What is Usability ?

Website usability is a measure of how easy it is for visitors to reach the goals of the site.

Normally the goals of both the site owner and visitors are the same, so that a site can be tuned to function efficiently for the benefit of all. However, it is not easy for the owner to see things from the visitors' point of view, and, especially, it is not common for website builders to prioritise for easy visitor interaction.

The First Stage of Good Usability
A new website visitor may come to the site deliberately seeking the resources the site offers; or, during a search for similar resources; or by accident. In any event they should find the following to be true as soon as they land on the site's front page:

It must be immediately obvious exactly what the site does
It must be obvious within a few seconds how the visitor can proceed successfully
A variety of choices should be clearly presented, according to various possible motives the visitor may have
If the visitor lands on an inside page, a path to the front of the site must immediately be obvious
The site must immediately present itself as the ideal facility for the resources that the visitor needs
The site management must appear as the ideal people to do business with

This is the first stage of successful usability management for a website. You can see that it depends on certain things being immediately obvious, and though one or two of these factors also depend on another important factor, credibility, the visitor must be shown that (a) they are in the right place, and (b) exactly what they can do next.

The Second Stage of Good Usability
The second stage is that steps taken by the visitor should proceed smoothly. If a desired objective is seen, then reaching that objective must be easy. Options should be presented that accord with the visitor's likely objectives, together with other options that may be of interest. The path to these goals must be quick, and easily traversed.

The Third Stage of Good Usability
The third stage is achieving the goal and leaving the site as a satisfied customer. Whatever the original goal of the visitor, the site should try to satisfy it or at least present an attractive alternative, or a series of options that should work well as alternatives. The visitor may have no concrete aim, in which case they can be presented with options that may fulfil a need or be of interest.

The pinnacle of good usability is when a visitor notices nothing at all about the site, but achieves their goal and leaves with a feeling of speed and success. From the perspective of the site owner, if a visitor is converted to a customer - especially if they did not come directly to the site as a motivated purchaser - then the site has succeeded.

It is also worth remembering that most purchases, sign-ups, or orders - collectively known as conversions - do not take place on the first visit. Business is most often concluded on a subsequent visit. This means that a likeable site is even more important, as you must persuade the visitor to return, and to sign up on their next visit.

Ecommerce website usability

These direct-sales sites were notoriously visitor-unfriendly in the past, and many still are. This is because of the complex coding required, and the many stages a prospective buyer must pass through in order to buy.

There has been much progress here, though, in areas such as single-page checkouts, and buying without an account. It is important to choose an ecommerce application on its merits - and among its most important merits are usability. If your online store succeeds, then you might receive the ultimate accolade from a customer: "Your store is so much easier to use than the others". This testimonial is probably the hardest of all to achieve, and is reserved for the best-developed ecommerce websites.

How is good website usability achieved ?

There are many individual points to work on. Always keep in mind the 3 Stages outlined above - these provide the basic outline for your task. Here are some of the items you can look at:

First of all, you must choose a web application that is known for its good score in this area, and avoid those that are known to present difficulties - trying to fix a poor application is not successful.
Lay out the front page and landing pages clearly, with their main message very clearly presented.
Use the right colour scheme for the purpose.
Use text of minimum 10-point size (like this text), which equals 13px - any smaller and the poor readability impacts usability.
Use a modern sans-serif font onscreen that is known for its readability, such as Verdana (like this) or Tahoma. In compact areas Arial can be used.
Do not cram the content in, leave whitespace areas for easier reading and clarity.
Place the most important content 'above the fold', in the top part of the page.
Always have a prominent link to the front page at the top left.
Make sure there are no orphan pages - pages that have few or no links into them or ways out.
Ensure that sections such as support ticket areas have links back to the front of the site.
Never use scripting to display vital content, or that navigation depends on in any way - many people have scripting turned off in their browsers, for security. All scripting is now a negative, scripts need to run server-side and be minimised. Scripting has been used so heavily to attack both users and search engines, that what was once seen as the latest must-have add-on is now unwanted by users (who switch it off with NoScript etc) and hated by search engines (who penalise sites, whether they admit to doing so or not). Many web developers have not got the message on this and are still trying to add more scripting - but what is actually needed is to remove it.
Never use scripted menus, they must only ever be built using HTML / CSS. Redundant script can be added if necessary (this means fancy effects that have no core function in the navigation).
Minimise the number of moving images or effects on the page.
Keep advert and image rotation scripts running on the page to an absolute minimum - if the CPU load on an average computer browsing the page ever goes above 33%, the page is faulty.
Ensure that at every step, it is absolutely clear to any visitor what to do next.
Above all, try to envisage all the different reasons that a visitor might have for coming to your site, and provide a clear solution to their needs.

Finally: remember that just about every factor on a website - and frequently the motivations of owner and web designer - impacts usability, more often than not in a negative way. If you give in to these pressures then visitor usability suffers and so will your bottom line. For example web designers love tiny text of 9-point size, as it makes their job very much easier; but if you give in to their pressure to reduce text size, usability takes a massive hit.

And when usability suffers, so does your revenue.

Web Management

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