Improving web site design - Internet Computing, IEEE

Poorly designed Web sites can lead to lost productivity and revenue. The question of how to improve the design of informational Web sites is thus of critical importance. Although most prominent Web sites are created by professional design firms, many smaller sites are built by people with little design experience or training. As a consequence, Web sites with local reach, such as those belonging to nonprofits and small businesses, often have substandard usability. What makes a high-quality Web site design? Although there are books filled with Web design guidelines, there is a wide gap between a heuristic such as “make the interface consistent” and the implementation of this advice. Furthermore, guidelines tend to conflict, and they offer the same advice for all types of Web sites, regardless of their purpose. Finally, guidelines require careful study and practice and might not be familiar to the occasional Web designer. As part of the WebTango project, we explore automated approaches for helping designers improve their sites. Our goal is to create an interactive tool that helps steer occasional Web site builders away from bad designs and toward better ones — a “quality checker” tool, analogous to a grammar checker in a word processor. What distinguishes our work from most others is that this tool is based on empirically derived measures computed over thousands of Web pages. We converted these measures, which characterize the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, into profiles for a variety of site types. Our rudimentary design-checking tool uses these profiles to assess Web site designs; future versions will also suggest design improvements. Many of the software tools described in this article are available online at webtango.berkeley.edu.