11 Essential Tips to Improve Your Website’s Usability
In today’s competitive age, a user-friendly and intuitive website has become a key to success for businesses and organizations. A well-designed website allows you to attract more visitors and offer a satisfying experience that compels them to spend more time on the site. To achieve such a feat, you need to prioritize good website usability.
What is Website Usability?
Website usability is a crucial aspect of website design that measures a website's ease of use. It represents a web page's user-friendliness and how simple it is to accomplish desired tasks. It often determines the likelihood of a site visitor completing a conversion action, such as requesting more information, making a purchase, or registering for a newsletter.
When users can navigate a website without thinking too much about the navigation process, it is referred to as good website usability. In this case, the information available on the website is clear, and the website performs well across different devices and browsers. The idea of web usability encompasses creating a seamless and engaging online experience for users.
It is about something other than how a website is created or what technology is implemented while developing it. Website usability is about how the website helps users complete their tasks and achieve certain goals, how they feel while using the website’s user interface, and how easy it is to create proficient website usage without depending on any external knowledge base.
Website usability is one of the major components of user experience design (UX design), which allows designers and developers to identify what users need and how a good user experience can lead to success. The concept of web usability includes several important aspects, such as utility, testing, and methodologies, to be effective.
Importance of Website Usability
While developing a website, webmasters and developers try their best to ensure it is user-friendly and easy to navigate and has all the modern features users look for in a website. For businesses, their websites are one of the main avenues for communication with their customers. Thus, they need to ensure their websites comply with their client requirements. In fact, a company’s online reputation is shaped by its website accessibility, convenience, relevance, simplicity, and credibility.
When you create sites with good usability, you speed up the conversion process. If you want your website visitors to perform a certain action, such as subscribing to your newsletter, buying your product or service, or downloading your e-book, you need to facilitate a smooth website experience for them. For better conversion rates, you should avoid long checkout processes and complicated forms. Also, you must ensure that the links work properly and the website loads within 0-2 seconds.
Clients who are satisfied with your website's usability generally stay loyal to your brand and do not switch to competitors. Website usability also has a major impact on your website's SEO. Apart from user satisfaction, good web usability ensures that users can easily explore and find what they are looking for on the site—search engines like Google track websites that are useful and assess them while ranking them. Since people spend more time on these websites, they usually receive higher rankings on the search engine results pages.
Key Principles of Website Usability
If you want your company website to succeed in today’s competitive environment, you must ensure that your website's usability is good. Here are the key principles that you should consider while designing a user-friendly website.
-
Accessibility
Your website should be easily accessible to everyone, even those with special needs. Since accessibility allows customers to explore your product, you must ensure that your website does not have any loading errors that may lead to dissatisfaction among your potential customers. For better accessibility, you need to:
- Find good hosting
- Check the website for broken links
- Remove broken links (if any)
Having a responsive website will ensure your website navigation is more accessible, especially on smaller devices (such as smartphones and tablets).
-
Clarity
If someone visits your website in search of something and cannot find it, they may never visit your site again. To prevent that, you need to fulfill the goals of your target audience. You should aim to provide your visitors with a consistent experience, let them reach their objectives, and guide them across your website. You also need to focus on the most crucial information, implement strategies that people already know, and structure your content accordingly. Ultimately, you need to ensure that your website is clear and easy to understand, even for first-time visitors.
-
Recognition
This principle describes how easy it is to learn the user interface of the website. Users should be able to get familiar with the interface of your website within a short period of time. Also, they should use it proficiently on their subsequent visits. According to this principle, the website should have simple, intuitive navigation and text labels, allowing users to recognize and locate what they are looking for and complete their desired actions on your website. The users should not have to spend too much time learning how to go through each web page or return to the homepage.
-
Credibility
Credibility is another crucial factor that influences how well the users trust your website’s content, products, or services. Having an impressive website design with complex animation and functionalities does not guarantee that your users will trust your website. You gradually earn the trust of your users when you consistently provide high-quality, relevant, precise, and up-to-date information. Trust signals such as security badges, genuine user reviews, and social media proof also help your website increase trust and credibility among users.
-
Relevance
This usability factor determines whether users will engage with your website. When users land on your site for the first time, they should find the content valuable and meaningful to fulfill certain goals, such as making a purchase, finding a specific piece of information, or completing a task within your website. Your website's content and functionalities should be relevant to the users’ needs and interests. It must deliver value and maintain the users’ engagement.
