Page Design: The Anatomy of High-Performing Web Pages: Usability Week 2012 Conference

Yes, all the other topics covered at this conference are important: from IA (structure and navigation) to writing (what you have to say). But the basic unit of Web design remains the page. The pages are the destinations you navigate to; the pages are where you put your content.

Page design determines the “4A” quality of your user experience:

How attractive your site appears (because the current page is the only thing users can actually see; the other aspects of the user experience are invisible)
How approachable your information is (can people tell what the page is about; can they quickly locate the thing they're looking for)
Whether the page can hold users’ attention or whether they leave quickly
How often users take the desired action after visiting the page (do you get your main points across; is the design convincing; does the layout prioritize the things users are supposed to notice)

What You’ll Learn

You will learn the page design principles that influence the extent to which a website or intranet meets its business objectives.

Course Outline

This seminar will be continually updated with emerging designs. Newer topics may replace older ones as time goes by, so this list is provisional:

How users approach Web pages
- Scanning vs. thorough review
- Where users look for specific page elements: the eyetracking evidence
- Scrolling and the "fold"
Visual & typographic hierarchy to guide users' attention
Mega menus and functional footers
Designing on a grid
Using images effectively
Integrating video, music, and other multimedia elements
Within-page updates: AJAX and related techniques for dynamic pages – how to use them and when to avoid them
Advertising and user behavior
Productive use of the "Twilight Zone" area that attracts less user attention (the right-hand column in the case of languages that read left-to-right)
Design criteria for special-purpose pages
- Homepages
- Category pages and galleries, including visual overviews and textual listings
- Product pages (for both e-commerce sites and other cases with specific items that need to be promoted)
- SERP (search-engine results page) listings

What is NOT Covered

This is not a programming course: we do not cover coding tricks for HTML, CSS, etc. This seminar is purely about the user experience (what’s shown to users), not about the engineering that goes into implementing that design. This seminar is about page design for mainstream use; there’s a separate seminar on design for mobile devices which are not covered here, except for the segment on multi-platform design.

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, and plenty of inspiring screenshots that we deconstruct to show why they work — and where they fail.

Course Materials

Copies of all presentation slides.

Who Should Attend?

This seminar is intended for anyone working on or managing the user experience of a website or intranet, including visual designers, information architects, usability specialists, developers, Internet marketers, and site management. Even if you're not personally creating layouts, it's highly useful to know what makes page designs work and where to put what. Except for a general familiarity with the Web, this seminar does not have any prerequisites.

Instructor

Kara McCain is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. For more than 14 years, she has been creating innovative brand and user experiences in the search, social media, luxury, hotel, travel, jewelry, telecommunications, professional sports, e-commerce, government, and food-service industries. Her expertise has allowed her to develop and implement highly successful Web and print design strategies for Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Nielsen Norman Group, McCain was a senior visual and interaction designer for Yahoo!'s Search and Social Media division, working on Yahoo! Answers, Local search, and defining the way people integrate social media into search. Prior to Yahoo!, she also led the Web design effort for clients such as Verizon, Pizza Hut, The Ritz-Carlton hotels, the Dallas Stars, Radio City Entertainment and the Zale Diamond Corporation.