The 411 on Lists -- Usability Guidelines, Ch. 12

While some of the following guidelines may seem like common knowledge, lists and the way they are designed can have dramatic impacts on the visual aesthetics and usability of your site.

The following is a summary from Chapter 12 on Lists:

Order Elements to Maximize User Performance
- First, decide whether or not there is an order for items that will facilitate the use of the site
- Ensure that the site is formatted to support that order, and that all pages follow the same order
- Keep in mind that it is the user's logic that should prevail rather than the designer's logic

Place Important Items at Top of the List
- Place a list's most important items at the top
- Users tend to stop scanning a list as soon as they see something relevant

Format Lists to Ease Scanning
- Make lists easy to scan and understand
- The use of meaningful labels, effective background colors, borders, and white space allow users to identify a set of items as a discrete list

Display Related Items in Lists
- Display a series of related items in a vertical list rather than as continuous text
- One study indicated that scanning a horizontal list takes users twenty percent longer than scanning a vertical list

Introduce Each List
- Provide an introductory heading (i.e., word or phrase) at the top of each list
- Allows users to readily understand the reason for having a list of items, and how the items relate to one another
- Users are able to use lists better when they include headings

Use Static Menus
- Use static menus to elicit the fastest possible speed when accessing menu items
- Should put the most frequently used menu items in the first few positions of a menu
- Adaptable menus -- where users are allowed to change the order of the items, elicits reasonably fast performance as well.
- However, one study found that users prefer having static menus, rather than adaptive menus

Start Numbered Items at One
- When items are numbered, start the numbering sequence at "one" rather than "zero"

Use Appropriate List Style
- Use bullet lists to present items of equal status or value
- Use numbered lists if a particular order to the items is warranted
- Bullet lists work best when the items do not contain an inherent sequence, order, or rank
- Numbered lists assign each item in the list an ascending number, making the order readily apparent
- Numbered lists are especially important when giving instructions

Capitalize First Letter of First Word in Lists
- Capitalize the first letter of only the first word of a list item, a list box item, check box labels, and radio button labels
- Only the first letter of the first word should be capitalized unless that item contains another word that would normally be capitalized