9 Website Usability Tips and Resources

The right time to ask this question is BEFORE you even put pen to paper to create your first draft or wireframe of your website.

However once your site is live, it’s important to continue to test for usability.

Website usability is a critical component of your success as a web marketer. If your users can’t easily take the actions you want them to, you could be missing out on more than just lost sales. When users find your site easy and perhaps even fun to use they are more likely to tell others about it, and generate more traffic.

So how usable is your website?

How quickly and easily can your website users find what they need?

I’ve put together a list of resources below to help you assess this very important question.

How usable is your website?

9 Website Usability Tips and Resources

1. First it’s vital that you know exactly what you want your “ideal” website user to be doing when they come to your page. It’s a good idea to map this out ie: when a new visitor comes to my webpage I want them to see ___________and do ______.

2. Excellent navigation is key for web usability. Good navigation allows the user to answer 3 questions : Where am I? Where have I been? Where can I go?

“Breadcrumbs” are an excellent way to achieve this. Breadcrumbs are text linked indicators of your journey to pages within your website.  eg: home FAQ   How much is the program? could be the bread crumb trail to a “How much is the program?” page.

3. Your navigation needs to be clear and consistent in its look, feel  and location. You can achieve this by using templates. There are many places you can source quality free templates such as oswd.org and opendesigns.org

4. A site map is an important feature of a usable website. A site that allows you to quickly generate a free sitemap is: xml-sitemaps.com

5. It’s important to be able to track and assess the actions your users are taking, to determine how useable your website is. This is made possible by software scripts such as those found at crazyegg.com you can access a free 30 day trial of their visual heat maps on you webpage users activities.

6. An opensource (free) alternative for heat maps can be found at labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html Clickheat allows you to see hot and cold click zones on your pages.

7. wave.webaim.org is a free web accessibility evaluation tool providing an on-page view of accessibility with embedded icons rather than complex technical reports. The entire webaim.org site provides a wealth of information and training in web accessibility.

8. usabilla.com offers a  5 minute, 5 step process that gives feedback at every stage of your design process
a. create a test start
b. select the pages you want to show your users
c. select questions for your pages
d. Invite your users to participate
e. Feedback analysis and statistics

9. No list on how useable is your website would be complete without a reference to the founding father of web usability Jakob Nielsen. Useit.com This is definitely not a site for those who like pretty graphics but for purists and researchers on the background on web usability. Information on one of his books “Homepage Usability 50 websites deconstructed” can be found at useit.com/homepageusability