Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines [2006 edition]

The new edition of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines. These guidelines reflect HHS’ commitment to identifying innovative, research-based approaches that result in highly responsive and easy-to-use Web sites for the public. These guidelines help move us in that direction by providing practical, yet authoritative, guidance on a broad range of Web design and communication issues. Having access to the best available research helps to ensure we make the right decisions the first time around and reduces the possibility of errors and costly mistakes

Benchmarking implementations of functional languages with ‘Pseudoknot', a float-intensive benchmark

Over 25 implementations of different functional languages are benchmarked using the same program, a floating-point intensive application taken from molecular biology. The principal aspects studied are compile time and execution time for the various implementations that were benchmarked. An important consideration is how the program can be modified and tuned to obtain maximal performance on each language implementation. With few exceptions, the compilers take a significant amount of time to compile this program, though most compilers were faster than the then current GNU C compiler (GCC version 2.5.8). Compilers that generate C or Lisp are often slower than those that generate native code directly: the cost of compiling the intermediate form is normally a large fraction of the total compilation time. There is no clear distinction between the runtime performance of eager and lazy implementations when appropriate annotations are used: lazy implementations have clearly come of age when it comes to implementing largely strict applications, such as the Pseudoknot program. The speed of C can be approached by some implementations, but to achieve this performance, special measures such as strictness annotations are required by non-strict implementations. The benchmark results have to be interpreted with care. Firstly, a benchmark based on a single program cannot cover a wide spectrum of ‘typical' applications. Secondly, the compilers vary in the kind and level of optimisations offered, so the effort required to obtain an optimal version of the program is similarly varie

SmartSites Toolkit for Evaluating Course Web Sites

Melody Y. Ivory, SmartSites Toolkit for Evaluating Course Web Sites, Technical Report IS-TR-2004-12-02, Information School, University of Washington, December 16, 2004.To facilitate the design of effective web sites for classroom-based courses, we developed a systematic heuristic evaluation methodology and relevant heuristics. To facilitate reuse of the methodology, we developed an evaluation toolkit. The toolkit provides detailed instructions on all aspects of the methodology and an example assessment. Assessments that are carried out with the toolkit can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a course web site. Furthermore, heuristics provide actionable feedback on how to improve sites. The toolkit is available as a zipped archive.Equal Opportunity Offic

Improving Web Site Design

Using quantitative measures of the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, a quality checker aims to help nonprofessional designers improve their sites. Poorly designed Web sites can lead to lost productivity and revenue. The question of how to improve the design of informational Web sites is thus of critical importance. Although most prominent Web sites are created by professional design firms, many smaller sites are built by people with little design experience or training. As a consequence, Web sites with local reach, such as those belonging to nonprofits and small businesses, often hav