Website Usability, as the phrase suggests defines how effortless it is for someone to use your site.
Not just how it looks, but how simple it is to navigate from page to page; how easy it is to find what you want; how accessible it is to people with disabilities.
The bottom line for businesses is that if you are investing money in promoting, or selling your products and services online, unless they can find their way around your website, people won’t use it.
The good news is that following the efforts of web usability gurus, such as Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, usability is now an established area of website design, and any designer worth their salt, will have a good grasp of the latest trends.
However, to ensure you yourself know what’s important and what’s not, I have compiled here 7 top website usability tips, you can use to either access a web designer’s competence, or, to ensure your own efforts are compliant with expectations.
1. Make yourself clear!
As the title of Steve Krug’s usability book suggests, your website shouldn’t make people think to find out who you are, or what to do on the site. Every choice should be unambiguous, every page self-evident and self-explanatory. Buttons should be visible, have limited text, and be differentiated in a way that invites you to click on it, and not some other part of the page.
Your home page should be the simplest, with everything non essential removed. It should state clearly what you do and the purpose of the site, and offer a site promotion which is rotated periodically.
2. Understand that users don’t read web pages, they scan them…
…so make sure your text is clear, but make sure it’s short and to the point. As a rule of thumb, omit half of the words on each page, and then, especially on home pages, cut what’s left in half. Doing this will accommodate the majority of people who scan rather than read pages.
In addition make it clear what’s most important by creating headings in different font sizes, use white space to break up pages, and, please, please, please minimize or omit completely, sounds and other audible alerts.
3. Make persistent navigation clear.
Persistent navigation refers to navigation cues and buttons which appear on every page. These should include a way back to the home page, a search feature, as well as the key sections of the site such as about and contact.
Your navigation should answer these questions: What site is this?; What page am I on?; What are the major sections of this site?; What are my options at this level?; Where am I in the scheme of things – see point 4 below.
4. Use Breadcrumb Navigation.
Building on the knowledge that the back button on website browsers accounts for about 40 percent of clicks on every website, website designers are increasingly designing sites to include something called breadcrumb navigation.
The term comes from the story Hansel and Gretel where two children left a trail of breadcrumbs through the forest so they could find their way home. On websites, the ‘breadcrumbs’ are buttons which typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, to provide links back to each previous page visited.
5. There are no average users, so test and then test some more.
Don’t be in doubt test your site with real users. According to Jakob Nielsen the best way to test the usability of a website is:
- Get representative customers, not your friends or colleagues. Five is more than enough.
- Don’t let them fool around, ask them to perform realistic tasks; i.e avoid setting tasks which only prove what you want to hear, or giving them hints how to use the site.
- Shut up and let them do the talking.
6. Design pages where people place their attention.
Again according to recent research from Jakob Nielsen, web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. The remaining 1% of viewing time is spent to the right of the initially-visible 1,024 pixels, information only visible after horizontal scrolling.
Vertically, people look at information above the fold far more (80/20) than they do at information further down the page.
This tells you two things.
You should opt for vertical scrolling, because users allocate 20% of their attention past the fold in the vertical dimension but only 1% past the fold in the horizontal dimension.
However, you shouldn’t ignore the fold on vertical pages and create endless vertical pages, because people don’t have the attention span to scroll down pages forever. Place the key call to action above the fold, unless it’s a longer article, and where it’s best to repeat the call to action a number of times throughout the text.
7. If you are an artist or have a brand which trades on your creativity as a company, then feel free to break the rules…
…but only if that doesn’t compromise the business case for the site. If the site is a portfolio which will be seen by people other than other artists, and people with superior web skills, then stay within good usability guidelines.
If you found this website usability post useful, please share it by bookmarking it with the icons below. I would also love to read your comments, please add them to the comments section. Thank you very much for your time.
Great post. Very useful topic!
Good post but some more details are expected.