And this year was really an User eXperience year for me. I devoted quite a lot of the time discovering it. Of course I didn’t learn UX from blogs alone but the three blogs listed below were really helpful.

And for that I want to thank the guys behind them.

So, here it is, my top 3 list of UX blogs out there.

1. UX Booth

2. Usability Post

3. Good Usability

Tara is doing a great job writing of different aspects of design and design business and hopefully my post will help her readers as well.

You can read the post at http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/an-introduction-to-web-usability-for-graphic-designers/

So why not help your visitors and guide them to complete those?
You can achieve that and drastically improve the site’s performance by including a call to action. Thanks to it your visitors will know what is the next step you want them to take. They will not always follow it but at least there will be an option for them to choose.

A lack of it though can create a different situation altogether. You rely on the visitor to choose their next move then. And imagine that you have 20 different options in your navigation, what are the chances that your visitor will go for the one you would like him to?

A call to action is not difficult to implement but here are few things you should think of when working on it:

1. What is your objective for the site?
Without knowing it it’s almost impossible to create a call to action. What objective do you want your users to complete on the site? Contact you? View your portfolio? Register for a promotion? Try a demo of your system? Try to imagine what would it be, it will form the main part of your call to action.

2. What are benefits for the visitor to follow your call to action
Before you create your call to action you need to make sure that there are some benefits for the user to follow it. Why would he do so otherwise?

A good idea is to place your call to action beside a list of benefits of using your company. Especially if it asks the visitor to get in touch with you.

3. Construct it offering an alternative solution
Do not push the visitor in one direction only, offer him an alternative route. Instead of saying “call us now” make your call to action to state “call us now or browse through our work”. This way your visitor should not feel forced to do one thing only, rather offered two paths to choose from.

The main thing here is to mark graphically which path is more important to you.

Remember The Milk offers an alternative but main option is made prominent.

4. Use active urgent language
A call to action should clearly tell users what you want them to do. It should include active words such as:

• Call
• Try
• Register
• Sign up
• Subscribe

and so on. The idea is to encourage the user to take the action.

Long sentences might work well too, example:

Overcome Fear of Public Speaking

Campaign Monitor uses active language for both call to action and it’s alternative.

5. Make it stand out
A call to action simply won’t work if it won’t stand out on a page. Make it prominent, make it big (well, not always but in most cases this works best). Use contrast to differentiate it from the rest of page elements. Use white space for the same purpose.

Wufoo uses strong color contrast to make call to action stand out.

6. Do not restrict it to a home page alone
A common belief is that it should reside on home page only but in reality you should have it on every page. The simplest reason for that is that you do not know which page the user has landed on when they entered your site. He may have simply googled a specific term and landed on one of the inner pages of your site.

Basecamp features this call to action at the bottom of every page

7. Test, test, test
Last but not least, you should always test your call to action before launching it on your site. Not only test whether all links work but even most importantly test whether it’s message is clear, it’s position right and will your potential visitors understand and act on it.

But what can you do with websites where you allow your client to manage or modify the content, grow the site and add whatever they please?

How can you keep up the highest quality level with those projects? Or maintain a highest level of usability if you do not have much control over the content? The site is still designed by you and so is the basic usability but many content based issues may and most likely will arise.

The simplest thing is to start designing for a CMS by assuming the following:

1. The content will most likely be different from what you have been told when the project commenced.

2. There will definitely be much more content than even the client anticipates.

3. And once the client realizes that they can do more with the cms they will.

So what can you do to protect yourself from losing your mind?

1. Allow the website and it’s content to expand.
Always make provision that there more pages will be added, same with content, images, videos and other site elements. Your navigation should accommodate this. Add dropdown menus or a way to create local navigation for website sections. Assume that there will be more of everything.
Also do not design your pages or their elements that are editable by the cms to have fixed height. Always allow them to expand vertically.

2. Always exaggerate when it comes to the content.
I always assume that there will be 3 times more content that I was told. In other words if a client tells you there will be only 3 paragraphs on a page, design as if there was meant to be 9 of them. And preview your designs this way.
This is important to keep the styling and a branding consistent no matter how much content there is on the site. You should always design for larger content that’s going to be on the site.

3. Do not give too much stylistic control to your client.
This generally relates to fonts and colors. Most clients want to be able to change them although from my experience the first thing they will do will be to change them to something not matching your style at all.
Try retaining control over fonts, sizes and colors via your CSS stylesheet.

4. Remember that your templates will be reused to create more pages.
Design them in a way that your client will have no difficulty creating additional pages from them. Also, do not create too many templates as it may be confusing for the client which one to choose for the site and ultimately may generate chaos in the sites layout.

5. Try hardcoding certain elements into the site rather than giving your client access to them.
This mainly relates to thank you and error notes on email forms outputted from cms. Very often this is an overlooked element leaving the site without this strong usability tool.

