Website usability
The usability of a website is defined by its user friendliness. There are many barriers that people face and even the most advanced users can struggle to buy goods from a website or find a particular resource.
What makes a website usable?
Logical layout
A website is based on a set of readable documents and as such they need to be laid out logically. Logic suggests keeping the title at the top, navigation grouped and consistently in one location, content in a column that the eyes fall upon when loading the page and a footer at the bottom.
This sounds obvious when read out here but there is so much room for variation that taking away these few simple rules means people have to learn a layout, that’s even before they have found the content they are after.
Readable content
If you have a lot of information to display, make it digestable. This could mean proper use of headers and paragraphs, fixed width content columns so the eyes can scan effectively, good contrast of text and a select choice of font that lends well to readability.
Making something readable involves serving the content to the user in a clear way, getting to the point of the page and highlighting specific areas of the content using appropriate headers.
Searchable content
This depends on the size of the website. If you correctly structure your web pages, the search engines will do half the job for you and send people to the right area on your website. This isn’t something you can rely on so offering effective searching to your content comes from a clear and well structured navigation system, ultimately a search facility that displays the results in a clear fashion.
If you summarise content into categories, make sure the categories are descriptive. This assists people in making a decision to view a category or not.
Generally, the internet is a medium for getting to resources quickly and this lowers patience. Why go against the internet by forcing people to watch intro’s, adverts, affiliates etc. There is too much online competition and loyalty is low so you’ll lose out in the long run.
Simple addressing
This cannot always be helped but ideally an address should be clear, readable and memorable. For example see the two web page addresses below.
- http://www.tn38.net/products/kettle/
- http://www.tn38.net/?pageid=4&product=16
Many database driven sites are rendered using the latter as a means of addressing. These don’t make for easy addresses to type, remember and bookmark. If the database model changes, you’ll need to capture the error when a page doesn’t load. Depending on the hosting server of your website, simple addressing can be achieved by using mod_rewrite, a system employed on this very website to make the address clearer.
Search engines also appear not to go too deep when indexing content that is dynamically addressed. Looking at the example above, the second address identifies products by their corresponding ID number, a number which could potentially be endless. A search engine will draw the line as to how much data it collects so make things easy for them, and every other consumer of your website.
How can TN38 Consulting help?
We can run many usability tests on your website and conduct surveys on your behalf. The last thing you want is someone to fill their shopping basket full of your products then not be able to locate the checkout. We offer a planning service that will create a usability wishlist and an auditing service to ensure the goals are met.
The aim is to identify weaknesses and address them to create a stronger, more usable website.
Contact TN38 Consulting to find out more.