What is Website Usability?
When you create a website, you're not creating it just for yourself (well, usually not!), or even necessarily for people just like you. You want your information to be easily available to anyone who visits your site. You need to create a user-friendly website.
Of course, you will want your site to be accessible by everyone, despite their differences / disabilities. This is discussed separately. But I'm focusing here on making your website easy to use! You generally cannot stand next to your website visitor and guide them through every click they make - nor would you want to. By making your website navigation confusing, and hiding your valuable information (and maybe products too), who are you benefiting?
I mention Steve Krug's book, "Don't Make Me Think", later on, but its title is an excellent starting point for this article. The Internet is an extremely immediate medium. If you tax your website visitor, and expect him or her to jump through hoops - or even just to click more than three times - to get what he/she wants, that visitor will happily click away to another website that doesn't expect so much. There is always another option waiting.
It is sometimes difficult for small business entrepreneurs to evaluate their own sites for web usability, and we can't all afford to hire website testers and focus groups, so for the rest of us, keep these basic pointers in mind:
1. Use clear navigation. Label your links - don't hide them behind obscure graphics and meaningless rollovers. I like rollovers - but they mustn't hide the link! Don't make your visitor mouse over something just to see what it does.
2. Make buttons look like buttons. And don't underline something if it's not a hyperlink.
3. Have your main navigation in one place. Website visitors are used to having menus on the left, or at the top. If you put your menus on the right, then leave the left column alone - don't clutter it with confusing links.
4. Have a "home" link on every page. If you have a logo, place it in the top left corner, or maybe the top center, along with your website title. Make those clickable - and link them back to your home page. This is what users expect.
5. Don't expect that everyone has unlimited bandwidth and all the latest plugins.
6. Use splash pages (graphical intro pages without much content) sparingly, and only in certain website industries. If you're in doubt, then don't have one.
And when you look at your own website, think critically - did I have to think about this? Or was the next choice in navigation an obvious one?
Further Reading
Jakob Nielsen is the guru on usability and web design: www.useit.com. His website is graphically bare, but yet it is highly functional and imparts its information without distraction - a good lesson to us all.
A fantastic book about web usability is Steve Krug's "Dont Make Me Think: A commonsense approach to web usability". Believe me - it will make you think! And the title is an excellent mantra - always remember, if your website visitor has to think too much , he/she will click away to somewhere else.