What is Usability?
It’s important that your website be simple and easy to use, if not, your visitors will become frustrated and soon leave. Here are a few guidelines that we follow based on our research and experience:
The User Experience:
- Avoid using pop-ups.
Users hate annoying pop-ups windows, so we avoid them; but as always, there are exceptions. - Exclude Flash introductions.
Users need to get directly to your content. Flash animations are expected for entertainment sites, but for business, service related and information-driven websites, people won’t wait, they want to get to the valuable information waiting just behind the flash. - Present credible information.
Contact details (phone, location, and valid email address), article citations and links to credible sources should be easily found on the website; the lack of these does not add to your site’s credibility. - Pages should load as fast as possible.
Self explanatory. - Visited links should be colored as such.
Have you ever clicked on a link only to visit the same page you just read? Visited links within content should change color or show some indication to the user that the page was previously visited. - Readable sized fonts.
Depending on a user’s screen resolution and monitor size, users shouldn’t have to resize the screen’s text to read your content. The font should be at a readable size in the first place. - Websites that print well.
Websites are documents for screen use, but users will occasionally need to print your content; it should be printable, excluding all the unnecessary stuff like: sidebar advertisements, menus and upper navigation. This is easily done with a CSS print style sheet. - Interactive user feedback.
Users should get a Thank-you page when they submit a form; this will let them know the form was successfully received. There should be a message or graphic indicating how long a video will take to load and play.
Navigation:
- Link should use common names.
The main navigation should be understandable; we try to avoid phrases, unknown abbreviations or words that aren’t common. When the user clicks they should find what they expected. - Consistency.
The main navigation should be consistent and present on all pages and should not change. Menus are different from the navigation because they change depending on which section a visitor is located. Menus are secondary to navigation. - Content links should be descriptive.
Links within content should be descriptive rather than using the words “click here”. The HTML title=”" attribute should be used to describe the destination of the link if necessary. - Inline links.
Long pages should offer inline links to sections within the page, followed by another inline link to jump the user back to the page’s Table of Contents; this minimizes the scrolling the user would have to do without them – this is often seen on FAQs pages. - Current page highlighting.
Visitors should know what page they are on by the mark of a highlighted
menu or navigation link. - Content links should have underlines.
Links within paragraphs should use underlines to differentiate from normal content.
Content Structure:
- Scan-able Content
Content should be laid out for scan-ability, using headings, bold-text and bullet points. The length of text on each line shouldn’t be too long or too short – some say: just around 55 characters. Learn more about writing for websites »
Homepage:
- Have a Homepage.
All major services, links, news or anything of importance should be placed here. People need this page as a starting point and an introduction to your website. - About the site.
Users should have a clear understanding of what your website is all about; short paragraphs and taglines are very useful on the homepage.
Design:
- De-clutter with white space.
We use “white space”, so page elements like paragraphs, lists, navigation elements do not look cluttered. - Consistent alignment.
Elements should be aligned consistently throughout the website.
Graphics / Style / Colors:
- Background and Text.
The site should have a readable contrast between the background color and the text color. - Images.
Images should be sharp and not be pixelated; designers should not use HTML to fit large images into a webpage. The image should be optimized, cropped and resized, beforehand, to fit the webpage. Large HTML-resized images slow down load time.