Trisha Cupra » Usability

Are Your Headings heading for Disaster?

Trisha Cupra — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:58:38 +0000

The bigger the heading, the more important it is

Are you using headings effectively on your website? Over at buildInternet, Zach Dunn has written a quick article about how to use the HTML Header Tags properly for headings. Header tags are numbered starting at 1, with h1 being the biggest and most important. He created the great graphic above, and you should read his article here.

A newspaper is a classic example of heading hierarchy. The name of the newspaper is biggest, boldest, and at the top of the front page. Then, a bit smaller in size is the front page main story’s heading. And the other stories have smaller headings – the smaller the heading, the shorter and less important the story appears to be.

I’ve added arrows and boxes to this photo of a newspaper’s front page to illustrate the point.

Headings in a newspaper

If this newspaper was a website, the headings in the newspaper would follow this hierarchy:

H1 – White

H2 – Yellow

H3 – Orange

H4 – Blue (same size as orange but not bold)

H5 – Green

If you look at this website below, you’ll see that the headings get smaller for each subsection:

Website headings

Is your site very user-friendly for your visitors? Do you have your information neatly organized under proper headings and subheadings?

More resources on headings/headers:

Variety in Heading and Body Fonts

Optimal HTML Headings for Proper Information Hierarchy in WordPress Blogs

5 Tips to Make Your Headings More User Friendly

Sub-headers are navigation

What you never noticed about Google’s Home Page

Trisha Cupra — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:55:22 +0000

When Google first created its beta (first draft) home page and set up a test to see how well it would work, there was a problem.

“[Our beta testers] would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…Google was perplexed.”

Interested in what the problem was and how easily it was fixed? Read the article:

What You Never Noticed About Google

10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of

Trisha Cupra — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:38:40 +0000

Visitors to your website don’t come just to look at your design and to figure out how to get all your fancy special effects to work. They come with questions they want answered. Your job is to make that information that they seek as easy to find as possible. Anything that stands in the way of your visitor finding out what they want to know quickly and simply makes your website a nightmare to use.

Smashing Magazine has a list of 10 Usability Nightmares you should be aware of with examples from real sites. There is also a list of 8 usability checkpoints:

Don’t use pop-ups.
Don’t change users’ window size.
Don’t use too-small font sizes.
Don’t have unclear link text.
Don’t have dead links.
Have at most one animation per page.
Make it easy to contact you.
Make links open in the same window.

Do you agree with the article? Do you know of any other usability nightmares that they missed?

10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of ~ Smashing Magazine

On a side note, comment #142 for this article was very amusing:

“I think that every designer should design for their grandma. If she can get around the site, only then can you pat yourself on the back. I have had customers that when I said click on the link, they actually picked up the mouse, put it on the screen and then clicked.”

Oh, dear.