In the digital age, website usability and creating a compelling user experience is now a commodity.
If I’m on a website that’s poorly designed and hard to navigate — I’ll usually leave. Most consumers today don’t have time to spend, and the slightest inconvenience gives them a reason to search elsewhere.
It’s important to leave a lasting first impression on your visitors by building experiences that go beyond a dull, usable website. Usability is still important, but it’s vital to pair it with a great user experience.
Usability = User-Centered Design. It’s crucial to focus the website’s design and development efforts around the potential user — this gives you a better understanding of who they are, how they’ll interact, and what their goals and requirements are for you to create the most efficient and easy to use website.
1. Accessibility and Availability
The most critical component of usability is the accessibility and availability of your site. When web pages take too long to load, or visitors can’t access the website — it becomes useless.
I’m sure most of you, including myself, have encountered something like this before. Not only is it annoying, but many time I’ve taken my business elsewhere. Point is: if your website is consistently inaccessible or unavailable, you’ll loose out on customers and revenue.
Here are a few tips to ensure you’re on top of accessibility and availability:
· Responsive design: With an increase in mobile usage over the years, making sure that your website is fluid with different screen sizes is important. Google recently turned to mobile-first indexing which ultimately means they’ll be using mobile versions of your content when indexing and ranking your site.
· Good hosting: Invest in high-quality hosting. I can’t stress this enough, using a web host that has little to no downtime is an important factor for your website’s usability. Don’t go for the cheaper option, find a reputable host that prides themselves on good service.
· Fix broken links: Constantly scan through your website and fix any broken links you come across. Using a SEO tool like SEMrush or Moz Pro help streamline this process by finding them for you.
2. Website Transparency
Another is transparency, the last thing you want is to confuse your visitors.
Overcrowding your website with content will not only distract them from their primary goal but will also leave them unhappy if they cannot easily find what they’re looking for. Either way, your website will not be viewed as user-friendly and visitors may never come back.
Typically, people will visit your site with a specific goal in mind. As the website owner, it’s your job to help them achieve this as soon as possible. The faster you get them the answers they need, the more positive their experience with your website will be.
Here are a few tips for you to achieve a transparent and usable design:
· Consistency: Providing visitors a consistent experience throughout your website helps them efficiently navigate pages and feel more comfortable.
· Minimalism: A little goes a long way. Focus on the important elements and avoid distracting your visitors with content overload.
· Familiarity: Apply what people are familiar with. Trying to be unique from your competitors is important but introducing new website concepts poses a website usability risk.
· Assistance: Show users how they can maximize their time on your site. Don’t expect them to explore on their own, guide them through your site and show them what you can offer.
3. Learn-ability
Learn-ability is the key to long-term usability.
I appreciate intuitive design, every web development project I’ve worked on is backed by this. The importance of creating intuitive website interfaces is that visitors don’t need instructions to figure it out. A major component is leveraging what people already know or creating something that is easy to learn.
Today, the world relies on the internet — people have trained themselves to recognize different navigation patterns for unique web designs. For example, visitors want to see navigation menus at the top of the web page and drop down menus should appear when hovering over it. The point here is not to reinvent the wheel, follow standard conventions that visiting users are familiar with.
Website Usability Means LOTS Of Testing
Creating a site with good usability isn’t something you can achieve overnight.
It takes time and patience to get it right, it’s amazing how many things you can make better on your website just by watching how people use it.
In the end, great website usability depends on accessibility, availability, transparency and learn-ability for visitors — while continuously testing and refining the user experience.
