Usability is the science of making things easier to use. Usability is especially important to websites since visitors can easily and quickly go somewhere else. Try these tips to make your website easier to use and help your visitors find what they’re looking for.
- Search in the upper right – Especially for large sites, make it as easy as possible for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
- Consistent menus – generally on the left or top of the site. Visitors should be able to navigate wherever they want and get a feel for the site structure.
- Include a home link – Visitors may want to get back to the homepage easily.
- Contact page – with a business phone, address and email. It increases your reputation and makes it easy for potential customers to get in contact with you.
- Sized to fit – Fit into the minimum standards screen resolution of 1028×768 without scrolling horizontally.
- Easy to read – Use text colors with good contrast, size and easy to read fonts.
- One layout – If your site has a consistent layout throughout, it will make it easier for visitors to navigate and find information.
- Pleasing to the eye – Color scheme is important to your professional image and makes it easier to visitors to understand what you do, as well as navigate your site.
- Use white space – Don’t bunch things up. People need white space in order to scan and read your site.
- Speak normally – Overly technical text or too much hype makes reading difficult.
- Use bullet points and lists – when feasible to make it easy for visitors to scan your content.
- Move forward to the right – Submit, next, go, etc. buttons should always be on the right, cancel buttons on the left.
- Use Flash, rich media, video, audio, etc. sparingly – If you have a video page, great, but your whole site shouldn’t be in rich media or people without the plugins, on mobile devices, or using text browsers will not be able to see your content. Audio, Video, Flash and rich media should preferrably not play without the visitor clicking a button.
- Restrain movement – Animation, flashing and movement make it difficult for people to read and scan your website. Use for relevant informational purposes, not just as a gimmick or ad.
- Limit advertising – We all understand that advertising has a place and a purpose. If you choose to include advertising, keep it relevant, limit it to specific spots on your site, limit then number of ads and mark them clearly as advertising.
- Include a Sitemap – Sometimes it’s just easier to see a list of all the pages on a website. This helps search engines find all your content as well.
Do you have other tips to increase usability? We’d love to hear them in the comments…
(photo by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL @ Flickr CC)
Technorati tags: customer experience, customer-centric, experience centric, business, usability, design
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Traditional marketing focuses on product features and benefits. But your customers are more interested in the experiences they can have with your products. Usually when a customer decides to purchase a product it’s not because of the features it offers, it’s because of what they can do with the product. For example, we purchased a flat screen HDTV not because of the number of pixels or brightness or refresh rate, but because it looks awesome when you’re watching a movie or sporting event. The experience we’re interested in is how the picture looks when we’re watching TV… the features of the TV just help fulfill that particular experience.
Your customers know what they want – or at least what they don’t want. They have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t and what types of features they’d like to see in a particular product. Usually companies base their product offerings on research conducted on focus groups or small groups of customers. But the power of the Internet allows companies to communicate with a much larger percentage of their customers (at least for most products).