Universal Guidelines
Discriminate between what's amusing or informative and what's distracting, and then eliminate the distractions.
- Blinking text and animated images are the visual equivalent of tugging repeatedly on someone's sleeve -- after first getting the audience's attention, the continued tugging can get pretty annoying. As part of the design process, the designer should find someone who has no stake in the site and no hesitation about giving bad news. Ask this person to make the animated/blinking page their browser "home page" for a week and then ask them whether or not the moving parts of it are distracting.
- Make pages viewable without adjustment beyond the default window size of most browsers (no wider than 472 pixels and critical information viewable within 325 - 350 pixels vertically).
- "Under construction" notices and repeated exhortations to "Check out ..." this and that are verbal distractions. Unless a site is a parody of Web jargon, don't make it sound like one.
- Waiting for pages to load is a distraction, no matter what other expectations an audience may have. If a site has an All Affect profile, the designer won't be able to eliminate large image files, but should employ every trick possible to reduce wait times for downloading pages.
Instill confidence in your primary audience.
- Provide information that identifies when pages were last updated so that people know how current the information is that's provided there.
- Provide valid contact information so that people know where to ask questions and so that they know who is behind the experience/information they are getting.
- Visual design is susceptible to the equivalent of misspellings, inaccuracies and grammatical errors. Check for stray pixels, images that didn't get processed properly for transparency or indexed color, misspelled words in image files (very common since most graphics programs don't provide spell checking), images loaded into the wrong file name so that they don't match the text or are mislabeled, graphics that give unintended effects when they are seen next to each other (strange color combinations, a person in one image appearing to point to someone else, the semantic content of images producing unintended juxtapositions).
Provide for users with low-end systems and browsers unless there is hard data showing that the primary audience has high-end capabilities.
To follow this guideline --
- use ALT tags to show text when images do not load or will not display,
- warn users when links lead to large image or media files or graphics-intensive pages and sites, and
- try pages out in a text-only browser in order to determine what kind of experience the audience receives in a text-only environment.
AMTEC 1997 Conference,
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Elizabeth Boling,
Barbara Bichelmeyer,
Kurt Squire, Sonny Kirkley
Indiana University
Last updated 1 June 1997
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~iirg/RESEARCH/AMTEC97/universal.html
