Design: Web Site Design

As I’ve noted many times before, people do not necessarily read left to right—and certainly, not in anything that is reliably like an F-pattern. However, once people find your content, they do reliably read it from top to bottom.

Wrapping text to the next line, continuing line after line, and presenting lists of discrete items of information are the two safe, reliable ways of designing digital content, especially for small mobile devices.

But what about when your content goes on and on? While there’s great concern about the right way of displaying arbitrary amounts of information, people make a lot of design decisions on the basis of hearsay, opinion, fear, or inertia. Plus, they assess existing design patterns based on incomplete data or bad implementations. Read More

Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results, as follows:

1. Decide on your filter value-selection paradigm—either drill-down or parallel selection.
2. Provide an obvious and consistent way to undo filter selection.
3. Always make all filters easily available.
4. At every step in the search workflow, display only filter values that correspond to the available items, or inventory.
5. Provide filter values that encompass all items, or the complete inventory.

By following the attribute-based filtering design best practices this article describes, you can ensure your customers can take care of business without having to spend time struggling with your search user interface. Read More

I dedicated my last Designing for Children column to exploring the effective use of color and graphics in interactive applications for toddlers and preschoolers. In this installment, I’ll continue my exploration of the use of color and graphics, but this time, in applications directed toward older children. Read More