The only way to generate vertical design guidelines is to study each industry's users and their tasks. We cannot provide a set of generic vertical guidelines. For every industry or type of company, there will be many detailed guidelines that address the ways customers of such companies expect to interact with websites and the best ways to serve those users' needs.
#Other words for guideline software#
We don't address special design considerations for vertical industry segments, such as homepages for software companies, conferences, or dentists.
For detailed information on general web design, see our other book, Prioritizing Web Usability. After all, a homepage is a web page, and thus homepage designers should consider all of the guidelines for web usability, not just those that are specific to homepages. Similarly, many, if not most, of the guidelines for the design of general web pages, web content, and web navigation would increase the usability of homepages. We have limited our guidelines to those that are critical for successful homepage usability, although many would improve the usability of other web pages as well. These topics each require their own book, and indeed several such books have been written and continue to be written.
This is not the place to go into details about user testing, task analysis, field studies, or usability engineering methodology and process in general. There are several usability methods that can identify and prioritize users' needs based on real data and observation. We encourage you to champion users' needs as the key factor in design decisions and to involve users throughout your design process. Often many departments are lobbying for homepage real estate, and the best lobbyists win. Unfortunately, many companies' corporate politics drive homepage design more than users' needs do. We don't address this issue in these guidelines because it depends on each site's users and tasks, as well as the company's business goals. One of the most important design decisions for any homepage is determining what content merits homepage coverage. Most of these topics deserve a level of detail that we feel is best left to separate books and reports, many of which exist already and are listed here. In an effort to limit the focus specifically to homepage guidelines, there are several important issues we do not address. If you make a decision not to follow a guideline, do so based on customer information in the context of your homepage.
Although you can greatly improve the usability of your homepage by following these guidelines, you also need to involve your own users in the process through methods such as field studies and usability testing and incorporate iterative feedback into your development cycle. However, we've developed these guidelines from our combined 14 years of experience, running user tests on homepages and observing what makes them pass or fail user scrutiny. For all sites, there are surely exceptions. This is an extensively illustrated book, and it is only in the context of a visual example that you can fully appreciate the negative impact of ignoring these guidelines.Īll said, these are just guidelines, not axioms.
You'll need to look at the individual site examples to see these guidelines used properly or, more often, overlooked. While we encourage you to use these guidelines as a checklist when designing your homepage, recognize that they are written in an abbreviated manner here. On closer examination, this change doesn't seem small at all. If you kept all design and writing exactly the same on this site but decided to show only local New York content on the homepage and link to all national and international news, it would inexorably alter the entire site. Consider the homepage for The New York Times. All homepages would benefit from being treated like a front page of a major newspaper, with editors who determine the high-priority content and ensure continuity and style consistency.Įven small changes to homepages can have drastic effects. One of the biggest values of a newspaper's front page is the priority given to top news items. Your homepage is often your first - and possibly your last - chance to attract and retain each customer, rather like the front page of a newspaper. While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high.
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