Within the next little while I hope to outline a few usability tips that I’ve picked up over the course of my short career. I feel that this exercise will not only provide useful insight to others, but also increase my understanding as a designer. So please, feel free and add your two cents to this “conversation.” I’m hoping that I can learn something from you too. There are a lot of principals out there, and for this post I’m just going to touch on a few of them. These aren’t original thoughts, rather lessons learned that I’ve picked up from other great designers, blogs and books. As I mentioned earlier, I hope to add more over time.

3 Click Rule

The first principal I would like to mention here is the 3 Click Rule. It’s as simple as it sounds, but can be tricky to pull-off; especially if you’re working on massive sites with lots of important information. From past experience, I have noticed that user’s will easily get frustrated, and may even stop using a website if they can’t find the information they need within a few short mouse clicks. Clear navigation, with a straight-forward site structure is key. Just as with any rule, there are certain unavoidable situations. At times you may be faced with a lot of information; if you were to fill up a given page to keep the 3 click rule just for the sake of keeping it, you may make things too complicated for the user. In these special cases, I have found it acceptable to allow a 4th or even a 5th click. Use your discretion, if you feel that your information has been broken down in a logical manner and that users understand where they are, add an extra click.

2 Second Rule

The next principal I would like to mention is the 2 second rule. Again, fairly straight forward and is to function just as it sounds. As a designer or programmer it is important for us to pay due-diligence when we’re creating our pages. The goal is to have your page load within 2 seconds - and in this case, the quicker you can have a page load up the better. Part of the trick is proper image optimization, content structure and even how clean our code is. Even with the rise of ultra-fast web connections, I’ve noticed that this rule is still broken. I know at times I’ve been guilty of it and we can get too lazy and forget about the users with slow connections. My advice, keep this principal in the back of your mind. The less a users has to wait, all the better user experience they will have.

Fitt’s Law

This principal was created by Paul Fitts in 1954. This law is a model that predicts the time required to move to a target area, is based on the distance and size of that target. Think of it this way, how long will it take a user to move their mouse from point A to point B. If this law is applied correctly, it can improve your users click rates as well as maximize the content areas you wish to give importance to.

Again, these are just a few of the many principals out there to think about. Please feel free and let me know your thoughts. I have only scratched the surface here, if you wish to pass on some further resources I’d be very grateful.

I have found the following resources rather helpful:

• useit.com - The virtual home of Jacob Nielson. He is one of the founding father’s of web usability, with many excellent books to boot. A must read for anyone working on the web.
• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - The web’s guidelines have been summed up here, and should be closely looked at when designing for the web. A great resource for sure.
• Smashing Magazine - A great site devoted to providing inspiration and tips for web designer’s. I got most of my thoughts for this post from one of their articles.
• A Web Based Test on Fitts’ Law - I found this exercise quite interesting, maybe you will too.