Recently I came across an article on CMS Usability by Sydney based CMS guru James Robertson. In his article, “11 usability principles of CMS products” he outlines the key principles a CMS should have to be truly usable.

A usable CMS will:

• minimise the number of options
• be robust and error-proof
• provide task-based interfaces
• hide implementation details
• meet core usability guidelines
• match authors’ mental models
• support both frequent and infrequent users
• provide efficient user interfaces
• provide help and instructions
• minimise training required
• support self-sufficiency

While reading through his article I found myself nodding in agreement and more surprisingly thinking that we’ve come pretty close in meeting these principles with our own CMS. While we didn’t start out with these exact principles in mind prior to development, it’s clear our own frustrations dealing with a combination of usability and technical issues across a number of CMS platforms led us to develop a CMS that is closely aligned with these same principles. In many respects it’s a little scary how close we’ve come.

Now, as the owner of a CMS, it’s easy to start believing your own sales hype and get carried away. However, our own research and more importantly, feedback from users support many of these principles.

I hope to meet James from Step Two Designs soon and get his feedback on our CMS to see if he agrees. I’ll report on his findings here in the near future.

With Google’s recent statement they were going to give increased importance to the loading times of a website’s home page (and penalise accordingly slow loading sites), could we be seeing the return of the Splash Page?

Here’s a favourite Splash Page of mine - Ginko Gardens

Splash Pages – Counter to ‘Usability’ and SEO best practice?

Much like hard copy brochure covers, splash pages typically contain very little content. Instead what you find is Flash animation, a striking image, a fancy tag line or a brief intro spiel advertising what the site is about. Throw in a logo, a keyword optimised footer and you’re done!

From a user’s perspective, splash pages are just one more click to make to get to the content they’re after. So they’re a big waste of time.

Splash Pages = Low Exit Rates

For website designers and online marketers, splash pages aren’t necessarily all bad news. For one thing, they can load pretty quickly (which given Google’s recent pronouncements is good news) and they usually offer a low exit rate.

Assuming few users leave the splash page and pursue their journey further into a website, that could have some SEO benefit. Search engines are known to value positively websites with low exit rates on their top web pages…

Is Google encouraging the return of the Splash Page?

So could Google’s latest pronouncement in favour of fast load times further encourage the use of splash pages? And doesn’t that run counter to usability best practice?

Imagine the web populated by useless splash pages. They would no longer contain Flash (as Flash increases load times), but they would be extremely content light to upload fast and would likely require users to click on to get to the content they’re after.

With savvy web marketers around… That scenario is not so hard to imagine.

Your thoughts?

A client recently approached us with the plan to render most of their website in AJAX (otherwise known as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a web development technique used in online forms and other interactive web apps.

For Responsive Webpages and Forms

AJAX is designed to make web pages more responsive – it allows for a page to be ‘seamlessly’ refreshed with new data without requiring a reload and effecting the look and speed of the interaction. It’s fantastic in application forms where instant feedback or additional details may be required.

AJAX – Handle with Care!

But AJAX should be used with care. It can have a negative impact on a site’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and can prove problematic for disabled users. So here’s a quick breakdown of what AJAX is good at and what it’s not so good at…

What AJAX is good at:

• Delivering small blocks of content – for small quick changes it works well.
• Reducing the number of steps in a process – it’s great for forms with options (like application forms).
• Delivering instant feedback such as validation of form fields and quick feedback on from submissions.

AJAX is not very good at:

• Making content visible to search engines and any device that is not JavaScript enabled.
• Bookmarking – once you’re some way down an application process in an AJAX rendered environment, you cannot bookmark individual steps like you could if each stage of the app is delivered in standard HTML.
• Providing content for disabled users – the blind and vision-impaired are not able to access AJAX rendered content (and can have legal ramifications as in this example with Target in the United States and with the Sydney Olympics Website).
• Providing speed benefits to users with slower machines as it puts the processing onus onto the user’s machine.
• SEO: a typical implementation of AJAX is invisible to search engines. As you can replicate AJAX functionality with HTML, you’re better off using the latter for web content if you’re concerned about ranking on search engines.

To see an example of AJAX functionality, play around with the flight booking engine on Bezurk.com

A very interesting article from Milissa Tarquini of AOL on how the long held rule of the “fold” is being de-bunked by web analytics and user testing, as well as how this will impact design and development processes based on screen resolution and browser compatibility.