Format-based navigation, such as links to Videos, at the top levels of a website’s information architecture lacks sufficient context and information scent for topic-focused users.
Longer pages can benefit users. Accordions shorten pages and reduce scrolling, but they increase the interaction cost by requiring people to decide on topic headings.
To engage users, website copy must speak to readers and not at them. Include words people can relate to, and avoid jargon, business speak, and feature-driven language.
The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user's needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.
Usability studies of corporate content distributed through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn: users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.
Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy's costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.
To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.
Unless you have explicit links to product pages from article content, users who visit articles directly from search engines might never realize that you sell related products.
Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment.
Even small holiday decorations can increase joy of use and make websites feel more current and more connected to users' lives and physical environment. The key is to commemorate without detracting from your users' main reasons for visiting the site.
To take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material rather than simply consuming content or distributing copyrighted material. Unfortunately most people are poor writers and even worse at authoring other media. Solutions include structured creation, selection-based media, and teaching content creation in schools.
Most streaming video is useless; instead use higher-quality downloadable clips and short segments that can be chosen from a menu. All multimedia needs plain-page previews.
Web services often collect content from separate sources and present it to users in a single interface. Making such integration usable requires unified meta-content.
Keeping old content alive will more than double the value of a site and only cost a small investment in content gardening. Removed pages equal lost users.
Errors in data records destroy the usability of a site and make it difficult to find info. Guidelines for preventing, correcting, and surviving errors.