Download Usability

We have heard of Universal usability, and then somebody talked of Link Usability as well.

Let's talk a little about Download (Actually content on the download page) Usability.

Picture this: You are at a website to download something. You have absolutely no idea around how heavy is the download going to be. When you were planning to fit the application on a floppy, it turns out to be a heavy 65+ MB download.

How can we fix this? Additional auxilliary content (this counts for content usability) needs to be added which declares the size and type of the file coming down to the user's system. That'll definitely help in deciding the portability of the file and what kind of media would the user require, if he plans to move it elsewhere.

Now, Does that look tough?

Technorati tags: usability, download, download+usability, User+Experience, design, patterns, content+design