Hick's Law (or the Hick–Hyman Law) says that the more choices you present to your users, the longer it takes them to reach a decision. However, combining Hick’s Law with other design techniques can make long menus easy to use.
A site logo linking to the homepage is not enough. Logo design and placement, as well as the presence of a text link to the homepage affect success of navigation to homepage.
A large-scale usability study revealed the most common and damaging web-design mistakes of today. They aren't surprising or new - they're enduring issues that continue to hurt website usability.
On large sites with several standalone subsites, universal navigation provides quick access to the main site. To be successful, it must not interfere with the subsite’s navigation.
Users are 37% faster at finding items within a list when visual indicators vary both in color and icon compared to text alone. If choosing between using color or an icon, icons with strong information scent perform better than color alone.
The link title attribute can be used to provide additional details for mouse users, but should not be relied on as the main source of information scent.
The phrase ‘Learn More’ is increasingly used as a crutch for link labels. But the text has poor information scent and is bad for accessibility. With a little effort, transform this filler copy into descriptive labels that help users confidently predict what the next page will be.
Decide whether and where to display thumbnails for list items based on the images’ importance relative to associated text, on whether images will be displayed for all list items, and on whether the small images are recognizably different from each other.
