I’ve been designing and creating websites for as long as there’s been a World Wide Web. My first efforts were pretty typical, too - long scrolling pages, lots of “back to top” links and such. Basically, really awful websites. I learned though, from watching people interact with either sites I’ve created, or others. I learned a great deal more when I was teaching web development. Oh my, the things we assume. (We being me in this case.)

My websites over the years took grew from those early giant page scrolling monsters to ones that had information chunked and organized better. I read about this, but it didn’t really sink in until I watched my students interact with websites I had created for them to use with classwork. Failing at first made me really study and learn about information architecture. I say this because I think it’s important for anyone reading this entry to understand where I am coming from and why I believe what I do.

I read a great deal about usability. Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug are two of my favorite authors on the subject, their works being both interesting to read and easy to understand. Sense is never common, but they make it seem so with their arguments. Vincent Flanders commentary is also some of my favorite and funny. (Although I think his website is ugly, it has great information.) The single most important book I’ve read on design and usability though is Robin William’s “The Non-Designer’s Design Book”. I made it the textbook for my web design classes when I was still teaching.

From these books I think the most important ‘take away’ has been the need to organize information into size-able chunks that the user can take in and understand and to provide this information in an organized context. This isn’t always an easy thing to do, especially for a site that has more than one purpose or a great deal of content.

A common pitfall for people is to try to have too many navigation elements. It’s hard to slim things down and this is where experience and usability studies really make a difference. Simply organizing content better can make a huge difference. Help the visitor find what she/he is looking for — don’t make them ‘learn’ to use your website. If you have to give instructions on how to interact with the interface of your website, things are too complex already. Keep it simple.

Paying attention to information architecture, and letting it determine the design instead of the other way around is easily one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years. If you haven’t read “The Non-Designer’s Design Book“, I’d highly recommend you pick up a copy.