Les Jones: WebDesignPractices.com

October 21, 2003

E-commerce > WebDesignPractices.com

If you design Web pages or e-commerce systems and care about usability, you need to visit WebDesignPractices.com. The site surveys popular sites to see what practices are most common, i.e., best practices.

Why do what everyone else is doing? Because it's what your customers expect, as Jakob Nielsen states in Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience:

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
This Law is not even a future trend since it has been ruling the Web for several years. It has long been true that websites do more business the more standardized their design is. Think Yahoo and Amazon. Think "shopping cart" and the silly little icon. Think blue text links.

That's what Neilsen was saying in 2000 or even earlier. He also noted that most Web pages link the logo to the home page. Lo and behold, look at what WebDesignPractices found:

60% of sites have a "Home" link on each page, and link their logo to the home page.
50% of sites use blue as the link color.
The Shopping Cart link was typically in the upper right corner of the page.
72% of sites used Cart or a variation (Shopping Cart) as the label for the link to the list of products the customer is ordering.
76% of sites that used a graphic to represent the shopping cart used a wheeled shopping cart.
32% of sites included a summary of the contents of the cart. Of those that did, 71% showed the number of items in the cart.

Fascinating stuff if you're, you know, actually trying to get people to use your site successfully in order to buy things. Some creative folks hate Nielsen and research like that done by WebDesignPractices, but results-oriented site designers should love them.

Posted by lesjones

Comments

Nielson's "links must be blue or people will be confused!!" rule has always struck me as complete BS.

It is much more effective to have unvisited links be a color that has high contrast to the background (such as dark tan on a white page), and visited links be a low-contrast tone of the same color (light tan, in this case). Thus, unvisited links are highlighted, and it is immediately obvious that unvisited links are "less important." This distinction is much less obvious, and more confusing, if one uses the blue=unvisited/purple=unvisited scheme that Nielson has proclaimed is the One True Way.

Posted by: steve at October 21, 2003

I think whatever you gain by increased contrast you lose by unfamiliarity. On the e-commerce site I run, I initially used blue links, but no underline. After obversving different people using the site, I saw people passing over links, not realizing they could click on them. I turned underlining back on and the problem went away.

Posted by: Les Jones at October 21, 2003

Underlining, yeah. That is an immediate indication that there is something *different* about that particular piece of text

but I'm just not buying that people are better able to cue in on links and differentiate between visited vs unvisited if they are a specific color I 'm basing my argument on my own reactions, which obviously is dangerous, but personally, even after 10+ years of using web browsers, I still occassionaly find myself momentariiy confused by the blue/purple thing, whereas I much less frequently am confused by a high contrast/low contrast distinction . Maybe it's just me, though.

I'm leery of Human Interface people, anyway. They're always going on and on about things like how 25 years of Hard Scientific Data prove that it is more efficient to close a window using a mouse than to hit Ctrl-W (or, *shudder* C-x-C-c)

Posted by: Steve at October 21, 2003

If only real life worked that way!

Posted by: Philosocles at April 07, 2005