Keep your design efforts centered solely around your user. Knowing your audience answers almost all design questions-if it sever the audience, keep it; if it is potentially distraction or annoying, eliminate it. Find out what users expect form your site. If you can, survey them with an online form. Create a profile your average user by compiling responses to basic questions. What do users want when they get to your site? Are they trying to find customer support and troubleshooting help, or do they want buy something? DO they want to read articles or search for information? Once you know what your users want form your site, you can evaluate how the reflects the audience profile.



Compare the main pages form the following sites and consider their target audiences. E online is an entertainment news site. The four ?column main page contains competing content that draws the user's eye? such as animations, a Java text scroll, bright colors, and familiar shapes. The overall effect decidedly similar to television ? familiar territory for E online's? audience.

Pen & Ink's Web site projects a strong smell of printer's ink. Other than the black and white photo, the main page components are textual. The prominent logo features a text element-the ampersand. Strong contrasting colors highlight the links. The layout evokes quill pens and lead type, which is exactly what the literary-minded user would link in an online journal.

suits the audience's visual expectations, which is the look of the site. But you also should consider the ways in which users interact with the content, which is the feel of the site.

DESIGN FOR INTERACTION

Think about how the user wants to interact with the information on your Web page. Design for your content type, and decide if the user will read or scan your pages.

suppose your page is a collection of links, such as a main page or section page. Users want to interact with these type of pages by scanning the content, scrolling if necessary, pointing to graphics to see if they are hyper linked, and clicking linked text. Design for this type of user interactions by using meaningful column headings, linked text, and short descriptions. Organize links into related topic groups and separate groupings with white space, graphics. Or background color.

Suppose the page is an article that contains large blocks of text. Your user is accustomed to interacting with pages of text by scrolling and possibly clicking hyper linked words of interest. The links may be in the body of the article or contained in a sidebar. Design your pages for this type of content by keeping paragraphs short for online consumption. Make reading easier by using a text column that is narrower than the width of the screen. keep your text legible by providing enough contrast between foreground and background colors. Provide links that allow the user to jump quickly to related content.

Two screen form the web monkey site illustrate the read/scan concept. Shows a page designed for scanning. Users will look through a variety of links to find a topic of interest. Once they choose a link, they jump to a page designed for reading, as illustrated in Note in both pages the user location identifier. This simple path statement lets the user quickly see their place in the hierarchy of information.