Designing for our users means spending time understanding them and their needs, and designing your content to meet those needs. Think, especially, about how can you make their interaction with our site easy. The result should be content that is useful, findable, credible, accessible, and valuable. This standard underpins all others.
How to meet this standard
- Match your content to who your reader is and what they are trying to do.
- Understand who your audience is and what their needs are. Design your page or site around their goals (not your department or program’s).
- Make the purpose of your page clear.
- Ensure your title clearly indicates what a page is about.
- Include a short introduction that lets users know what they will be able find there.
- Prioritize clear navigation.
- Limit the number of items in menus to seven or fewer. Focus on the most important things and organize the rest into choices that make sense at every step.
- Offer logical choices. Think about where your reader will they want to go next, and provide them with next steps or links to related pages.
- Provide clear in-page subheadings to make your pages easily scannable.
- Write link text that describes the link destination.
- Use calls to action (CTAs) that help users take action towards their goals and support the shortest path to complete those goals.
- Think mobile first. Over 50% of visitors to bcit.ca are using a mobile device to browse. While bcit.ca is a responsive site, it’s still advisable to:
- Test your pages in mobile view.
- Avoid PDFs. They are not mobile responsive and display poorly, creating a poor website experience for the user.
- Base decisions on data.
- Review analytics for your page to identify patterns and reveal insights. Reach out for help setting up a dashboard or interpreting the data.
- Do research to understand your audience’s needs and the problems we need to solve. Talk to students about their experiences using our website.