Best practices
on the Web
Tatiana Sidorenkova
Elvira Arslanova
Julia Malyk
UXify Eindhoven
18.02.2014
Google
LinkedIN
Ryanair
Reddit

The culture of Reddit (video)

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com
What are the best practices?
A best practice is...
➢ a method or technique
➢ that has consistently shown results
superior to those achieved with other
means,
➢ and that is used as a benchmark.
It can evolve to become better as
improvements are discovered.
The elements of UX
by J.J.Garrett
Further reading
Heuristics:
Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design by J.Nielsen
First Principles of Interaction Design by B.Tognazzini
20 Guiding Principles for Experience Designers by H.Whitney
List of Style and Product Guidelines
Web:
ISO Standards
W3C Standards including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (2008)
Web Style Guide by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton (2009)
Gestalt Principles
Similarity

Closure

Continuation

Proximity

Figure
Main Message
§  Short and clear
§  Straight to the point
Call to action
Main principles of call-to-action:
Color
Position
White space
improved legibility
fresh feel
drawing attention
higher comprehension
(stop worrying about fold)
Shape
Size
Secondary action (http://eu.marketo.com/)
Tell users what they will get
Navigation
success of navigation system is that the user
will click through it with a high degree of
confidence
Choose the logic for navigation

•  Understand your users and your content.
•  Understand the content properly, make wireframes
•  Find “lists” of things in the content
•  Create diagrams (hub & spokes, card sorting, post
• 
• 
• 
• 

notes, word association games etc.)
Find individual things
Create diagrams
Group “logically” to your user ( according to the
research that you have done). Iterative, tests.
Give names to the “clumps”
Find space in your content
Do not conflict with local navigation
Understand the behaviour of your
user
What screens are most often visited?
Do they jump between the pages often?
Now it’s time to be creative.
Choose a widget. Iterate.

Examples:
Rijksmuseum
Couchsurfing
Dataveeys
Ultranoir
Further Reading
Web User Interface (UI) Elements
Web Design Elements: Examples And Best Practices
Web Forms: Luke Wroblewski Modern Web Form Design,
Web Form Design in Action, Web Form Design Best Practices,
Designing for Today's Web
Social Login Accounts
Good UI
UI Patterns Libraries:
UI Patterns
Welie
Quince
PatternTap
Patternry
Responsive Patterns
Motion Graphics
Transitions and Animations
Dark Patterns
Content
Purpose
Why and for whom am I writing this?

vs.
Metadata

•  meta titles
•  meta description
•  meta keywords
+ alt tags
Language
Consider type of user and context
Skip the “happy talk”

•  Objective
•  Short
•  Concise
×
1 idea
per paragraph
AIDA Principle
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
Structure
–  Heading
–  Subheadings
–  Paragraphs
–  Bullet points
–  Links
×
Pictures &
Layout
Home page

•  establishes the brand;
•  sets the tone;
•  gives the push in the right direction.
Important to:

–  spell out the big picture;
–  create a good tagline;
–  put contacts and call to
action upfront.
Web Typography
in 4 simple steps

and it’s not about choosing fonts
1. Contrast
2. Size
3. Hierarchy
4. Negative space
Getting a little more
professional
Quotes
Dashes
Alignment
How?
Typography layout
There’s more

Fascinating kerning game
Further reading
–  Web Is All About Typography
–  Smashing Magazine
–  A List Apart
–  I Love Typography
Links from the discussion
Awesome website
Bootstrap is a front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first
projects on the web.
Foundation is an advanced responsive front-end framework.
inuitcss is a powerful, scalable, Sass-based, BEM, OOCSS framework.
HAL (Hypertext Application Language) is a simple format that gives a
consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API (very
technical).

UXify Eindhoven: Best practices on the Web