Usability and Design

October 28, 2009

usability

OK. I can hear you saying, "Hmmmmmm what is usability? Another mumbo-jumbo designer-y term". Well, yeah, it is. BUT, this is the most important aspect of designing a website.

Usability covers how users will navigate your site, view your content, and access each page of your site. All of this can influence a user to do business with you, or not. I am sure we have all been on websites that are not clear on how to contact, make a purchase, or access relevant information buried within it. Well, most of us will click out of a site that is disorganized and presents too much information up front. Please view the wiki post on website usability and see for yourself.

The first thing to think of when preparing to design your site is making sure that the interface is clean, simple, and familiar to the user. Meaning, let's keep the navigation where people are used to navigating a website. This is usually on the top of your page, or to the left. Trying to make a splash by doing funky navigation placement, or making the navigation hard to read or understand, is a going to get people clicking out of your site faster than the speed of light.

The next part of website usability you should think of is what do you want to tell the user in the first three seconds that they are on your site? Who you are? What you do? What are your featured products? This is easy. Keep a large area on your homepage, that would contain enticing graphics, and a small amount of text that would tell people who you are, what kind of products you sell, etc.... This is where you need to make the most of the short amount of time you have to hook the user. Take a look at this great example. You have enticing graphics, a short bulleted section that tells you what the product is. Plain, simple and effective communication.

When designing a site, especially your homepage, less is more. The purpose of your homepage is to give a quick overview of your business, and get people to stick around. The last thing that makes an effective homepage would be to fill this space with every product you have, your life story, every blog post you have ever written, etc...... You need to tell the user in a short, concise manner what makes you better, and how you will solve their problems. You don't need to tell them your life story, or that you named your business after your cat. Keep in mind, you are not designing your website for you, you are designing it for customers coming to your website that want to do business with someone in your industry. Do not use terms like "welcome to our website". What does this say about you? Nothing at all. Use that space to create compelling copy in conjunction with subtle graphics to tell them who you are and what you do.

Another thing to keep in mind is that through the massive usage of the web in the past 10 or so years, people (and their eyes) are trained to look for things in certain places. Take a look at this pic.

google eye tracking

This pic shows how eyes navigate throughout a google search results page. As you can see, that upper left area is the hottest area. Well, this is why logos are usually placed there, with nav to the right of that. You also have an opportunity to showcase services, products, or relevant and concise information under that.

What this really shows is that there is a formula for presenting your business online. As cool and interesting as it might be to play with this formula, it will not give easy functionality, and will prevent the user from consuming your content. When it comes to the web, less is much much more.

Some things to consider:

  • Keep your copy to a minimum
  • Do not use busy graphics
  • Keep your homepage easily to scan
  • Keep content readable (use bold and italic fonts sparingly)
  • Include your tagline on your homepage
  • Make your homepage simple and "digestible" in 5 seconds
  • Contacting you should be easy
  • Nav should be simple, consistent and easy to find
  • Make every page consistent

This is just a small overview of usability. I could carry on for hours about this. BUT, that's NOT good usability.

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