Research Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines: Printing the Guidelines

Who are the Guidelines for?
Why did HHS create the Guidelines?

  How audiences will benefit
  Options for implementing the Guidelines
  Considerations before using the Guidelines

The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines were developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Guidelines were developed to assist those involved in the creation of websites to base their decisions on the current and best available evidence. The Guidelines are particularly relevant to the design of information-oriented sites, but can be applied across the wide spectrum of websites.

Who Are the Guidelines for?

The primary audiences for the Guidelines are website designers, managers, and others involved in the creation or maintenance of websites. A secondary audience is researchers who investigate Web design issues. This resource will help them determine what research has been conducted and where none exists.

Why Did HHS Create the Guidelines?

HHS created this set of guidelines for several reasons:

1) To create better and more usable websites. Translating the latest Web design research into a practical, easy-to-use format is essential to the effective design of HHS's numerous websites. The approach taken to produce the Guidelines is consistent with HHS's overall information dissemination model - rapidly collect, organize, and distribute information in a usable format to those who need it.

2) To provide quantified, peer-reviewed website design guidelines. This resource does not exist anywhere else. Most Web design guidelines are lacking key information needed to be effective. For example, many existing guideline sets:

Are based on the personal opinions of a few experts;
Do not provide references to support them;
Do not provide any indication as to whether a particular guideline represents a consensus of researchers, or if it has been derived from a one-time, non-replicated study; and
Do not give any information about the relative importance of individual guidelines.

By addressing these issues, the Guidelines will help enable HHS and other organizations to make more effective design decisions. Each guideline in this book shows a rating of its "Relative Importance" to the success of a website, and a rating of the "Strength of Evidence" supporting the guideline. Carefully selected panels of professional Web designers, usability specialists, and academic researchers contributed to these ratings. The ratings allow the user to quickly ascertain which guidelines have the greatest impact on the success of a website, and to determine the nature and quality of the supporting evidence. The "Relative Importance" and "Strength of Evidence" ratings are unique to the HHS Guidelines.

3) To stimulate research into areas that will have the greatest influence on the creation of usable websites. There are numerous Web design questions for which a research-based answer cannot be given. While there are more than 1,000 papers published each year related to Web design and usability, much of this research is not based on the most important (or most common) questions being asked by Web designers. By providing an extensive list of sources and "Strength of Evidence" ratings in the Guidelines, HHS hopes to highlight issues for which the research is conclusive and attract researchers' attention to the issues most in need of answers.

How to Use These Guidelines

Successful use of the Guidelines depends on how they are disseminated and used within an organization. Simply providing the Guidelines to designers and managers may not be enough to spur the adoption and use of the Guidelines.

How Audiences Will Benefit

The Guidelines offer benefits to four key audiences:

Designers
The Guidelines provide a clear sense of the range of issues that designers - especially those new to the field - need to consider when planning and designing a website. Applying the Guidelines will help to reduce the negative impacts of "opinion-driven" design, and referring to evidence-based guidance can reduce the clashes resulting from differences of opinion between design team members.

Usability Specialists
The Guidelines will help usability specialists evaluate the designs of websites. For example, usability specialists can use the Guidelines as a checklist to aid them during their review of websites. They also can create customized checklists that focus on the "Relative Importance" and "Strength of Evidence" scales associated with each guideline. For example, a usability specialist can create a checklist that only focuses on the top 25 most important issues related to the success of a website.

Managers
The Guidelines will provide managers with a good overview and deep understanding of the wide range of usability and Web design issues that designers may encounter when creating websites. The Guidelines also provide managers with a "standard of usability" for their designers. Managers can request that designers follow relevant portions of the Guidelines and can use the Guidelines to set priorities. For example, during timeframes that require rapid design, managers can identify guidelines deemed most important to the success of a website - as defined by the "Relative Importance" score associated with each guideline - and require designers to focus on implementing those selected guidelines.

Researchers
Researchers involved in evaluating Web design and Web process issues can use this set of guidelines to determine where new research is needed. Researchers can use the sources of evidence provided for each guideline to assess the research that has been conducted, and to determine the need for additional research to increase the validity of the previous findings, or to challenge those findings. Perhaps more importantly, researchers also can use the Guidelines and their sources to formulate new and important research questions.

Options for Implementing the Guidelines

There are a variety of ways to use the Guidelines in website development efforts. Users can read the book from beginning to end to become familiar with all of the guidelines. The book also can be used as a reference to answer specific website design questions.

The Guidelines can be customized to fit most organizations' needs. The customization process can be approached in several ways:

Encourage key stakeholders and/or decision makers to review the full set of guidelines and identify key guidelines that meet their Web design needs. For example, an organization may develop portal websites that focus exclusively on linking to other websites (as opposed to linking to content within its own website). Therefore, it may focus more on selecting guidelines from the "Links" and "Navigation" chapters and less from the content-related chapters.
Selected guidelines can be merged with existing standards and guidelines currently used within an organization. This may reduce the number of documents or online tools that designers must reference, and thus improve the adoption and use of both the HHS Guidelines and existing standards and guidelines.

Considerations before Using the Guidelines

The Guidelines are intended to improve the design and usability of information-based websites, but also can be applied across the wide spectrum of websites. When using the Guidelines, it is helpful to remember that:

Within each chapter of this book, the guidelines are ordered according to their "Relative Importance" ratings. That is, the most important guidelines are toward the beginning of a chapter and the less important ones are toward the end. Readers may have a tendency to think that guidelines with one or two bullets on the "Relative Importance" scale are not important. However, it is crucial to note that all guidelines in this book were rated as at least "somewhat important" by the review team, otherwise they would not have been selected for inclusion in the book. Therefore, a guideline with one or two bullets is still important, just relatively less so than a guideline with four or five bullets.
The Guidelines may not be applicable to all audiences and contexts. For example, they may not apply to websites used by audiences with low literacy skills that have special terminology and layout needs. In general, these guidelines apply to English language websites designed for adults who are between 18 and 75 years of age.
The Guidelines may not adequately consider the experience of the designer. For example, a designer may have specialized knowledge about designing for a particular audience or context. These guidelines are adaptable and are not fixed rules.
The Guidelines may not reflect all evidence from all disciplines related to Web design and usability. Considerable effort has been made to include research from a variety of fields including human factors, cognitive psychology, computer science, usability, and technical communication. However, other disciplines may have valuable research that is not reflected in these guidelines.
Some "Strength of Evidence" ratings are low because there is a lack of research for that particular issue. The "Strength of Evidence" scale used to rate each guideline was designed to value research based evidence, but also to acknowledge experience-based evidence including expert opinion. Low "Strength of Evidence" ratings should encourage the research of issues that are not currently investigated.

How to Contribute Additional References?

The authors of the Guidelines attempted to locate as many references and source documents as possible. However, some important guidelines may not have been created, and some applicable references may have been missed. Readers who are aware of an original reference pertaining to an existing guideline, or who have a suggestion for a new research-based guideline, should submit an email to: webguidelines@hhs.gov.

Please include the following information in an email:

Reference information - author, title, publication date, source, etc.
(Remember, books are usually not original references.);
The guideline to which the reference applies;
If suggesting a new guideline, a draft of the guideline; and
A copy of the source (or a link to it), if available. This information will help HHS maintain the Guidelines as a current and accurate resource.