LibGuides Best Practices

• Create a visual hierarchy. The top left corner is the “entry point” for reader’s eyes.  This area should include heavier elements, such as bold text or images.
   
• Users tend to read in an ‘f-shape pattern.”  Consider this when laying out important content. 
  Fig 1: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/

Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations.  These red and yellow areas are where you might considering including your most important info.
 

• Arrange content in a “front-load” format.  Include the most important information in your guide on the first page, and above the “fold” or the area where readers must scroll down to continue reading.
   
• Keep your guide clean and simple.  Don’t let lines of text span across the entire webpage.  Break up text in columns.  Paragraphs should be short, 5 or fewer sentences.  Keep your content clear and concise.
   
• Give your reader’s eyes a place to rest.  Including every relevant resource can be overwhelming for readers.  Select the most important resources and arrange them in a way that looks nice and signals to your readers what their eyes should do.
   
• Include a table of contents.  While studies have shown that the most important information should go on the first page, where readers spend the most time, consider also including a table of contents to give them an idea of the guide’s contents and how to proceed.
   
• Include a short description for your links.
   
• Guide, page and tab names should concisely and meaningfully summarize the content they cover.  This allows your user to skip information as they need to.

• Link through the University of Utah’s proxy when creating links.  This allows students to access full text without being prompted to login when they click through.