Derived from Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir
Communicating the Site's Purpose
- Show the company name and/or logo in a reasonable size and noticeable location. Upper left is probably best.
- Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does.
- Emphasize what your site does that's valuable from a user's perspective.
- Emphasize the highest priority task so that users have a clear starting point on the homepage.
- Clearly designate one page per site as the official home page.
- On your main company website, don't use the word "website" to refer to anything by the totality of the company's web presence.
- Design the homepage to be clearly different from all other pages on the site.
Communicating Information About Your Company
- Group corporate information, such as About Us, Investor Relations, Press Room, Employment and other information about the company, in one distinct area.
- Include a homepage link to an "About Us" section that gives users an overview about the company and links to any relevant details about your products, services, company values, business proposition, management team, and so forth. Use the name of the company and call it "About Acme". See also http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031027.html
- If you want to get press coverage for your company, include a "Press Room" or "News Room" link on your homepage.
- Present a unified face to the customer, in which the website is one of the touchpoints rather than an entity unto itself.
- Include a "Contact Us" link on the homepage that goes to a page with all the contact information for your company. Also include the "Contact Us" link in the "About Us" page.
- If you provide a "Feedback" mechanism, specify the purpose of the link and whether it will be read by customer service or the webmaster, and so forth.
- Don't include internal company information (which is targeted for employees and should go on the intranet) on the public website.
- If your site gathers any customer information, include a "Privacy Policy" link on the homepage. Call it "Privacy Policy".
- Explain how the website makes money if it's not self-evident.
Content Writing
- Use customer-focused language. Label sections and categories according to the value they hold for the customers, not according to what they do for your company.
- Avoid redundant content.
- Don't use clever phrases and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying.
- Use consistent capitalization and other style standards.
- Don't label a clearly defined area of the page if the content is sufficiently self-explanatory.
- Avoid single-item categories and single-item bulleted lists.
- Use non-breaking spaces between words in phrases that need to go together in order to be scannable and understood.
- Only use imperative language such as "Enter a City or Zip Code" for mandatory tasks, or qualify the statement appropriately.
- Spell out abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms, and immediately follow them by the abbreviation, in the first instance.
- Avoid exclamation marks.
- Use all uppercase letters sparingly or not at all as a formatting style.
- Avoid using spaces and punctuations inappropriately, for emphasis.
- Use examples to reveal the site's content, rather than just describing it.
- For each example, have a link that goes directly to the detailed page for that example, rather than to a general category page of which that item is a part.
- Provide a link to the broader category next to the specific example.
- Make sure it's obvious which links lead to follow-up information about each example and which links lead to general information about the category as a whole.
- Make it easy to access anything that has been recently featured on your homepage, for example, in the last 2 weeks or month, by providing a list of recent features as well as putting recent items into the permanent archives.
- Differentiate links and make them scannable.
- Don't use generic instructions, such as "click here" as a link name.
- Don't use generic links, such as "More ..." at the end of a list of items.
- Allow links colors to show visited and unvisited links.
- Don't use the word "Links" to indicate links on the page. Show that things are links by underlining them and coloring them blue.
- If a link does anything other than go to another web page, such as linking to a PDF file or launching an audio or video player, e-mail message, or another application, make sure the link explicitly indicates what will happen.
- Locate the primary navigation area in a highly noticeable place, preferably directly adjacent to the main body of the page.
- Group items in the navigation area so that similar items are next to each other.
- Don't provide multiple navigation areas for the same type of links.
- Don't include an active link to the homepage on the homepage.
- Don't use made-up words for category navigation choices. Categories need to be immediately differentiable from each other -- if users don't understand your made-up terminology, it will be impossible for them to differentiate categories.
- If you have a shopping cart feature on your site, include a link to it on the homepage.
- Use icons in navigation only if they help users to recognize a class of items immediately, such as new items, sale items, or video content.
- Give users an input box on the homepage to enter search queries, instead of just giving them a link to a search page. Should be in upper-right or upper-left.
- Input boxes should be wide enough for users to see and edit standard queries on the site. (25-30 characters)
- Don't label the search area with a heading; instead use a "Search" button to the right of the box.
- Unless advanced searches are the norm on your site, provide simple search on the homepage, with a link to advanced search or search tips if you have them.
- Search on the homepage should search the entire site by default.
- Don't offer a feature to "Search the Web" from the site's search function.
- Offer users direct access to high-priority tasks on the homepage.
- Don't include tools unrelated to tasks users come to your site to do.
- Don't provide tools that reproduce browser functionality, such as setting a page as the browser's default starting page or bookmarking the site.
- Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage.
