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Usability: The Home Page

The home page is not only your website's point of entry, it is also the most widely visited page, so it is worth following a number of guidelines when you come to designing it. By María José Serres of ARTech's marketing team.

One of the characteristics of Internet websites is that users can access them not just through a single gateway, but via any one of the pages that make up the entire website, given that search engines (like Yahoo, Google and others) can index each and every one of the pages.

Nevertheless, the home page is by far the most widely visited page. Many users enter it to find out what the site is about, to see what's new or on sale and to learn what it has to offer. They will also go to the home page from any other page within the site if they are unable to find what they were looking for. The home page can be defined as a launch pad from where you can undertake any of the activities within the site.

To obtain the desired effect out of such a widely visited page, you should follow these guidelines:

1- Define an objective

i. This objective is what you wish your users to achieve with the home page, be it to get to know your company or product, to navigate within the site, etc.

ii. It should have a brief, descriptive message devoid of empty words that take up space and provide no information (e.g. "This is the product for you!")

2- Design and structure the page bearing this objective in mind at all times.

3- Give the page a try-out: have no more than five people read the page and tell you what information they got out of it, see what they do while they are looking at the page, where they go, etc. You can find more information on usability testing at:

http://www.pantos.org/atw/35317.html  

http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/evaluation/conductingusabilityreviews.asp  

http://jthom.best.vwh.net/usability/  

4- Keep the site's design and structure as simple as possible. Simplicity means being able to understand the content and structure, finding what you are looking for with ease, all with fast uploading speed. There's a very descriptive acronym in usability: KISS ("Keep it simple stupid!")

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci521694,00.html  

http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/pgtsj0208a.html  

http://www.webreference.com/graphics/column53/  

5- Do not overload the home page with images as it makes the page slow to upload. This page, being the most frequently accessed, should also be the page which uploads in the least time.

6- Highlight the four main things you can do in this website starting from the home page. Do not choose more than four, otherwise the page's objective could become obscured (e.g. searches, purchases, documents, news).

7- Make the content dynamic: news items should be of the latest news, events should be soon-to-be-held events or reviews of recent events, documents should be kept up-to-date, etc. There is no set rule for how often you should renew the home page; it depends on your company and its content. But it is clear that the page must be seen to be dynamic so that everyone knows that the page is alive and well.

Recommended sites:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031110.html  

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020512.html  

http://www.fixingyourwebsite.com/amazon.html  

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/  

http://www.hildesheim.co.uk/usability/homepage.htm

 

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