1. Graphics neither help nor hurt information
gathering
Many people feel that graphics make the Web site more
usable. Another contingent feels that they make sites
unusable. Neither group is right. According to this
study, the amount of images on a page had no visible
effect on the gathering of information, with two exceptions.
These are:
Animation
Users found it annoying and "several users covered
[the animations] up with their hands". In fact,
one animated image had the answer to one question in
it, but the users simply didn't see the answer there.
Download Time
This was not generally an issue, except with a page
that had a lot of small images and poor alt text. The
image had the answer, but users would navigate away
before the image had downloaded.
2. White space makes sites less usable
When searching for information, users wanted information,
not fancy, artistic sites. In fact, in direct conflict
with an accepted rule of design, this study stated that
"the more white space, the more users say the site
is complicated, over-detailed, visually confusing, not
clear, and not enticing." In fact, users in this
study felt that sites with less white space were easier
to use and had more information available.
What do I think this means?
I think that readers who are looking for information
want to find it quickly. They don't want to have to
navigate through several layers of the site simply because
there is a nice design that is visually appealing. The
more information that is on the first page they come
to, the more likely they are to find what they are looking
for.
3. Content and navigation must be handled together
A really common format for sites right now is what Mr.
Spool called a "Shell Site". These sites are
where the navigation is developed and then the content
is shoved into that format or shell. What he found was
that when a user is looking for information, shell sites
are very hard to use. Because the links are the same
on all navigation within the site, they don't add anything
new once they have been reviewed. Thus, when a user
is looking for information, the navigation shell is
usually discarded as an information source immediately.
4. Search engines (on sites) don't work
If a user doesn't click on the Search button, they are
50% more likely to find the information they are looking
for than if they do. This is disconcerting until you
think about how most search engines handle searches
and results:
Many sites have several different search engines for
the Web site.
These may be intuitive to the Web designer, but often
the user doesn't know what the difference is (or even
perceive that there is a difference).
Users don't know what they are going to get when they
search.
They may be getting a list of pages on this site, the
Web as a whole, a sub-set of this site, or something
completely different.
Results were confusing and hard to understand
Often the search results were something apparently unrelated
to what the reader searched on. Or, there was no text
to clarify the search results, simply the title or file
name.