- Label graphics and photos if their meaning is not clear from the context of the story they accompany.
- Edit photos and diagrams appropriately for the display size.
- Avoid watermark graphics.
- Don't use animation for the sole purpose of drawing attention to an item on the homepage. Animation rarely has a place on the homepage because it distracts from other elements.
- Never animate critical elements of the page, such as the logo, tag line, or main headline.
- Let users choose whether they want to see an animated intro to your site -- don't make it the default.
- Limit font styles and other text formatting, such as sizes, colors, and so forth on the page because over-design text can actually detract from the meaning of the words.
- Use high-contrast text and background colors so that type is as legible as possible.
- Avoid horizontal scrolling at 800x600.
- The most critical page elements should be visible "above the fold" at the most prevalent window size.
- Use liquid layout so the homepage size adjusts to different screen resolutions.
- Use logos judiciously.
- Never use widgets for parts of the screen that you don't want people to click.
- Avoid using multiple text entry boxes on the homepage, especially in the upper part of the page where people tend to look for the search feature.
- Use drop-down menus sparingly, especially if the items in them are not self-explanatory. See also http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001112.html
- Begin the window title with the information-carrying word -- usually the company name.
- Don't include the top-level domain name, such as ".com" in the window title unless it is actually part of the company name, such as "Amazon.com".
- Don't include "homepage" in the title. This adds verbiage without value.
- Include a short description of the site in the window title.
- Limit window titles to no more than 7 or 8 words or fewer than 64 total characters.
- Homepages for commercial websites should have the URL http://www.companyname.com (or an equivalent for your country or non-commercial TLD).
- For any website that has an identity closely connected to a specific country other than the US, use that country's TLD.
- If available, register domain names for alternative spellings, abbreviations, or common misspellings of the site name.
- If you have alternative domain name spellings, choose one as the authorized version and redirect users to it from all other spellings.
- Headlines should succinct, yet descriptive, to give maximum information in as few words as possible.
- Write and edit specific summaries for press releases and news stories that you feature on your homepage.
- Link headlines, rather than the deck, to the full news story.
- As long as all the news stories on the homepage occurred within the week, there's no need to list the date and time in the deck of each story, unless it is truly a breaking news item that has frequent updates.
- Take users to your "real" homepage when they type your main URL or click a link to your site.
- Avoid popup windows.
- Don't use routing pages for users to choose their graphical location unless you have versions of your site in many different languages, with no single dominant language.
- Keep ads for outside companies on the periphery of the page.
- Keep external ads as small and discreet as possible relative to your core homepage content.
- If you place ads outside the standard banner area at the top of the page, label them as advertising so that users don't confuse them with your site's content.
- Avoid using ad conventions to showcase regular features of the site.
- Don't literally welcome users to your site. Before you give up prime homepage real estate to a salutation, consider using t for a tag line instead.
- If the website is down or important parts of the website are not operational, show it clearly on the homepage.
- Have a plan for handling critical content on your website in the event of an emergency.
- Don't waste space crediting the search engine, design firm, favorite browser company, or the technology behind the scenes.
- Exercise restraint in displaying awards won by your website.
- Don't automatically refresh the homepage to push updates to users.
- When doing a refresh, update only content that has actually changes, such as news updates.
- If your homepage has areas that will provide customized information once you know something about the user, don't provide a generic version of the content for first-time users - craft different content for that space.
- Don't offer users features to customize the basic look of the homepage UI, such as color schemes. But respect users' browser preferences by using relative rather than absolute font sizes.
- Don't provide plain links o registration on the homepage; instead explain (or at least link to) the customer benefits of registration.
- Explain the benefits and frequency of publication to users before asking them for their e-mail addresses.
- If you support user communities with chat or other discussion features, don't show generic links to them.
- Don't offer a "Guestbook" sign in for business sites.
- Show dates and times for time-sensitive information only, such as news items, live chats, stock quotes, and so forth.
- Show users the time that content was last updated, not the computer-generated current time.
- Include the time zone you are using whenever you reference a time.
- Use standard abbreviations, such as p.m. or P.M.
- Spell out the month or use month abbreviations, not numbers.
- Give the percentage of change, not just the points gained or lost in stock quotes.
- Spell out stock abbreviations, unless the abbreviation is completely clear, such as "IBM."
- Use thousands separator appropriate to your locale for numbers that have 5 or more digits.
- Align decimal points when showing columns of numbers.
Other recommendations
- For current job openings, use "Jobs".
- Footer navigation links: use for "footnote style" links such as copyright and contact info. At most, 7 links across the bottom of the page. Should be a single line when displayed in the common size of window.
