Guidelines for designing usable World Wide Web pages

Abstract

The proliferation of World Wide Web pages with poor usability is a serious problem because these pages waste user time, discourage exploration and could be responsible for a large amount of unnecessary traffic on the Internet. To alleviate this problem, we are proposing a set of simple guidelines for designing usable Web pages. The guidelines were compiled from a heuristic evaluation of existing Web sites. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the usability of home pages designed with the proposed guidelines. The experiment demonstrated that designers of Web pages can improve the usability of home pages by applying these guidelines.