A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, January 2000

Around 800 law firms in England and Wales now have websites and with probably about the same number planning to go online in the next year or so, website design is an increasingly important consideration in the marketing and delivery of your firm’s services.

It should not need pointing out that the web is a completely different medium from print (and other media) and thus demands adherence to a new set of design rules, many of which it has to be said are still being figured out.

Whether or not you are directly involved in the construction of your firm’s website, contributing your views as a web user will be important in developing a presence which does not just attract but retains users and hence delivers real business benefits. Typically most attention is addressed at the former: large marketing and advertising budgets are employed to design striking sites and generate interest in them, only for the sites to fail to retain users through poor usability.

The web is essentially a user-driven experience and thus the usability of your site is of prime importance. Web users are impatient: they want immediate gratification – to get something done quickly in the way they are used to. They are not prepared to spend time learning new methods, nor will they tolerate delays, distractions or impediments to their progress. If a site does not provide a high level of immediate satisfaction, they leave, often never to return and – worse still – usually fall into the arms of your competitors.

This article looks at some common examples of bad design practice. Avoid these and you’ll be more than half-way to a successful website.

For a development of these design arguments, see Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column at www.useit.com/alertbox/ and his recently published Designing Web Usability (New Riders, 1999).

Poor response times

Ideally users want sub-second response times. This is rarely achievable for the average user with a 56K modem, except for very short text pages or those already cached by the user. Research has shown that users are prepared to tolerate a delay of up to 10 seconds while a page loads; any more and they backtrack or leave the site. Most commonly poor response times result from pages requesting many or large graphics (which may be hundreds of times the size of a corresponding text file).

Breaking the Back button

The Back button is the lifeline of the web user. It is the second most used navigation feature (after clicking on hypertext links). It gives users the security of knowing they can always retrace their steps or escape when the need arises. Interfering with the utility of the Back button angers users, imparting a hostile message by taking over their machine. The two most common instances are:

• Opening a new browser window – Usually employed on the theory that it will keep the user on the site. Users often don’t realise a new window has opened, are confused that the Back button is greyed out and resent the intrusion: all bad for you.
• An immediate redirect to another page – On loading a page the user is immediately bounced forward to another; thus backtracking through the redirecting page is impossible (except for those deft with the mouse and with split-second reactions). To escape the user must select a previous page from the History list.

Using frames

Using frames is not the disaster it once was when browsers could not support them properly. Even now that browsers handle frames more elegantly, frames should be employed sparingly since they militate against the fundamental simplicity of the page as the fundamental unit of information and navigation.

Using animations and scrolling or blinking text

Why on earth would you want to distract the user’s attention and irritate them? There are subtler, better ways to attract attention.

Using bleeding-edge technology

Web designers are keen to implement the latest technology, but this is usually inappropriate since a significant proportion of users may not be able to take advantage of it and are unlikely to download the latest plug-in or patch necessary for them to do so. New technology also misbehaves: a single Javascript error message is sufficient to drive a user away from your site.

Using advertising

Advertising or anything that looks like advertising is a big turn-off, except where a user is engaged on a shopping expedition. Though advertising is now ubiquitous on the web, click-through rates for adverts are extremely low and plans to carry advertising should be examined very critically.

Poor readability

Reading text on screen is difficult enough with current low resolution screens and relatively small screen sizes. Don’t make this worse by choosing inappropriate colour schemes or background images or animations. Use black text on a plain light-coloured background.

Poor ‘scanability’

Users’ attention spans are short and screen real estate is small. They scan text rather than reading it. Consequently text written for the web should be short and succinct, broken into easily digestible chunks and highlighted with optimal use of headings, bullet points, etc. It is a mistake to republish on the web text designed to be read in print without a thorough review, rewrite and reorganisation.

Meaningless titles and headlines

Titles (which appear in the bar at the top of a browser window) and headlines often appear out of context, for example when listed on a search engine results page or when a page is loaded directly from an external link. Titles and headlines should therefore be short, straightforward, standalone descriptions. On a web of a billion pages consider the futility of entitling a page ‘Home Page’ or ‘Welcome’.

Non-standard link colours

Users are familiar with the convention that unvisited links are blue underlined and visited links are purple or red. They use this information to see which parts of a site they have visited and which remain to be explored. Mess with the standard link colours and they lose their way.