Try to learn the rules of good web design and usability and you will quickly discover that a few of the commonly-accepted rules are just flat out wrong. For example, there are many books and web sites that proclaim that, on a computer screen, serif fonts [fonts with a tail] are harder to read than sans-serif fonts [fonts without tails]. Cute, but wrong:
Research shows no reliable differences in reading speed or user preferences for twelve point Times New Roman or Georgia (serif fonts), or Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana (sans serif fonts).
Whoops. How can you separate the good web design rules from the fake ones? Easy. Check out the United States Department of Health and Human Service's [HHS] recently-updated "Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines." For each of the over 200 web design guidelines the HHS has collected, you'll see
- A summary of the guideline
- Real-world examples of that guideline in use
- A rating of the "relative importance" of the guideline
- A rating of the "strength of evidence" supporting the guideline
Those last two bullet points are important. There are a
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