Usability/Web Design

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Teaching Units

Topics

Presentation Slides

• Presentation concerning web design usability by Monika Pilarska and Martin Schmidkunz

Resources

Links

Basics

• Web Typography Style Guide
• Criteria for optimal web design
• Research Based Web and Usability Guidlines
• Link Collection
• Myth of 800x600
• Usability in design theory

Links

• Link guidelines
• Usability-Now a web-design site (German language)
• Webdesign-Tools for webdesigner's effective and efficient work (German language)

Bad examles

• A collection of badly designed and unusable web pages
• Mixed languages
• Portals - Part 1
• Portals - Part 2

Methods

• Quick overview about methods in measuring usability of web pages

Technical issues

• Guides & References for HTML/XHTML, Stylesheets (CSS), XML/DTDs, JavaScript/DOM, Dynamic HTML, Perl, PHP
• Overview of Macromedia Flash Tutorials at Google

Statistics

• Internet facts by Arbeitsgemeinschaft Online Forschung (AOF)
• Use of browser, OS, display resolution, color depth and JavaScript by w3schools
• Use of browser and OS by Net Applications (Sample size about 40.000 URLs, 43% commercial sites, 18% company sites, 10% content sites, 29% other sites (e.g. authorities, search engines)

Selected links concerning webdesign by J. Nielsen

Who is Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.? He is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use. Jakob Nielsen has been called: "the king of usability", "the guru of Web page usability", "the world's leading expert on Web usability", ... See the complete content of the web design alert box here.

Top 10 mistake lists

• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design -- The ten very worst design mistakes of all time. A summary based on the main elements of the other lists.
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for May 1996: Original Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, May 30, 1999: The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, December 23, 2002: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, December 22, 2003: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 3, 2005: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005

How to use dialog elements

• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 11, 2005: Scrolling and Scrollbars
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, May 10, 2004: Guidelines for Visualizing Links

Problems with use of technology

• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 1996: Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time)

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