Usability.gov

Usability.gov

Intended audience:

• Students, professionals, and government officials in the information technology fields,
  
• web designers and their clients,
  
• corporate marketing teams, and
  
• anyone who needs the resources to make their website "user-friendly" by employing best practices of usability.
  

Usefulness of Content:

The content is very useful. The site includes a step-by-step "Usability" guide that describes the questions and methods that should be taken into consideration at every step in the usability design. There are also sections on topics in usability - mostly made up of shorter, informative articles with many links to other topic pages on the site. Some of the links connect you to other helpful resources online (such as a Dictionary at usabilityfirst.com and whitehouse.gov). There's also a section with updates, newsletters, and notification about usability training and courses, local events, and meetings and conferences. All in all, this is not a website with a lot of fluff - it's just pure resources for a wide variety of users interested all aspects usability.

Consistency of design:

I think the design of this website is really attractive - the four colors that make up their logo are pleasing to the eye and are used tastefully throughout the site. The only other tones on the site are lighter shades of the four basic colors, so that aspect is very consistent. The colors are really the only thing that stops this website from being text only, so it is important that the header does not change one bit as you navigate around the website.

Ease of navigation:

As you might guess from a website whose banner reads, "Your guide for developing usable and useful Web sites," they've made it pretty darn easy to get around. So I really just have a couple of tiny bones to pick with the way the content within each usability topic is displayed. They break the topic up into overarching questions that link to a series of more specific questions (which are displayed below the larger question) and answers. I don't like that the broader questions are linked, but the more specific questions are not linked until you actually click on the larger topic. In other words, while you can browse the topic sections for specific questions you'd like an answer to, you cannot link directly to that question until you've selected the broader topic. I think if they had made the more specific questions links, it would save some users an extra step.
My other bone to pick involves the opposite scenario with the topics; if you want to read every section in a topic straight through, you'll have to go back each time to the topic section list and click on the next subject. They could have solved this by placing a link to the next section at the bottom of each page.
Finally, since there are so many links on the page, it's easy to lose track of where you were. Therefore, it is a little frustrating that there is no sidebar to remind you where you are, and where you started from. So you end up pressing the back button a bunch of times to get around, which is really not efficient at all. A sidebar that simply listed each step in the guide and each of the usability topics would have made the site easier to navigate.