The primary objective of graphic design is effective visual communication. A properly designed page structure should enforce a consistent hierarchy of design elements where the relevant elements are emphasized and the content is displayed in a logical and orderly manner.
This doesn’t mean pages need to be humdrum and uninspiring. Aesthetics is an element of usability, [...]
Entries from December 16th, 2007
The goals of your website’s layout
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Displaying Search Results
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The following provide a set of suggestions for effective presentation of search results.
Use Domain – Specific Terminology
Use terminology, relevant to your domain. Avoid terms like “record,” “field,” or “database.” For instance, instead of saying “55 records found in the database,” specifically say “55 matching products found in the store.”
Repeat the Query
Your presentation should repeat the [...]
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What Makes for Good Search Results
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The quality of search results is usually characterized by three factors: precision, recall, ad relevance.
Precise search results contain the fewest possible incorrect matches. If you search for “gravy,” you shouldn’t be getting documents about “gravity.”
Recall refers to the completeness of the search results. Complete search results include as many appropriate matches as possible, without missing [...]
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Desirable Search Engine Capabilities
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Following are some advanced search engine capabilities that you’ll want to try to support.
Fuzzy matches are matches that don’t fit the search query exactly but would probably be interesting to the user to a certain extent.
For instance, if I look for “per food” and there are no matches at all, there’s a high probability I’ll [...]
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How People Search
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Most people are relatively poor at searching. They use terms that are too broad or too narrow.
They overconstrain the search. They don’t consider synonyms. They don’t know how to filter out documents that are irrelevant. As a result, we need to help out as much as much as we can.
Traditional information retrieval makes use of [...]
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External Links
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People have a variety of default assumptions about where a link leads, depending on how it’s presented.
In most cases, people assume a link will take them to another page on the same site unless something indicates otherwise.
Thus, if you have a link that goes to an external site, make sure the link label is very [...]
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Page Links
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Page links are links that, instead of taking you to another page, simply scroll you down to another location on the current page. When people see links, they typically assume that they’ll lead to a new page, so to avoid confusion, it’s a good idea to explicitly label such links, like this:
On This Page: Lions – [...]
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Search Engine Design
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Search engine development is much harder than most people realize. If you want a search engine for your site that works as well as Google or AltaVista, your best bet is probably to buy it, and expect to pay quite a bit.
On the other hand, if you can’t afford to build or buy a good [...]
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You Are Here
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In a navigation bar, be sure to mark the current page viewed, and don’t link the current page. If the navigation bar shows several levels, mark the ancestors of the ancestors of the current page as needed to make the hierarchical position obvious.
“You are here” indicators include such simple techniques as marking the current location [...]
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Website Design Process
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Evaluation helps to ensure that the design on track to satisfy the goals of the design. Evaluation may include usability evaluation, client review of the design, quality assurance, or technical feasibility evaluation.
Evaluation is part of what makes usability pervasive, but usability is also fully integrated into every stage of the process.
This process is meant as [...]
Tags: Conceptual Design·design·Iterative Design·mockups·prototypes·target audience·usability