For example, are school web site designers using the best fonts, download times, screen resolution, or sentence length?
“When we start using our own guesswork, literally, we find our web sites are all over the place,” said SanJay J. Koyani, senior usability engineer in the Office of Public Affairs at HHS. “It’s not good to have consistently bad web sites.” As many as 1,000 research papers on web design are published each year, Koyani said–but many of them are hard to access or understand, and not all of them are relevant. “The No. 1 problem was none of [these studies] agreed, and the second problem was none of them referenced research,” he said. In the Usability Guidelines report, however, each recommendation receives two ratings: one to gauge its “relative importance” to the success of a web site, and another to determine its “strength of the evidence.” Some recommendations have a greater impact on the overall success of a web site than others, and the available research to support each recommendation is not equal in quality and scope, Koyani said. Researchers audited and reviewed many research papers