In other words when you design for the cms you design for change and you should always keep that in mind while working on your artwork.

What is your reaction to that, frustration, irritation, fear? Well one thing is for sure, you want to get out as quick as possible and you would use all the magic you can think of to do so. Unfortunately many websites these days are mazes like that. They take you deeper and deeper and sometimes a close button on your browsers window seems like the only way out.

So now, imagine how your visitor feels about such website. Not only he got lost but also had to use “magic” to escape from it all. Would he ever come back to the site? Unless he would absolutely had to, I doubt it.

So what you should do to prevent your website from becoming a maze?

Firstly, plan well, make your pages long, there is no problem with that anymore. In the past long pages were considered a usability error but nowadays in the era of blogs, online magazines and web articles it doesn’t seem a problem anymore. But do not make them deep by creating a complicated navigational structure with many levels the user has to go in.

Secondly, make your navigation well structured and tell the visitor where he is at all times.

Deep sites cause one extra problem, the content is usually split into too many levels. Where there could be one page on the topic you have five and four of them only confuse our visitors more.

Those that will immediately end up in my bookmarks. But some are so confusing that I have to stop and think what my next move on the page will be. Sites like that usually make me to take a break or simply move on to another site. Just so that I do not lose reason.

And how do you recognize such site?

Look at your own reaction. Are you confused on a site? Not sure where you are and what to do next? Most of those sites share certain characteristics, access to the information on them  is restricted by complicated design, confusing page structure or inconsequential design elements making the site almost unusable.

But if it was just me then there really wouldn’t be any problem. Unfortunately your visitors are the same. They have the reason to be on your site and they will wander off if they don’t find what they were looking for or have to make any more of an effort to access the information.

But how do you prevent that?

My best tip is design well but communicate first. Remember that your site’s users are not visiting it for your design, they are there for information or product and they want to get it as quick as possible.

Structure your site first. What I always recommend to our clients is to start with a site map. Simply create a list of all pages you would like to have on a site and draw how they will link to one another. Mark which ones will be in a main menu and which ones will be in any local navigation if you you plan to have any.

Then look at the content, what information is the most important and position it prominently on pages.

Think about conventions you will be creating, how links will look like, will there be any elements that will repeat from page to page (or between a group of pages)? If so, make sure they look and work the same on each page.

And always remember that if your visitors have to stop and think whether an element on a page is a link or not… you are in trouble.

The fact is that visitors categorize or remember sites based on how easy it was for them to find the information they were looking for, how pleasurable the experience was and whether they actually found what they came for.

So in order to improve your design skills place yourself in visitors shoes, judge other and your sites as well, browse them consciously and develop a habit of analyzing sites against their usability.

But how do you do that?

By asking those 5 simple questions you should be able to tell very quickly whether the site is successful.

1. Can I understand the purpose of the site in the first couple of seconds?

Upon landing on a site, if it’s designed well you should be able to tell it’s purpose in seconds. You should very quickly be able to say what the company does and what it wants to offer you through the site. If this is executed poorly you will find yourself wandering your eyes on the page looking for a clue to what is going on. And in many cases if you don’t find it quick enough you will leave.

2. Can I navigate through the site instantly after landing on it or do I have to stop and think before doing that?

In other words, is the navigation clear and self explanatory or do you have to search for it.
The best example are sites which place the navigation at the bottom of the page, underneath the content. Users actually have to scroll down the entire content to access it. This is an unnecessary step forcing the user to do so where they should be able to access the exact information they are looking for.

3. Can I tell where I am on the site at all times?

After a while of browsing and going deeper into the site, can you still tell where you are? What is the signposting on the site like? Look at the navigation and see if the page you are currently on is highlighted in any way.

If not, are there any other signposts marking your location, breadcrumbs (the “you are here:…” links), texts informing you where you are, page title containing the name of the page. Check also whether hyperlinks that you clicked in the text body offer any indication that you already used them.

4. Am I being asked to complete tasks and if so, how clearly they are communicated to me?

Are there any calls to action (’click here to…’) on the site. There doesn’t have to be any but if you come across one, how well was it laid out to you? A good example here is a login screen, or any registration forms. How well is it described how your password should be structured? Is it all there or did you have to find out that a password must contain numbers from an error message.

5. If I choose wrong, is it easy to go back or correct my mistake?

Make a mistake, deliberately even though you knew what to include in the menu type something else. See how the error message is communicated to you, how well it is explained and whether it is easy to correct your error.

There are many design solutions that can be implemented to solve those problems. There are also many other aspects of a website that can cause it to fail (wrong content, images disturbing the image, non-readable text and many others) although as long as your visitor can answer those questions and his answers are positive your site will be considered easy to use and on a straight road to be successful.