Ch - 5

1. Why Your Site Is Not Perfect

2. Your 3 Brains
• The Reptilian Brain
• The Limbic System
• The Neocortex

3. • When we design landing pages for the web, we
must understand that we must often please the
limbic system of our visitors.
• We are being judged on the emotional gut
reaction that our pages evoke.
• Our mid-brain knows what it is like and what it
doesn’t.
• At some level, the whole point of large-scale
statistical landing page testing is to tap directly
into this hidden limbic system decision maker and
unmask it by seeing its emotionally based action.

4. Learning Modalities
There are 3 major ways to get information into
your long term memory.
• Visual ( Learning by seeing )
• Auditory ( Learning by hearing )
• Kinesthetic ( Learning by doing )

5. Try to use the following types of information to
address each learning modality more effectively:
Visual : Guided imagery, color codings
, diagrams, photos, maps
Auditory : Audio clips, oral
instructions, poems, rhymes, video clips
Kinesthetic : Games and interactive
activities, associating emotions with
concepts, problem solving, role plaing.

6. Usability Basics
Some of the overall goals of usability are :
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Decrease the time required to finish task.
Reduce the number of mistakes.
Shorten learning time.
Improve satisfaction with your site.

7. When we are considering usability for
landing pages, we should always take
into account visitor’s typical mindset
and behaviour:
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The Visitor has extreme impatience.
The visitors commitment level to your website is low.
Text is scanned, not read.
The visitor has fixation on more prominent items of
interest.
• The visitor will pay attention to certain kinds of
pictures.
• The visitor’s desired next action is to click on
something.

8. Information Architecture
• In general your site navigation should :
• Be easy to understand ( Grouped into logical
unit)
• Be visible ( Not require scrolling to find key
navigation)
• Support the visitor’s task.
• Be consistent throughout the site.
• Use clear and distinct labels.
• Provide context

9. Legibility
Since most of our Web experiences are currently
based on reading, legibility requires special
attention.

10. Font Styles
Font Sizes
Font Consistency
Underlines
Justification
All – Caps
Line Length
Contrast
Link Text
Text background colors
and images

11. Launguage
How users read on the web:
They don’t

12. To increase the odds of the favourable outcome
you need to consider the following areas of
your writing:
• Structure
• Tone
• Format

13. Structure
• The preferred structure for most web writing is
the inverted pyramid.
• It uses the principle of primary to control
saliency.
• In this style of writing, you put your conclusions
and key points first.
• Less important and supporting information
should be placed last.
• This is critical since most readers will choose not
to read very far.

14. Tone
How to avoid writing in ‘Marketese’
• Do not use any adjectives
• Provide only objective information
• Focus on the needs of your audience
Your editorial tone should have following attributes:
• Factual
• Task – oriented
• Precise
• concise

15. Format
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Write in fragments or short sentences
Use digits instead of words to write out numbers
Highlight important information carrying words
Use clear, emphasized titles for page headings
and important subheads
Use ordinary launguage
Use active voice, and action verbs
Use bullet lists instead of paragraphs
Do not use more than 2 levels for lists or
headings.

16. Visual Design
• Page Layout
• Graphics
• Color