aspdaddy - 9:23 pm on Feb 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

Great post DrDoc, so many sites these days are poor on usability, I often find myselt hitting Google and starting again out of frustration with bad design.

I held some workshops recently with staff of UK schools on how to optimise the user experience on using common portals.

These are primarily data inputters /form fillers but I think the principles apply to any site, especially e-commerce sites, the main things being repeated by attendees were:

- Limited use of the mouse required to use the sites
- Can control the text sizes in the browser
- Can print the pages as they look on the screen
- Can go back to any previous point from any point (Back button enabled, breadcrumbs etc)

This was quite a focused sgroup for a specific application but I approach it like any other website.

I start by identifying the primary and secondary user types. For each type identified I list the characteristics (age/background/IT skills), environment (noise/distractions/PC Spec/WebAccess) and the main tasks and goals each user performs including the frequency and session length.

From this you can decide which usability guidelines to consider and how important each is. You should design for the primary users while considering the secondary users.

Some people say this approach is unrealistic and your site should be designed for all users, IMO that is unrealistic, users and user-goals on the web are so diverse and you need to focus design effort on a few key things.