Best practice

Summary: Highlights our principles of effective website navigation and user experience. It advocates for broad, shallow navigation that is easy to use, adheres to browser standards, and provides clear feedback. Key design principles like Fitts' Law and Hick's Law are followed to ensure usability, with appropriate control sizes, reduced complexity, and balanced information density, all aimed at creating an intuitive user experience.

Navigational/information

• There is a convenient and obvious way to move between related pages and sections and it is easy to return to the home page.
• The navigation system is broad and shallow (many items on a menu) rather than deep (many menu levels).
• The site follows and takes advantage of system and browser standards, e.g back button and open links in same window, read view, zoom pages etc.
• Navigation choices are ordered in the most logical or task-oriented manner.
• Link names match the title of destination pages, so users will know when they have reached the intended page.
• Good navigational feedback is provided (e.g. showing where you are in the site)
• The site uses a customised 404 page, which includes tips on how to find the missing page and links to "Home" and Search.

Task oriented

• There is a visible change when the mouse points at something clickable (excluding cursor changes).
• Links and navigation labels contain the "trigger words" that users will look for to achieve their goal.
• Hypertext links that invoke actions (e.g downloads, new windows) are clearly distinguished from hypertext links that load another page.
• The site provides clear feedback when a task has been completed successfully.
• When the user needs to choose between different options (such as in a dialog box), the options are obvious.
• It is easy to "undo" (or "cancel") and "redo" actions.
• The path for any given task is a reasonable length (2-5 clicks).

Visual design

• Fitts' Law is followed (the distance between controls and the size of the controls is appropriate, with size proportional to distance).
• Hick's Law - keep an eye on the attention ratio - numbers of things you can do vs should do.
• Jakob's Law - use existing mental models and UX-patterns
• Reduce complexity in every detail.
• On content pages, line lengths are neither too short (<50 characters per line) nor too long (>100 characters per line) when viewed in a standard browser width window.
• The layout helps focus attention on what to do next.
• There is a clear visual "starting point" to every page.
• There is a good balance between information density and use of white space.
• GUI components (like radio buttons and check boxes) are used appropriately .