). Web navigation: Designing the user
experience. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates,
Inc. Companion Web Site: http://www.squarecircle.com/navigation/
[4]
Shneiderman, B. (1998). Designing the user interface:
Strategies for effective human-computer interaction (3rd
ed.) . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley
Publishing.
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