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Web Usability Illustrated: Breathing Easier With Your Usable e-Commerce Site (continued)

published in The Journal of Electronic Commerce, Volume 11, Number 4

Design to Reduce Visual Work
1. Provide "affordance" to controls	Make clickable controls obvious The button on the right looks clickable (has "affordance")
	Test for self-evidency of controls ("Which areas can you click on?") User should not have to use the mouse pointer for clues!
2. Reduce irrelevant eye movement	Avoid challenging eye movements like this. Keep a left-right, top-down task flow
	Avoid these label placements. For languages that read left-to-right, keep labels to left of an edit field (see next).
3. Reduce clutter	Research shows ragged left appears cluttered Align text on left margin
	Create groups by color, proximity, shape, and alignment
	Avoid irregular columns Make buttons the same width when arranged in a column
4. Maintain reading speed	Avoid all caps for text. Users lose 14-20% in reading speed.
Design to Reduce Intellectual Work
1. Carefully engineer user tasks	Research the task to meet user expectations and concepts
	Aim to simplify, reduce steps (including scrolling) Perform walkthrough with collegues to get feedback before designing the site
2. Match field length to the data	Avoid misleading users with arbitrarily long entry fields Should users enter state abbreviation or the long name? (etc.)
3. Consider instructional prose	Avoid complexity Break into smaller steps (shown here)
	Avoid special codes (the computer can identify the code for the user) What's the airport code for Toronto? (hint: it begins with Y!)
	Avoid computer concepts unknown to your users
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