Hello, my name's Melody, and I'm a product designer at Coursera, and I'll be giving a guest lecture for this course on the principles of good web design. Everyone in this course is interested in designing great websites, whether if it's for your business, personal portfolio, etc. No matter what kind of website you're making, keeping in mind good design principles are always useful. We'll be covering three principles, and we'll be seeing how they're being used in a few example websites. And we’ll also cover how you might be able to use them while you're building yours. So let's dive in to the first principle. How might we make strong first impressions of the user when they first land on your site? In order to make this strong first impression, you have to consider your users and make sure your site is catering to their needs. So the three questions you should keep in mind as you're designing your website are what is your purpose. If someone landed on my site right now, would they be able to immediately understand what our purpose is? The second is, who are my users? What information are they looking for? This is to make sure that when your user first lands on the page, you've catered your website for the information that your user is looking for. So let's imagine that you're a furniture store. What's your purpose? It's probably to sell furniture. That purpose should be immediately apparent when someone lands on the site. The second question is, who are your users, and what information are they looking for? They're probably there to either buy furniture, figure out whether or not you have the furniture they're looking for, and if maybe they are looking for a store because they like to shop for furniture in person. So knowing those things, you want to make sure that your website is catering to all business cases really clearly. If not, then a user that comes to your site and is trying to achieve those goals is just going to leave the page immediately. So we can go over to Compliments, a furniture store in Denmark, to see how they've done it. So here we have Compliments, a furniture store. And here they've already answered the first question really clearly. What is the purpose of this website? It's to sell furniture. You could see cushions in the back you see this tag line, making home, home. You see as these images scroll through, you see that there's bed linens, there's cushions, and things like that. And so, if you go back to the first page, they've also answered the information question. Their main call to action, here in the middle, is See catalogue. So if the major use cases are, look at the furniture that compliments, hat is offering, and if the other use case is to be able to find a store. Again, they've thought through these things, and they made those the two prominent items in the navigation bar. And they've also made it the main call to action in the middle of the screen. So, I would say this is a really great example of a store making it super clear that we're a furniture store, and here are the ways that you can check us out or come to a store and buy furniture directly. So the second principle is to communicate clearly. A lot of times websites today are just super overwhelming. You land there, there's a lot going on. There's a lot of buttons, there's a lot of links, there's a lot of text. And you really don't know what to do. So it's really important that, as you're designing the website, that you guide the experience. Use clear calls to actions to guide your user's behavior. Calls to actions are typically in the form of buttons, and again, just because you put a button on there, doesn't mean that it's a clear call to action. You want to make sure that there is maybe one, maybe two, calls to actions to guide your user through the experience. The second point is to break up your content into digestible pieces. You want to use images, headers, and bullet points to add structure to your content. If you just have a block of text, it's really hard to parse through. You don't really want to stay there for long. And it's just not very interesting to the user. You want to make sure that you structure it so that you can communicate your point across. The last point is, use words, phrases, and concepts that your users are familiar with. A lot of times people will try to stick to convention in order to keep to consistency across the navigation bar, or use phrases that are too jargony, that only you know as someone building the website. But the idea is that you want to make sure boil it down into words and phrases and concepts that your users will understand. So at times, it's better to break grammar rules for the sake of this user understanding. And so, to check out a good example of this, we can head over to hoovermason.com. So here we have hoovermason.com. Again, a really well made WordPress website. This can give you an idea of just how powerful that framework is. But here you see that they have a really great way of emphasizing what to look at here. The main header is really big, you have smaller headers here, and tag lines here. You also see that they're using lots of big imagery to kind of make the page really interesting to the user. And the most important thing, again, is that they're using really interesting and familiar language to get you to continue on in the experience. So here it says Explore the Trestle. They could have just used the phrase learn more, which is what lots of people tend to do on the web today. But by using a concept familiar to the user and giving it very clear call to action, Explore the Trestle, you know exactly where to click. It's a big yellow button. So they did a really great job of guiding the user experience for your user.
