1. Design Principles – Design for scanning, not reading! Take advantage of conventions. Create effective visual hierarchies Break pages up into clearly defined areas. Make it obvious what’s clickable. Eliminate distractions. Format content to support scanning . Keep paragraphs short. Use bulleted lists. Highlight key terms.

If I was to sit down today and redesign Live Nation, or Fender, or any of the thousand band websites I did, the user interface would just be an empty text box asking:

“What can I do for you?”

For this type of analysis, I am only interested in finding things that don’t work, are annoying, take too long, interrupt me, confuse me, or block me from continuing. Things that work well, I ignore. When I do encounter a usability fail, I take a screenshot, put that screenshot into a Keynote deck, and rate each usability fail based on the followin

for. One great quick way to check if your key pages are following this best practice is to use Google’s free Browser Size tool (http://browsersize.googlelabs.com