​

1. Web Design: A Key Factor for the Website Success
   Web Design: A Key Factor for the Website Success is an interesting article because researchers conducted this study from the viewpoint of the user's demands/needs and not the website's creators. The study's goal was to improve the interaction between the company (website) and the customer (user). This study concludes that consumer's behavior and perceptions are directly correlated to a properly designed website. Proper website design is crucial for building the customer database, repeat customers, and customer satisfaction. Ease of navigation throughout the website was the number one recommendation of this study (although there are many others(Flavian et al., 2009).
    

2. A Literature Review: Website Design and User Engagement
   This study aimed to outline a set of specific elements (a checklist) for designing an effective website and mobile applications. The goal was to predict user engagement with a website. They define seven critical elements based on previous research and outline and describe them in an excellent table for reference. The elements included along with their percentages in the reviewed studies are navigation (62.86%), graphical representation (60%), organization (42.86%), content utility (37.14%), purpose (31.43%), simplicity and readability (31.43%).  Researchers did not include anything falling under the 30% threshold in the list of essential elements (Garett et al., 2016).
    

3. The Relevance of Web Design for the Website Success: A heuristic analysis
   This study looked at the success and failure or web design and focused on successful interfaces that generated positive consumer responses. They compared the success/failure of two websites (amazon.com and easyjet.com) to determine what factors made one successful over the other. They did this by using a small set of "evaluators" who looked through the interfaces and their usability. They identified four key factors to the success of the website: The navigation, a comprehensive internal search engine, fast page download speeds, and the visual (appealing) features (Ramadhan, 2009) .
    

4. Enhancing the Design of Web Navigation Systems: The Influence of User Disorientation on Engagement and Performance
   Disorientation on Engagement and Performance broached the topic of website user's "disorientation" due to faulty search engines or complicated web site navigation or design. Disorientation leads to user's frustration, loss of interest, loss of sales, and higher use of the "help" features on a website. Staying oriented while on a website is a recurring user issue. Reducing disorientation relieves the burden on the user and increases user engagement. User engagement is a crucial goal for system designs (Webster & Ahuja, 2006).
    

5. Eyes Don't Lie: Understanding Users' First Impressions on Website Design Using Eye-tracking
   This study intrigued me as it focused on eye-tracking – aka where a person focuses their attention on any given page. It mainly focused on first impressions of the website, and participants rated various websites on their impressions and emotional responses. The results revealed various methods that website design could improve to impact impressions and be more successful. The research results showed that the strongest impression (fixation) was on the website's main menu, thus suggesting that the navigation element is key (Sheng et al., 2013). 
    

6. The Effect of Color in Website Design: Searching for Medical Information Online
   This study observed the effects that color had on a user's website experience and their subsequent rating of that site's performance. The study created an experimental medical website (based on popular website models) and tested with 120 participants. Color, gender, and ratings interacted with each other in the users' experience. Duly noted was the negative affect the color red had on males (Nordeborn, 2013) .