Usability Standards

The development team can proactively avoid many usability traps by applying certain standards from the very beginning of the project. The information architect should act as ombudsman for these standards.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has compiled a list of ten major usability standards. While Nielsen originally created the list for software projects (and wrote it in a language only remotely related to English), all are applicable to Web projects, as Keith Instone of Web Review has shown.6

Each standard is listed on the following pages with a plain-English title and additional commentary.