Web Usability & Design Guidelines

Functionality and Usability

Before you go to an outside vendor...
Think about using the ehc.com graphic designers and web developers. We want to help you optimize functionality and design of your site. And hopefully make it as easy as possible for the website administrators to change and update the site. If you do choose to go to an outside agency, we need to be a part of development from the beginning stages to optimize the final site.  See our the Use of Outside Designers Guidelines.

Three tiers of navigation is not practical.
We discourage the use of more than two tiers of navigation for a couple of reasons. One being it overwhelms a website, you want the information and headlines on a web page to hold the focus. When you keep adding onto the navigation it soon becomes the focus and the user will not notice important information. Also, it is not intuitive for users when you have navigation embedded in layers. You need to look at your website from an outsider's perspective. Would you know how to get to a page that is in the third or fourth tier of navigation?

Do not repeat navigation and links all over the page.
There is a difference between putting a navigation piece in two different areas on you main navigation and putting the same links on the top, side and bottom of a page. It begins to clutter your page and take up important real estate.

Look around at websites and get a feel for what you would like for your site to look like and what you want it to convey to the user.
At ehc.com we have several graphic designers and web developers on staff to help you with upgrading your current site or making a new one. Click here to download a creative brief for a redesign.

Top Ten things you should know about your website’s design

At ehc.com, we’re always busy developing state-of-the-art…well, art. Despite what is sometimes said about artists, we take a practical, reliable approach to designing an effective look for each of our customers’ websites. In an effort to demystify the process, we’d like to share our Top Ten principles for designing usable websites.

1. Practice consistency
Consistency is key to usability. It keeps website visitors grounded in their location and helps them feel familiar with their surroundings. Consistency applies to many aspects of your website: navigation controls on every page, color scheme, font styles and page layout. In a consistently designed site, visitors never have to worry about what will happen next because their experience of the site’s look and behavior is the same page after page. And as their expectations are met, the visitor feels more in control of their viewing experience.

2. Bind your site to your overall marketing presence
Practicing consistency extends beyond your website to your greater marketing presence. If your facility has produced marketing materials such as brochures, posters, fliers, commercial spots or billboards, these items should inform the design style of your web presence. A unified strategy can dramatically increase the impact of an overall marketing campaign, enhancing a facility’s image and reputation in its community.

3. Keep homepage content concise
Content on your site’s homepage should be short, concise, and easy to scan in a moment. Avoid posting full-length articles or documents on your homepage. Instead, write a short synopsis—or blurb—of each main piece of content to peak the visitor’s interest and have the blurb link to the full story on a second-tier page.

4. Don’t overload a page
There’s no limit to the amount of content you can cram onto a web page, but remember—just because you can load up a page doesn’t mean you should. It’s easy to keep adding content to a page when you feel it’s important—something visitors shouldn’t miss—but by doing so you run the greater risk of visitors abandoning an overwhelming webpage. (Be aware, as well, of pages splattered with disparate content—they are evidence of poor organization.)

5. Choose graphics carefully
Poor graphics are a threat to a website’s credibility, and thus to your facility’s. Examples of poor graphics include: badly designed or drawn images; use of huge drop shadows or bevels; and poor page layout. Such substandard elements will make a site look amateur, outdated, and untrustworthy… and no one wants to visit an “amateur” hospital. As you consider graphics to add to your site, think about the images used to sell expensive electronics on Amazon.com or BestBuy.com – rather than serve as mere page decoration, they are carefully designed to have maximum selling impact. The aesthetic value of your website speaks volumes about your perceived credibility with visitors.

6. Distinguish your content from web advertisements
When designing your webpage content and graphics, avoid elements that look like online advertisements. Web designers have coined the term “Banner Blindness,” a real condition in which visitors avoid fixing their eyes on anything that looks like an ad banner. Some design elements that are typically confused with ad banners include: blinking or flashing text; aggressive animations; and popup windows (which are generally closed before they even have time to render). Eliminating such confusing design elements put your website one step closer to success.

7. Skip the intro page
There’s a trend among website owners to show off by placing a short animated flash introduction on their homepage. These “Splash Pages” can indeed be flashy, but it’s interesting how many clients request one while having no idea what they want it to say. Design advisors recommend including a “Skip Intro” button on such a page, but think about what that tells your users—by giving visitors the option to skip this material, it signifies that the content on this page is not worth seeing. Why should a visitor spend time looking at it? This casts suspicion on your entire site.

8. Employ only one browser window
One of the most frustrating elements in the visitor’s experience is the use of multiple browser windows. This design strategy eliminates the most basic form of web navigation—the Back Button. The Back Button is both universally understood by web users, and frequently underestimated by web designers. When use of the Back Button is supplanted by having a new browser window open, visitors often do not realize this has happened, and they wonder why the Back Button is grayed out. (There are, however, appropriate times to open a new browser window, such as when linking to a PDF or Word document.)

9. Make media an "on demand" event
Don’t force media such as video or audio on your visitors. Make the viewing of this content an “on demand” event. Automatically downloading rich media on entry of a website drastically slows down the loading of the page and can be extremely frustrating. Visitors often assume the website is not working because this type of media is bandwidth-intensive and the wait is unpredictable, varying from site to site, and page to page. Design your pages to make media available to visitors when and if they want to see it—by clicking on it.

10. Put background images on the back burner
It’s tempting to use a piece of artwork or your facility logo as a background pattern for your website. And while a complex background may make for a beautiful piece of art, it does a lousy job as a backing for text. Legible text is a priority for websites. One final note along the same lines: always use contrasting colors for the page background and the text. Light text color in front of a light background is terribly hard to read, and the same goes for dark text on a dark background. Text is usually not pretty or artistic, but just like the sound in a movie—if it’s unintelligible/illegible, no one will know what’s going on.