Making things easy
Your goal as a creator of websites should be to make things as easy as possible for your visitors. Ease of use is a tricky thing to measure especially if you don’t have the money for qualitative research. Thankfully there are plenty of big players out there giving you free lessons.
Default, default, default
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but four of the biggest Internet properties Yahoo, Ebay Google and Amazon all use the default link color. Do you want to know why? It’s because it’s the color people are familiar with. Use the default colors for everything you can. Heck, while you’re at it, don’t pretty up those form elements either. People are familiar with the ugly gray “Submit” box. Give them what they know. Minimize the learning curve.
Whitespace is your friend
When you’re creating a layout it never hurts to have a little too much whitespace. Whitespace makes it easy for your visitor to scan elements of the page. A good amount of whitespace looks professional and also helps make your text easier to read.
Readable
It drives me nuts when text is either too small or in a barely visible color. My laptop has a display which is a little too bright. I’ve tried fixing it on numerous occasions and nothing seems to work. When I visit Signal vs. Noise I can barely see the date next to the author’s name. Sometimes you’ll get bogged down in the design process of making things look pretty and forget to make things look readable. Don’t let it happen to you.
Show your users where they are and where they’ve been
A breadcrumb trail is an absolute must for navigation but it’s not enough. A breadcrumb is too linear and fails to keep track of the individual pages a user has visited. I was on the Price Waterhouse Coopers website last night and noticed that they have this great feature that shows you the last few pages you’ve visited. I’m not sure if it was modelled on Amazon’s ‘recently viewed items’ or not but I found it very useful. I didn’t have to stress about finding that page a visited awhile back because the site was keeping track for me.
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It takes effort to make your site easy to use. Sometimes you’ll have to bicker with your designer to get it. I think it’s worth fighting for. Observe how the best in the business do it and then follow their lead. If you want to read more on this stuff Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is a great place to start.