Web Guide - Usability

Jakob Nielsen’s “Law of the Web User Experience” states that “users spend most of their time on other Web sites.” In other words, users form expectations of your site based on what’s commonly done on most others. If you deviate from the expected norm, your site will be more difficult to use. For this reason, we require that all OU sites:

• Contain the global navigation bar.

• Display the OU logo or the words “The University of Oklahoma” linked to www.ou.edu

• Display the department/college name in the upper quadrant linking back to that site’s homepage.

• Contain the global footer.

• If possible have topic navigation on the left, close to the top.

Web applications (forms, ecommerce, etc.) should not include interaction techniques that deviate from common graphical user interface (GUI) standards as they can create usability catastrophes that make applications and transactions much more complex and in somecases, impossible to use.

All sites that collect personal or financial information must consult with the IT Security team and comply with all, ecommerce, PCI, privacy and security requirements.

Some required page elements may be eliminated in certain Web applications (forms, ecommerce, etc.) where the presence of an element may hinder the usability of the application. Any exceptions to required page elements must be approved by the Office of Web Communications.

There are many excellent resources for creating good user interfaces for Web applications. We recommend starting at: http://www.usernomics.com/user-interface-design.html.

Domain names should be intuitive, short, and reflective of an academic or administrative unit’s affiliation with The University of Oklahoma.
 
Typical OU URLs are extensions of the root ou.edu. In general, only URLs ending in “ou.edu” are hosted on university Web servers. Colleges and departments must request an exemption from the Office of Web Communications in order to utilize a domain extension other than .edu (.com, .org, etc.). The university also reserves the right to reserve URLs or refuse requests for URL forms deemed inappropriate or likely to be used in the future by departments and administrators (for example,URLs including words like “security” or “emergency”).

We recommend that when referring to email addresses, you represent them as name[at]ou[dot]edu. This prevents many spam spiders/crawlers from extracting email addresses to add to spam databases.