Usability - Some suggestions

Usability is an important quality property that every website must have. Success of your online business mostly depends on how usable your website is.When a website is usable, your visitor will be happy. A happy visitor is always good for your online business. If your visitor or prospective customer finds your website to difficult to use, then they will leave your site. There is a strong possibility they may say this bad experience to their friends. So try to give your user best possible experience. Remember this

USABILITY = EASY OF USE

In this article I will tell some of the usability rules that are important to make a website usable to delight the user. Here they are:

MAKE EVERY PAGE SELF-EVIDENT

Don't make your visitor think when using your website. More your visitor thinks on how to do things in your website, more confused they will be. They do not have much time to do this. Design your website in such a way that it is self-explanatory. Your visitor should be able to figure it out about the purpose of the website without thinking much. This is the first lesson I have got while reading Steve Krug's book DON'T MAKE ME THINK .

PROVIDE SCANNABLE TEXT

Think about yourself. How you read newspapers, magazines and books. You look for the words that are interesting to you. You don't read line by line until you see something really important and interesting to you. Same thing is applicable to website. Your visitor will scan the pages. So you need to provide scannable text in your pages. Here are the tips given by Jacob Neilsen in this article How Users Read on the Web that you can use:

• by highlighting keywords
• by providing meaningful sub-headings
• bulleted lists
• one idea per paragraph
• the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion 
• half the word count (or less) than conventional writing  

A CLEAR VISUAL HIERARCHY IS IMPORTANT

When a page does not have a clear visual hierarchy, it forces a user to treat everything in that page equally. It slows down the user's thinking process. Defining the relationship between the things on the page is crucial to provide the visitors important visual cues that they are looking for. This is how we can do this:

• the most important heading should be larger, bolder and in distinct color. It should be at the top of the page. For example: you can use <h1> html tag for the most important heading. For less important you can use <h2> or may be <h3>
• group the things together that are similar, place them under a heading and display them in a similar visual style
• if you want to display a thing that is part of a collection then nest them visually to show what's part of what 

EACH PAGE SHOULD HAVE CLEARLY DEFINED AREAS

Diving a page into clearly defined areas help your user to decide quickly which she or he should focus on and which areas can be ignored safely. When you have clearly defined areas in your web page, you can communicate with your user effectively.

MAKE THE CONTENT BRIEF, SHORT & TO THE POINT

Benefits of doing this:

• the noise level of the page will be reduced
• it makes the useful content more prominent
• it makes the pages shorter

Moreover do you really think that your user has enough time to read a huge page. Give them the time to do other important things. Your user will be happy.

PROVIDE CLEAR, SIMPLE & CONSISTENT NAVIGATION

A website's navigation helps user to find and access information effectively. It also tells the user where they are. Navigation reveals the most important content of site. A good navigation system plays a key role to build the trust of the user. Things to remember:

• place the navigation in a standard place to locate them quickly 
• standardize its appearance to make it easily distinguishable from other things in the page
• the navigation should appear in the same place on every page with a consistent look
• group items in the navigation area so that similar items are next to each other
• your navigation must have a link or button that will take the user to the site's Home page
• provide the feedback to let users know where they are. It can be done by providing path and hierarchy information ("breadcrumbs"), matching link's text with the page heading, changing the color of the link that has been clicked.

PAGE NAME

Each page must have a name. Place the page name in the right place Make the page name prominent with the combination of position, size, color and typeface. Page name needs to be matched with what the user clicks.

MAKE THE PAGE LOAD FAST

No one likes a slow page. Fast loading pages improve user experience. Most of the page load time is spent on separate HTTP requests for images, javascripts and stylesheets. For example: do you need separate CSS files or one file is enough? Multiple CSS files means multiple HTTP requests. If you can accommodate few more bytes then try to have the CSS rules in the same files. There are other ways to improve the performance that I will tell you in separate article.

USABILITY TEST

If you don't do it then do it now. Make it top priority task. Start testing early and test often. Three to five users are enough to do the testing. Let them use the site and you observe how well they are using it. There are many guidelines on how to conduct the test but I like the process outline by Steve Krug in his DON'T MAKE ME THINK book.

CONCLUSION

Usability is nothing but to make sure that something works well. When thing works well, it makes the visitor happy. There is strong possibility this happy visitor can become your customer and generate more revenue for your business.