How this web usability course is presented

This web site usability tutorial avoids long chunks of text, presents many examples of good and bad usability and encourages you to make up your own mind about each issue. The tutorial emphasises issues which affect the whole of a web site - page structure and size, site navigation methods, etc.

Written by Philip Chalmers who is based in the Medway area of Kent, England, United Kingdom.

Style of presentation

A lot of the material about usability on the web is not user-friendly!

The principles of usability are generally agreed but their application to the web is changing and subject to debate - the web is now very different from the way it was around 1995.

What's good for for one site's users may not be good for another site's.

So this course tries to:

Avoid long chunks of text.
Present examples wherever appropriate, so you can see the effects of the design approach which is being discussed.
Encourage you to make your own decisions rather tell you what to do or to avoid.
Summarise the main points and show you where to find additional information or other points of view.

Structure

We look first at topics which affect the whole of a site - page structure and size, navigation methods, etc. If you get these wrong you face an unpleasant choice between:

reworking all your existing pages. Even if the result is a big improvement, some users will resent the changes because they have to re-learn how to use the site.
sticking to the existing approach and producing more pages with serious usability defects.

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