Wednesday, August 13, 2008

How to judge a good web page?














“The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations.”
Nielson (2006) cites that there are 79% of people use to scan the information on the internet while 15% of people read the content on web word-by-word. Moreover, reading from a computer screen is usually 25% slower than from printed document and so, the web content should be 50% the size of its paper equivalent.

Regarding to those data, how should we judge a web page is good or bad?
Let’s take a look of the short hints:

The Scannability:
- Is there any keywords which can attract me and impress me at once?
- Any headings and subheadings to make the content more clear?
- Any bulleted lists?
- Is the content distribute in the inverted pyramid style?
- How about the outbound hypertext links?

The Credibility:

- Is the web using high quality graphics to make it more impressive?
- Is it a good-writing web?
- Any use of the outbound hypertext links?
- Is that a updated web pages?

The Readability:

As argued by Nielsen (2006), the dominant reading behavior follows an F shape: a first horizontal movement, a second horizontal movement a bit below, and a vertical scan on the left, and it is quite consistent over several different types of web pages and tasks.






No comments: