So I want to talk you through eight golden usability rules. These were developed by a very clever man, Coach Knight burn is an academic and an expert in usability design. And please go with me on this. It might seem quite technical, but there's some great great learnings off the back of this. And I'm going to try and make it as relevant to you as possible. So the first golden usability rule is consistency.

So what we mean by that is all your fonts, all the colors, all the graphics, all the content, including how you label stuff, how you phrase certain elements of your product, and business or consistency of everything needs to be absolutely spot on. And it's really the fundamentals of a great user experience. Second, usability Rule is about shortcuts. So if you've ever copied a link to the pasteboard, and then paste it back into a different place, that's a great example of a shortcut. It's made your life easier, and made the overall experience a lot more intuitive and rewarding for the customer. So in this example, to copy and link, but it might be other shortcuts, like saving a basket before you go browsing, anything that takes friction away from the user flow shortcuts are a great little surprise and delight moment for your user when they're on site.

The third point is giving good feedback. Now, I'm not sure if you can see this example. It's quite small on the screen, but this example is saying, hey, look, I found a new version to download. Would you like to download it these feedbacks from the system back to the user, give them feeling that they are almost in control. But this is a good experience. They're understanding where I am in the journey to giving good feedback to users, even when it's slightly negative.

So if they've put in the wrong credit card details, or if your customers are on a contact form, and they enter a mobile phone or a cell phone number that isn't quite right, then that's an example of feedback. So you can feed back in a nice and positive way. And you can use the tone of voice that you developed in your hooks to do that. And I've got some examples I'll show you. But giving your customers feedback in terms of where they are, is a great way to make them feel really involved in the user experience. Always keep informing your customers where they are.

Now in this example, I've used a brilliant brilliant piece from MailChimp. So if you've ever used MailChimp, and I think maybe Some of you have, when you set a campaign up to go live, it kind of rewards you and this lovely little graphic and says, whoa, you're in the queue, it will go out shortly. So what you're doing is every step of the way, you're kind of reinforcing where your user is on their journey, but also see it as an opportunity to reinforce the personality of your brand, or your product or your service. Conversely, we talked about this a little bit, but handle errors with care. Sometimes things happen, it might be that a page is down. It might be that the payment gateway is not working.

It might be your fault, it might be theirs, it doesn't matter. But again, if you handle errors in a charming way, is a great way to reinforce who you are and how important your customer is to your business. So handling errors often overlooked to this part, but great opportunity to improve the experience for your customer. So they're more to easily undo. So, if a customer has been on your website and they've done something, and perhaps it's a big thing, they've deleted an account or that baskets been removed or something like that, give them the option to undo it is a great way of acknowledging that people make mistakes equally, it's a good way of getting them to think about what it is that just done, just deleted their account, then, not only is this an opportunity to make them think twice, if they perhaps did it on a whim, but it's also from a sort of technical point of view.

It's a great way to get them to reverse what it is they've just done, give control. So the example you're looking at and you've had an iPhone, or an iOS device, and you'll you'll see this be served up on your screen quite often. But if there's a software update, which as you know, can take quite a long time to install and what the system is doing in this example saying, Hey look, it's up to you. You can install it now. You can do it in an hour. And I've seen also they can often say to you, I tell you what, we'll install it overnight.

So this is a great way of handing control over to the customer. So they're really, really driving the experience. Finally, don't overload people. Generally speaking from a cognitive point of view, we and that's humans can't process much more than five things at any one time as a lot going on in your customers head and presenting them with too many choices can easily overload and make them back off in the example I'm showing here, it's probably no surprise that at the bottom of the iPhone, if you've got one are only ever for menu items. And I think that's been deliberately designed that way. Apple a great at this type of thing, but it's acknowledging that it's a busy world out there, give your customers time, don't try and throw Too much at them at any one time.

So there you go. Those are the eight golden usability rules, some of them quite technical. But in the lesson later on, I'm going to sum up some of these and give you what I think are the most important ones to think about, because I completely understand that some of them are quite difficult and actually not possible with lots and lots of people's websites. So I hope you found that useful. If you're interested in finding out more. The gentleman's name is Ben Shneidman.

And if you google him, you'll find loads and loads of great stuff, loads of papers that he's written. And you'll really see how well thought out this framework really is. Okay. I hope the eight golden rules wasn't too much for you. It is quite technical. It's very scientific.

It's based on a huge amount of research, but I know there's some great stuff in there. You can use to improve your website and make the experience for your customer even better. So, before I finish this lesson, I wanted to give you three of my own web usability hints. And if you did nothing else, and it's a lot granted, but have a think about these three. The first one is consistency. And you heard it in the eight golden rules.

It is the basics, we must have this on our website as a sort of level one if you like. And as we said, it's consistency in fonts, and colors, and logos, but also in stuff like content, how you refer to your products and services, how they're labeled. Make sure all of that is consistent, and that will give you a great hygiene level for your website. Number two is patents Now, we've already seen the pattern. And that's the shape of the F. And it's like that, because generally speaking, users of all websites around the world, like things to be in a certain place, it's habitual. So generally speaking, the website logo is normally top left, the search bar is normally top right.

If there's an offer, or a call to action, or really important piece of content, it's probably on the right hand side at the end of the middle bar of the F. Now, websites don't have to be designed like that. It's just users are used to those elements being there. So if you move away from a pattern, which lots of people do, then that's absolutely fine, but just understand it might impact on your usability, but it's only one way to find out That's my third and final point. It's all about testing. Test the website for usability is the only way you'll ever find out. It's really easy.

You don't have to spend a lot of money. just invite five your friends around to your house, set your website up, give them some teas and coffees, make them comfortable. And watch them use your website, see where the cursor moves, watch how they interact with the elements on your website. It won't be simple, it probably won't be clean, but you'll have a great understanding of how your website actually works. I hope you found that useful. I really hope it wasn't too complicated.

But I know you're going to get a whole stack of great insights off the back of this particular lesson. Thanks and I'll see you in the next lesson.