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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Thanks to the Internet and social networking, customers have more input than ever before into a company’s intangible valuation. Marketing and brand management are no longer done in a vacuum with a company broadcasting how it thinks customers should feel about its products. Customers are talking directly to each other about companies and products. Word of mouth marketing is trusted much more than anything a company says about itself. Therefore, how customers feel about a company (customer satisfaction) is an important measure of a company’s intangible valuation.
Creating great experiences comes from listening, respecting and getting to know your customers. Think about a satisfying purchase experience you’ve had recently. You probably had some personal interaction with the company, they listened and were helpful in guiding your purchase decision. You felt like they really understood your needs and what you were trying to do. Many of us no longer have in-person interactions with our customers, but we can still use social media to accomplish many of the same touchpoints.
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.
Yesterday Jason Falls over at Social Media Explorer wrote a post about 
Succeed at managing your customers expectation and you can never fail. Fail to manage your customers expectations and you can never succeed. ~ me
This is the question that every business asks themselves (or should) – What do our customers not know? It is vitally important to know the answer to this question because that is the very information you need to have on your website and in your brochures. Potential Customers come to your website to get the answer to their questions.
After dropping my daughter off at school this morning, I stopped by the local bagel shop.
When was the last time you went to a website looking for some information about a product or service? Did they have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)? Was the information you were looking for actually there? A lot of times FAQs are only marketing driven – trying to cover any doubts a customer may have about purchasing a product. But there is a real opportunity to provide useful information for your customers by providing answers to questions they actually ask frequently.
You’ve heard it before – content is king. Well without regularly updated useful content your business website will stagnate. It’s the end of the year and a good time to reflect on how you’re using your website and the Internet to further your business goals. Take a few minutes to think about how you can use content to help your customers and further your goals. The good news is that content strategy can be cheap (in dollars) to implement and can provide excellent returns on investment (helping you reach your goals). Here are some questions to consider in your content strategy:
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