eConsultant - Usability FAQ
Usability Rules
Communicating the site's purpose
1 show the company name and/or logo in a reasonable size and noticable location.
2. include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or the company does.
3. emphasize what your site does that's valueable from the user's point of view, as well as how you differ frokm key competitiors.
4. emphasize the highest priority tasks so that users have a clear starting point on the homepage
5. clearly designate one page per site as the official homepage
6. on your main company website, don't use the word website to refer to anything but the tatility of the company's web presence.
7. design the homepage to be clearly different from all the other pages on the site
Communicating info about your company
8. group corporate information such as about us, investors relations, press room, employment and other info about the company, in one distinct area.
9 include a homepage link to an about us section that gives users an overview about the company and links to any relevant details about your products, svcs, company values, business proposition, management team and so forth
10. if you want to get press coverage for your company, include a press room or news room link on your homeage
11. present a unified face to the customer, in which the website is one of the touchpoints rather than an entity unto itself
12. include a contact us link on the homepage that goes to a page with all the contact info for your company.
13. if you provide a feedback mechanism, specify the purpose of the link and whether it will be read by the customer service or the webmaster, and so forth
14. don't include internal company info (which is targeted for employees and should go on the intranet) on the public website
15. if your site gathers any custiomer info, include a privacy policy link on the homepage
16. explain how the website makes money if it's not self evident
Content writing
17 use customer focused language. label sections and categories according to the value they hold for the customer, not according to what they do for your company
18 avoid redundant content
19 don't use clever phrases and and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying
20. use consistent capitalization and other syle standards
21. don't label a clearly identified area of the page if the content is sufficently self explanatory
22. avoid single-item categories and single-item bulleted lists
23. use non-breaking spaces between words in phrases that need to go together in order to be scannable and understood.
24. only use imperative language such as "enter a city or zip code" for mandatory tasks, or qualify the statement appropritely
25 spell out abreviations, initialisms, and acronyms, and immediately follow them by the abbreviation, in the first instance.