Usability

Tips on making your website more usable...

Usability is a measure of how easy a website is to use. That is, can a standard visitor to the site find the information that they want to find on the site in a straightforward manner. If tasked with retrieving a certain piece of data or performing a task, will the user be able to perform it without getting confused, frustrated and giving up? These are the sort of questions that usability asks and tries to answer.

So, how do you find out how usable your website is? It is very hard to do this yourself as you will be so close to the site and know where everything is (and if you don't take it as a warning shot that the site is very hard to use if the owner doesn't know where to get what they want!)

User Feedback on Usability is Essential

The best way to find out is to get a series of typical users of your site, as broad a cross-section as possible, to try and perform certain tasks on the site and see what they find easy and hard to do. This will highlight potential weaknesses and problems with your site and help you find out ways to improve the navigation and way information and content is presented on your site.

What you need to do is come up with a list of tasks for the user to undertake. Some are simple, some more involved. You need to record if they completed the task successfully, and their comments on it - was it easy and simple, or was it involved? Did they make a few mistakes before finding or completing the said task?

Once all the tests are complete, the job of analysing all the information begins. Look for common problems and issues, then have a brainstorming meeting to work out the best way to resolve any problems that occurred.

There are many things that you can do to correct problems with website usability and make your site more usable.

Improving Website Usability

Clearly every site needs to be treated on an individual basis, but some common improvements that can be made are as follows:

- The content on a web page should be as clear and precise as possible. It should use accurate terms and speak in the language the customer understands. This means that you refer to your products by the names your customers would use, for instance. Many companies - particularly larger ones - accidentally use internal references or demarcations that the outside world will not use or understand.

- Have clear calls to action and navigation on your site. Make it obvious what is a link and what isn't a link. If you have a prominent image on a page that seems to be asking people to click it to go to the next page but it is not a link, for instance, the usability review stage above will show this.

- Consistency matters. If on one page you show a link as a bold, underlined piece of blue text then do the same on the next page. Using stylesheets can help you create a uniform approach across a site.

- Get the site structure right. This means that you have intuitive categories and headings and sub-headings, and that therefore users will be able to follow that logical structure to find what they want.

This means more work for you upfront, but makes it easier for the customer in the future. Don't just shove a hundred links on the homepage and let the user trawl through every single link. Rather structure and split your content into manageable categories.

- Breadcrumbs. On larger sites it is a good idea to have a small breadcrumb that shows the user where they are. For instance this might read category > sub-category > current page, with each other page being a link.

One useful test of how good your navigation is, is to ask your users how often they click the 'back' button. Ideally you would want them to be using on-site navigation to move around.

- Search facility. Opinion is divided on this one, with some people saying that a truly usable site does not need a search engine. However, with a larger site that has lots of content it is important to have a search facility as just due to sheer volume of information this may be the quickest method.

Also many users these days always have Google as their home page and are almost trained to look for a search box on entering a site and try this first. Only then if they can't find what they want do they try and look around to find the content they need before giving up and leaving.

If you have a search engine, try to rank results in order of relevance so that the results accurately reflect the most relevant content you have on that search. Include some tips on searching and if you have lots of content consider allowing the user to refine their search to certain categories.

Consider making matching words in the results bold so as they can see what their result brings up. It is a good idea to show them the title and first couple of lines of any pages that match their result so they can quickly scan to see if it is relevant to their needs.

- Sales processes. Usable and intuitive sales processes are essential if you want a healthy conversion of leads to sales. Make your sales processes easy to follow, with clear calls to action. Keep the steps short but do not have too many steps. Reduce all distractions during the sales process so that users do not click away to some special offer link or similar and forget to make the sale they were in the process of!

Indicate to users how many steps are in the sales process so they know what is still to be done, and ensure that they do not need to enter any information twice. If you are performing a hand-off for processing of details, try to get it branded consistently as sometimes the switch can put users off.

A lot of usability is about common sense, but many potential pitfalls with your site may not be obvious. This is why it is so important to get a range of users who have some or no experience with the site to perform a series of tasks so you can really understand just how usable your site is and look to resolve any problems.

If you want hints or tips on usability for your site, please get in touch with regard a usability review service for your website or to discuss how to find a suitable base of users to conduct a usability study and ideas on what to include in a usability questionnaire.

Usability

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Sep 6th 2006

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