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Website Usability Is Your Website Usable To Your Users

Website usability: is your website usable to your users?

Written by Joe on Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Website usability is all about your users

Website usability is about making your website easy to user for your users. Your users should be able to easily navigate through your website and find the information they are looking for. These are some broad guidelines for website usability:

Present the information to the user in a clear and concise way.
Give the correct choices to the users, in a very obvious way.
Remove any ambiguity regarding the consequences of an action e.g. clicking on delete/remove/purchase.
Emphasize important links and buttons

Here are 10 basic website usability factors for your website design & development.

1. Think like your users

Think of your website as your store. Customers are looking through your store, scanning the shelves and racks, to see if you have the product they are looking for. Web users do the same exact thing. They scan your website quickly to see if they can find the product they are looking for. If they see something they like, they will click a link to get more information, such as prices, colors, etc., then decide to buy or leave. Understanding this is key to laying out your website pages to draw the attention of your users.

2. Focus your users attention

Use text, images, and video to focus your users attention on the items you want them to focus on. Using formatted text, images, and video you can let the user know what is most important for them to see. The goal is to focus and guide the user to purchasing your product.

3. Don’t make your users think

According to the first law of Usability (Krug’s Law): A webpage should be obvious and self explanatory. You want to make your user experience as simple as possible. If a user has to ask questions about what something is, or what page they need to go to in order to find information, you could confuse them and end up losing out on business. If you display a product, it should only take 1-2 clicks to buy that product.

4. Make use of effective copy writing

Writing for the web is much different than writing for print. Users don't want to read long text articles with no images, links, or emphasized points. Writing for the web requires the use of emphasized text and images that enable the user the quickly scan the page and pick out the information they want to see,

5. K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid

Well written and designed content should your focus, rather than a pretty design. Focus on presenting important information to the user in a simple manner. Keep your designs simple and focus on highlighting the important information.

6. Give your text a break, use some white space

"White space" is areas on your web page that don't have any text or images. White space allows your users to take in more information and more easily understand and follow the flow of your text. If a website is too crammed, you can easily get lost between different texts. Give your text plenty of space and make it as easy as possible to for your users to read.

7. Use unique page titles with your keywords

Every webpage on your website should have a different title. Titles let the user know that they are on a seperate page and what that page is about. Including keywords that your webpage is focused on in your title is also an effective search engine optimization technique. Try to focus your writing and keywords for every page on a few select keywords.

8. Create scannable content

Use heading tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc., to separate the different sections of your content. Headings allow your users to easily scan over a page and find the information they are looking for. You can also include your keywords in the heading for search engine optimization, but don't over use your keywords. Nothing looks worse than seeing the same words and phrases over and over again.

9. Let your users search

Some users don't want to read through your website and look for the content they want. Providing a search feature gives your users a way to search for exactly what they are looking for. Giving your users what they need is what web usability is all about.

10. Broken links

Have you ever visited a website, tried to click what you though was a link and nothing happened? Broken links aren't good for anyone. Test your website frequently to ensure that all of your links work correctly and take you to the appropriate page.