ptg16476052606 LESSON 22: Designing for User Experience
Considering User Experience Level
The people viewing your website have varying levels of experience. Although most peo-
ple visiting your site will be interested in the Web, some of them might have barely used
a web browser, while others might have been browsing the Web for 20 years. When you
design your site, consider that the people who visit it might have varying levels of experi-
ence and browsing requirements.
Will the topics that you discuss on your site be of interest to people with different levels
of experience? If so, you might want to build in some features that help them find their
way around more easily. The key, of course, is to make your navigation as intuitive as
possible. By keeping your navigation scheme consistent from page to page throughout
the site, you’ll do a favor for users of all experience levels. There are a number of fea-
tures you can add to your site that will improve its usability for everyone.Add a Search Engine
Many users go straight to the search engine when they want to find something on a site.
No matter how much time and effort you put into building a clear, obvious navigation
scheme, someone looking for information about Frisbees is going to look for a box on
your page where she can type in the word Frisbee and get back a list of the pages where
you talk about them.
Unfortunately, locating a good search engine package and setting it up can be an awful
lot of work, and difficult to maintain. On the other hand, there are some alternatives.
Some search engines enable you to search a specific site for information. You can add a
link to them from your site. Some search engines even allow you to set things up so that
you can add their search engine to your site, such as Googl e:
http://www.google.com/cse/
By signing up, you can add a search box to your site that enables your users to search
only pages on your own site for information. For a list of other ways to add search func-
tionality to your site, see the following page in the Open Directory Pro ject:
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Internet/Servers/Search/Use Concise, Sensible URLs
One common mistake made by web designers is not considering how users share URLs.
If your site is interesting at all, people are going to email the URL to their friends, paste
it into instant messaging conversations, and talk about it around the water cooler. Making
your URLs short and easy to remember makes them that much easier for people to share.
There’s a reason why people have paid huge sums for domain names like business.com