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Thursday, January 3, 2013

Usability: An Ongoing Part of the Website Design Process

A website is intuitive only if it behaves in a predictable manner, and it can only do that if the designer of your website anticipates what assumptions site visitors will make about how your website functions.

The good news is that visitors already have helpful expectations of how your website functions. They will expect a mouse click to take them to information they are looking for, they will expect icons they've seen on other sites to behave in a similar fashion on your site.

Here are a few important things to consider to make your site more user-friendly:

Remove Obstacles
Allow site visitors to directly interact with content and provide "express routes" to additional information they are looking for.

Minimize Effort
You can make life easier for visitors to your website by keeping related links close together and by placing frequently used links in a prominent position on your page.

Be Explicit
Make content on your site that is clickable obvious to the visitor and try and use conventional names for  navigational elements. If you cannot think of a better way to say "About Us" then don't even try. These types of conventions work because people are familiar with them.

Be Flexible
Visitors will expect you to provide shortcuts to content so they can skip the information that is not of interest to them. If you have video or sound on your site, make it easy to quit or shut off. People want to feel like they are in control when they are surfing the web, so allow them to make their own choices.

Be Forgiving
Most visitors to your site do not choose the best option, they choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing. While visitors often play the guessing game when searching for information, don't make it difficult for them if they change their minds, use breadcrumbs and/or omnipresent navigation to allow them to find their way around your site.

Usability is not a step in the website design process—it's not something you do only once and never think about it again. It's an ongoing part of the design process.
Posted by kathleen sullivan at 3:41 PM
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