Website Design - Usability
By Webzuniverse Dot Com
Usability for websites is about designing for ease of use and accessibility. This is achieved through simplicity, consistency and clarity. Websites that follow these principles are generally more successful than those that don't.
Broken down into more specific goals, usability for websites has the following objectives:
Shortening the time to accomplish tasks.
Reducing the number of mistakes made.
Reducing learning time.
Improving people's satisfaction with a system.
Some of the benefits of planning usability into your design include:
Users who are better able to use, and hence more attracted to, your website.
Increased success for users who want to perform tasks like contacting you or making a purchase - "if the user cannot find a product, then he or she will not buy it" (Source: Jakob Nielsen).
Reduced development costs over the long term, compared to poorly designed sites that have to be fixed later.
Reduced training and support costs.
More return business.
Extensive testing in usability for websites has allowed usability experts to identify trends in the way people use websites, which have many implications for how sites should be built.
The most likely reason visitors will enter your site is to find useful information. Therefore useful and relevant content should be provided in as accessible a manner as possible.
On individual pages, you can help your audience find relevant information by:
Devoting most of the space on your web pages to useful content.
Keeping pages concise and to the point.
Having large, easy to read text that stands out well from the background.
Placing the most important and useful information at the top of the page.
Providing descriptive headings and sub-headings.
Making this information easier to find on your site as a whole involves creating a sensible navigation system and site structure. Instead of fancy or unusual systems, Internet users prefer standard navigational methods that follow conventions established on the majority of sites. Information should also be arranged in a way that will make sense to your visitors.
You'll attract the most visitors if you make your site accessible for everyone, not just those who have the best equipment, happen to live close to you and have the fastest Internet connection.
Speed is the single largest barrier to accessibility on the Internet. People find it frustrating to wait for pages to load and often abandon a page that takes too long. So it's vitally important to keep graphics small and make sure your site is hosted on a server with a good connection to the Internet.
By keeping your website design relatively simple and flexible, you can reach large numbers of people who have non-standard equipment, and ensure that your site can be seen on anything from a cellphone screen to a huge monitor.
Writing for websites is another area in which accessibility should be taken into account. As most readers scan websites rather than read them word by word, it makes sense to allow for this in your writing - through brevity, simple language and clear formatting.
This will also make it easier for some of the more than 50% of users who don't speak English as a home language to understand your site. Other ways of doing this are obviously to translate your website and not have country-specific references and metaphors.
These are just some of the usability for websites issues encountered in web design, but your users should be considered throughout the website design process.
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