Usability Best Practices

Good usability is when a website provides the support the user needs to complete tasks with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. If a website is too difficult to use, users will leave and abandon what they came to do.

Site structure

When determining the overall structure of your site, it is important to select a strategy that is tailored to your particular audiences and use case. Viewing your site through the perspective of your users helps avoid a tendency to build a website that overly reflects your department’s internal structure.

Navigation

Limit your navigation menu to six (6) items or fewer. Each item should have less than 94 characters total to avoid the text wrapping to a second line. Keeping navigation short and simple will make it easier for users to scan and navigate a site without feeling overwhelmed — creating an optimal user experience.

Navigation items cannot link to pages that are on other websites. The navigation menu’s main purpose is to help users explore pages within your site.

Word choice in links and navigation menus

Determining the labels of your navigation links and pages highly impacts the journey your user takes to find what they need. Strong, clear and easy to understand labels and titles helps your visitor determine whether a page will have the information they are looking for. Users typically scan titles, headings, and links first, and long bodies of text only after they have decided that doing so is likely to be worth their time.

The best labels utilize keywords and phrases that are already familiar to users.

Page and file naming conventions

Page and file names should be easy to read (note: the name of your file determines the URL path of your page). They should also concisely describe what the page or document is about. Including relevant keywords can also help improve your content’s findability in search engines.

The following below conventions will help keep analytics data clean and page and file URLs readable and understandable.

  • All lowercase letters
  • No spaces; use hyphens, not underscores, to separate words
  • Use full words (don’t drop letters to make it shorter)
  • Avoid acronyms (unless they are commonly used, e.g. “faq”, “mba”)
    • Example: instead of sjsu.edu/ubp, use sjsu.edu/usability-best-practices

Broken links

Siteimprove is the preferred tool for checking for broken links. Email us at web-ops@sjsu.edu for access.

PDF files

PDFs are often not very accessible. If a PDF can be converted into a webpage, we highly recommend to do so. They are ideal for content intended to be printed, but should not be used in place of a well-designed web page. For additional details, view our PDF accessibility guidelines.

"Resources" pages

Your audience does not treat your organization's website as their "home base" on the internet. You don't have to provide links to the library, campus catalog, or Career Center websites. Those resources are easily searchable (and also available in the header or footer of every page on the university template).

Pages with long lists of links to the homepages of other programs and services on campus clutter up and hide the useful content you can offer.

You should share resources curated specifically to the interest of your audience.

For example:

  • instead of linking to the main Career Center website, link directly to a page related to careers associated with your program
  • instead of linking to library.sjsu.edu, find a Lib Guide specific to your topic and share that information