Improving web site design - Internet Computing, IEEE

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To build this chart, we surveyed Web design. literature ….. Assessing Web Design Quality. Figure 3 shows how a Web site designer might use …

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Content
Melody Y. Ivory
and Marti A. Hearst
University of California, Berkeley
Improving
Web Site Design
Using quantitative measures of the informational, navigational,
and graphical aspects of a Web site, a quality checker aims to
help nonprofessional designers improve their sites.
Poorly designed Web sites can
lead to lost productivity and revenue.
The question of how to
improve the design of informational
Web sites is thus of critical importance.
Although most prominent Web sites are
created by professional design firms,
many smaller sites are built by people
with little design experience or training.
As a consequence, Web sites with local
reach, such as those belonging to nonprofits
and small businesses, often have
substandard usability.
What makes a high-quality Web site
design? Although there are books filled
with Web design guidelines, there is a
wide gap between a heuristic such as
“make the interface consistent” and the
implementation of this advice. Furthermore,
guidelines tend to conflict, and
they offer the same advice for all types of
Web sites, regardless of their purpose.
Finally, guidelines require careful study
and practice and might not be familiar to
the occasional Web designer.
As part of the WebTango project, we
explore automated approaches…