If your website does not follow these key website usability principles, people will start leaving and abandoning your website. This increases your website’s bounce rate and impacts other SEO metrics. You need to make sure that your website is accessible to the users, easy to understand and learn, trustworthy, and relevant. Keep the specific target audience or demographics in mind while developing the website.
11 Ways to Increase Usability and Boost SEO Rankings
Users generally spend more time on websites that are more functional. While you do need to follow the aforementioned usability principles, you also need to integrate usability best practices throughout the website design and development process. You can use website usability tests to check your website for what is going wrong and what needs to be fixed. Let’s check out some of the best practices for web usability that you must consider while designing and developing your site:
1# Optimize Your Layout For Better Results
Imagine finding your way through a jungle without any maps or stars to navigate by. Not very easy, isn’t it? A good organizational scheme is both easy on the eyes and simple to navigate, resulting in a better customer or user experience and, ultimately, greater gains for the website. A tool like CrazyEgg does just the trick by providing a heat map and showing you a suitable schema for where to put all the elements of your page.
As you may realize, a website's user experience relies heavily on its navigation. Users should be able to effortlessly locate the information they are looking for. You need to use menus, labels, and headings that are easy to understand and offer seamless navigation. Also, you must maintain consistency in your navigation menus across all pages so that users do not get confused while transitioning between different sections of the website.
2# Improve Site Speed by Deploying a CDN
Radware research conducted in 2013 explained how a 2-second delay in page load time during transactions made cart abandonment rates surge by 87%. In the age of blazing-fast optical fiber and wireless Internet, we wouldn’t expect anything less either. Besides, slow-loading page elements usually result in a reshuffling of content and multiple reloads, which can make a site, especially on mobile devices, downright unusable.
Some tweaks you can implement on your website will involve reducing file sizes through Gzip compression, optimizing image sizes (or progressively rendering for speed), and reducing script size through minification.
In addition, you can optimize cache headers to improve site loading performance for repeat visitors, which will also boost CDN performance since the frequency of retrieving static or cached content will be optimized. You can check out this guide by Incapsula to learn the best content caching options for your site, which will depend on your needs.
A cloud-based application delivery platform makes it possible for sites to:
- Distribute their data across globally positioned servers.
- Minimize bandwidth drainage on the main host.
- Improve the users’ access to your website.
Overall, it is a win-win for both companies, website providers, website hosts, and end users.
3# Use a Mobile Optimized Design
As the number of mobile users grows exponentially with the development of the smartphone industry, it is estimated by SmartInsights that time spent on mobile media by US users is 51% as compared to desktops (42%).
Naturally, the key to success with websites and blogs is through mobile-optimized and responsive web templates that give users the same visual and textual experience as they would get on more traditional platforms. If you’re working with WordPress, you might also check out some plugins or themes that can directly optimize the mobile site, depending on the platform.
4# Decrease the Load Time on Graphics
Many companies are now moving further away from the old-fashioned and heavily burdened scripts such as JavaScript, and there’s a reason for that. Heavy scripts not only take time to load but also increase bounce rates and make websites difficult to navigate, especially on smaller screens such as mobile phones.
Eliminate duplicate scripts, optimize images, minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and also check out Bravenet’s guide on incorporating graphics into a website without killing loading times. The best websites always have minimal scripts to make the user experience far more pleasurable, and this can be seen in Google’s new initiative on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) services, which cut down on the scripts to provide a faster and smoother user experience.
5# Utilize In-Image Advertising
The world of web marketing relies heavily on the use of images, but when you find out about in-image advertising, you’ll discover just how effective it can be, as well, especially compared with other forms of advertising. Simply put, in-image advertising is a way for advertisers to connect customers with certain compelling images and monetize those images in the process.
Apart from simple, static images, in-image ads can also feature cinematography, which is a hybrid of animated GIF-style and still photos.
Platforms like GumGum produce in-image ads that are integrated into content, which results in a more natural impression. In-image ads brighten up web pages and simultaneously offer a more seamless experience for users browsing the site as well by keeping text and images aggregated. LinkedIn Ads are a great example of in-image ads, as provided in the screenshot below:
6# Perform A/B Testing to Ensure What Works Best
A/B testing is a standard statistical analysis model proven to be effective in a wide range of situations and in various ventures. Publishers can implement A/B testing on their email marketing copy and just about anything in order to ensure that they get only the best versions of their website out to their customers and other users.
It’s a great way to subject two different sample sets of people to two different variants and find out what they respond to better. This takes out the guesswork in determining the more effective choices to get you the best results in terms of user experience.
