If you are developing a website you will always think about how to make your
websites more usable, whether it is improving the HTML structure of pages which
benefits the user’s process or whether it is thinking about how we can show the
messages on site in a better way to user by using CSS..
But you normally
never bring this thought process into your jQuery-based or any other
JavaScript-based website.
How can the user experience and usability of our
jQuery events can be enhanced ?
If you are designing websites for a
living or running your business online, below are some useful tips you should
definitely read and remember.
1. Always add a search form
A
lot of visitors will visit your website and immediately look for a search box.
If you don’t have any search box, then they leave.
Site visitor do not feel
comfortable on a site where they don’t feel in control.
The ideal position
for a search box is on the top - right corner of the page.
2. Use
a grid for your website structure
Grid helps to structure your
website and keep the eye flow going for the website visitor, which is key
factor.
Once you are done with a clean main website structure you can
incorporate everything into a design of your choice, but don’t forget the
grid.
3. Make the navigation easy to find &
readable
If you’re website navigation is supposed to take your
visitor from point A to point B, why would you place the navigation part in a
weird spot or use irrelevant images for the site links.
Try to keeping the
navigation easy to read for the website visitor. The ideal position for
navigation section is at the top of the site so the visitor can easily navigate
through your site.
4. Do not make the “contact us” link in your
navigation bar a mailto: link
Most of the website visitor will hover
over a link and check what the bottom of our browser screen says before he click
on it. Especially visitor do it for the "contact" link since some people think
it’s good to link this directly to your email address, causing an email program
to open up.
This is not a good User experience practice. Ideally you should
create a contact us page, put your email address on it. Website visitor will
feel nice and will actually email you more often.
5. Make use of
User Experience Applications as much as possible for website
tests
Keeping track of the various forms of data from your website is
something you should definitely do.
Google Analytics is a perfect solution
for checking where your visitors are coming from, what pages they’re going to
and how long they’re on your site.
A User Experience applications like Crazy
Egg is perfect for learning where your visitors are mostly clicking and which
are the most visited pages.
You can take help of some sites like Feedback
Army to test how users see and use your site.
By learning such types of
statistics for your website you can make sure you’re utilizing space as well as
making sure that you've got the important stuff where it needs to
be.
6. Do not overload your website’s sidebar with lot of
widgets
We understand that if you’re running a blog there are a
million widgets you can use on it, but you don’t actually need to use them all.
Think of it like your home. If there’s clutter everywhere and if your home
is not clean, nobody in your home might not want to stay in it.
So clean up
and keep things organized. Stick to the things that matter most for the user
experience on your website and try to improve them.
7. Make sure
that your website pages displays well on various browsers
We all know
that IE6 is dead and outdated, but do not forget that there is still a lot of
users who use IE7, IE8, Opera, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc.
Just because
your website looks good on one or two browsers it doesn't mean the visitor using
another browser will like that your site is not displaying properly.
Take
out some time and check your code and make sure it all works across the various
browsers.
8. Keep your website forms shorter
Your
contact us form should not be long and neither should a registration form. We
should keep things simple.
The chances that people will leave the page when
they are faced with a long sign up form are more then a short one with just
three simple questions [name, email, suggestion]).
9. Keep you
website pages structure consistent
You need to remember that people
want familiarity when they are viewing your website pages.
If they feel like
they are somewhere else when they load a new page up, they’re normally click the
back button and this should not happen.
The feel of website should be consistent through out all the pages of website.
I will post remaining part in next post :-)
