Best Practices

This guide is meant to help you build a clear, accessible research guide for the UMass Medical School. Here you can find style guidelines and best practices to help in creating and updating your guide.

This does not mean that you do not have creative or content control over your guides! These standards are in place to help create a consistent, accessible style across Lamar Soutter's many research guides.

The effects of cognitive load are real. Our users are already dealing with the increased cognitive load of graduate school. We can lower the burden on working memory by following a few design tips:

• All guides should follow the same basic design and layout.
• Terminology should be consistent between guides.
• Contact information should be placed in the same place on every page.
• Avoid having long lists of links (think “Best Bets” instead of every possibility).
• When in doubt, less is more.