1. www.isolani.co.uk - 31/01/2008

2. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug, New Riders Press; 2nd edition, 2005 - 31/01/2008

3. www.skysports.com - 31/01/2008

4. www.music.nokia.co.uk - 31/01/2008

I am going to start this report with quotes from two highly respected men in the world of website design Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug.

"Usability studies suggest that people don't read content in a web page - they skim them." 1

"What users actually do is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.” 2

This means visual cues are very important to the staying power of your site.

The most common visual ques are underline, Bold, italic and Bold italic when it comes to fonts. These are also the simplest to produce but still have the desired impact on the user. When you see these methods your eye is immediately drawn to the change in text. Links make the most use of the underline feature because on the internet an underlined word generally means it is a link Fig 1.

Sky Sports3 makes good use of bold-underline and bold text Fig 2. Italic text is much harder to find on the internet and it seems only to be used for names of people or in long paragraphs of text.

Other visual cues come in the form of images. These can be very effective depends on the image used. If a designer chooses the wrong image then the user will get the wrong impression and could get lost in the website. If the images are used well and in the correct place they can add to the usability of the site. This is something the iTunes Store does well the small icons to the left of the page are pretty obvious what they link to without looking at the text Fig 3.

The visual cues I have defined are the most obvious to a visitor but a visual cue can be almost anything that stands out from the page.

Animated icons are probably the most eye catching visual cues but can be misleading. I tend to associate icons that move with things like pop ups and spam flash banners Fig 4 which are distracting and annoying to the user. I would not click on something that moved just in case it was some kind of virus that tried to attack my computer or an external company advertising something that would take me away from the site i was on.

Visual cues are an essential tool to a web developer, even more so when creating a website such as iTunes because it would have a lot of information on one page. Visual cues in my opinion should be subtle that people notice but don’t take offence too. 

Colours can be key in interface design. A punk/rock page should not have a warm orange/yellow colour combination because this does not suit the image of a punk person. Getting the colours of a website wrong can be easily noticed by a user and may put them off the site because it is the first thing they see, and first impressions can count for a lot.

This is something the Nokia Music Store4 website does quite well with its homepage Fig 5, but less so with its sub category pages. I think keeping a websites layouts structure the same on each page is good but the colours stay thesame throughout the site. For instance the Regge Fig 6 and Country Fig 7 category sections of the website are coloured exactly the same but with different images. I think a little effort to change the look of the site by changing the colour would have improved the site and made the user instantly realise what page they were on.  

I plan to use colour to illustrate different genre types of music, this is a simple but effective way to draw a users attention and lets them know where they are on a site most of the time without them having to read any text.

Preferences

Fig 1

 

Bold Underline text

Fig 1

 

Icons

Fig 3

 

Animated gif

Fig 4

 

Nokia Music

Fig 5

 

Nokia Regge

Fig 6

 

Nokia Country

Fig 7