7# Think Out Design Angles: Use Good Color Schemes, Fonts, and Design Elements
Visual impressions are a great factor in website responses.
- Color Schemes: Color schemes are based on fundamental principles of color psychology, but remember that these are bits of code, and the greater the complexity, the longer the loading time.
- Fonts: Depending on the website you’re using, choose fonts that go well with the personality of that site. A professional-looking font on a kids’ site may be disastrous, and vice versa. See how the graceful and classy Raleway sans serif font adds a sense of sophistication to Archie Wilkinson's website.
On the other side, this is not the font you’d want to use on the landing page of your accounting firm:
- Design Elements: Content and design elements like HD images and 3rd party widgets often take a long time to load and can be quite elaborate, distracting from the main theme of the page. Minimize them, or at least optimize the use so these are not obtrusive! Here’s some vital guidance.
8# Make Effective Use of White Space
Any designer worth his or her salt will tell you that white space has an enormous impact on user experiences. A clean design can often help impress others because of the impact that minimalist design makes. It is easier to scan for important text and images with effectively used white spaces that are left there just for that very purpose: making the site look more inviting.
White space helps break up content, making it easier to follow. It is also a fundamental aspect of user experience in design. It allows you to direct user’s attention to a specific webpage. The empty space surrounding content and certain elements helps capture the focus of the user and guide them through the interface. Apart from making the website easier to navigate, it also makes the information more comprehensible.
Web design tutorials on Envato Tuts+ can show you how to effectively utilize negative spaces to build upon the existing dynamics on your web page and significantly improve the user experience. However, it is important to note that whitespace alone cannot efficiently guide users’ attention. You need to employ several design techniques to establish a clear visual hierarchy that guides the user towards the most crucial piece of information.
9# Use Headings and Subheadings with Your Content
Headlines are significantly important if you want users to be attracted to your site! A witty headline can spark that curiosity and rouse one’s interest, whereas something mundane barely gets a look-over. Besides this, your headline should have a strong, positive message and already impart the message contained within the copy. Take your headline as your only chance to make a first impression, and you’ll see what we’re getting at. To test whether it’s a good headline, you can opt for a headline tester or analyzer like CoSchedule.
10# Use Effective Navigation
The navigation functionality is one of the most troubling things about most websites, especially when viewed on mobile browsers. With the importance of multi-level menu bars and sidebars confusing the entire site experience, it’s important to make information more accessible to users. At the User Testing blog, they’ve come up with a list of 37 menu usability resources to streamline the navigation bar and improve the site experience for the end user.
The goal of an intuitive navigation system for a website is to enable users to quickly move from point A to point B without spending excessive time figuring out what links they are clicking on. Structured navigation appropriate for the top, footer, and sidebar can boost user experience and user control without exploring the web pages in detail. Also, adding a search field or search function to your website allows users to search for particular keywords about your niche and get related results without spending too much time scanning the content.
11# Perform Usability Tests
Lastly, you need to perform website usability testing to evaluate your website’s ease of use and isolate the areas for improvement. You need to perform usability testing throughout the design and development process to confirm website efficiency and consistency. Some of the common web usability testing methods include:
- In-house Usability Testing: This method, conducted in person or on-site, involves gathering user feedback through surveys and questionnaires managed and observed by researchers. The information gathered concerns researchers’ satisfaction with the website, their perception of the site’s usability, and suggestions for improvements.
- Remote Usability Testing: This method focuses on user testing in a remote location using the internet. In this testing, participants stay inside their environment while receiving instructions from a tester or personnel managing their entire testing process. This also involves observing the user and tracking their experience during and after the test.
- Guerilla Testing: This method uses an informal feedback collection setup by presenting websites, products, or services to random users in an impromptu manner. It is done randomly, and testers approach people in public spaces and ask them for feedback on a service or product.
- Eye-Tracking Testing: In this method, testers monitor users’ eye movements while they interact with the website. This helps the testers identify which areas of the website attract users the most and which areas they may overlook.
- Tree Testing: Testers use this method to evaluate the hierarchy and findability of titles or subjects within a website. Here, users navigate a text-only version of the site’s navigation structure, identify potential usability issues, and suggest improvements.
Conclusion
Ultimately, by providing a better customer/user experience, you stand to gain greater SEO conversions and create a completely optimized website in the process. Websites with good usability have higher chances of achieving their goals, be it increasing organic traffic, boosting the conversion rate, or improving user engagement. Once you are done with the testing, you need to gather all the crucial details, analyze the data, and plan the best possible action to solve the usability issues on your website.