247 web usability guidelines

Web usability guidelines

• Home page usability: 20 guidelines to evaluate the usability of home pages.
• Task orientation: 44 guidelines to evaluate how well a web site supports the users tasks.
• Navigation and IA: 29 guidelines to evaluate navigation and information architecture.
• Forms and data entry: 23 guidelines to evaluate forms and data entry.
• Trust and credibility: 13 guidelines to evaluate trust and credibility.
• Writing and content quality: 23 guidelines to evaluate writing and content quality.
• Page layout and visual design: 38 guidelines to evaluate page layout and visual design.
• Search usability: 20 guidelines to evaluate search.
• Help, feedback and error tolerance: 37 guidelines to evaluate help, feedback and error tolerance.

Download an Excel workbook containing all 247 web usability guidelines

You can also download translated versions of this checklist.

How to use these guidelines

Work through each of the guidelines in each list and mark your site as either conforming or not conforming to the guideline.

Remember that all guidelines are context specific. If you feel that a guideline does not apply to your site, it's OK to ignore it.

The guidelines are purposefully expressed as positive statements, so that when you feed the results back to the design team you can identify some strengths of the design before you launch into the problems.

And remember that guidelines can get you only so far. Nothing replaces a good design process.

Love it? Hate it? Join the discussion

Have you used these guidelines to evaluate an interface? Which guidelines do you find most useful?