12 Website Usability Tips
Usability refers to the user experience about the effectiveness of a website to accomplish the desired tasks. It is about ease of use and good feelings. The perfect usability can only be achieved through iterative design and development. Learning from user experience, feedbacks, changing and refining are some of the ways it can be achieved. But there are some very common and perhaps basic aspects of designing a website which are being quite often ignored by the designers or otherwise overlooked. I've tried to list down few of them which I could remember:
Consistency (Look, Colors, Fonts, layout)
Provide a consistent look throughout the pages. Stick to one layout and do not switch colors of the most common elements which are font, buttons, forms and links. A sudden change in colors and font sizes for example can be very annoying and disturbing.
Navigation
A good navigation helps a lot in usability and browsing experience. Make sure that the navigation is well structured and things are easily accessible in no more than 3-4 clicks at any stage. As a good practice, provide a separate navigation inside each block of functionality, that will help the users navigate in the same section without having to go back to the homepage and coming back.
Animations (Flash, Animated Gifs)
Do not distract your users when they want to read something on the page or fill important information. If you are using animated GIFs or Flash on a page, it is better to have an animation that runs once and then stops. Continuous animations can cause distraction and annoyance.
What, Why and Where
Assuming that everyone knows everything or letting them find it out themselves can be a cause of displeasure to many users. Web is a media where users would often look at the page and try to pick the things at the first glance. At this point you need to tell them What, Why and Where, and you better do so in the beginning of the page. Put the important notes and guidelines on top of the page. It will particularly help the screen readers when they will access the page.
Size does matter
Make your pages well under the danger size. Do not make users wait for the pages to load. Remember one of the factors in Google success was its simple interface and faster results.
Consider Browser and Technology Limitations
Remember not all the users are the same. If not the oldest ones, at least you should take measures to accommodate the slightly old browser versions. Design for cross browsers. Sections requiring a plug-in to get displayed and script dependant content should be set up to accommodate users who don't have or don't want to install a particular plug-in or prefer to browse with scripts being turned off.
Frames and Pop-ups
Say no to Frames, not because of other common reasons but also because there are usability issues with it. Frames simply mess with the fundamental rules of web pages definitions. Frames can cause bookmark, search engine indexing and printing problems which makes your pages highly un-usable. Pop-up is another irritating factor. Pop-ups can distract the attention of users and cause them exasperation.
Page Titles
Keep your titles according to your page content. It will help users to identify them when they want to bookmark it or make a shortcut for it. Having one title throughout the website for all the pages is a bad practice.
Use Descriptive Headings
Heading are a great way of telling your users what they are going to read. By making the heading more descriptive, you are actually making it easier for them to know about the page and what it is about. Generally a descriptive heading have a much better impression than their short versions.
Link Titles
Links are probably what the websites are here for. It is normally not always appropriate to use descriptive text for links because of the layout and availability of space and that is where the titles come to rescue. Adding a descriptive title to your links will not only win you extra points in search engines but they are also an excellent tool to make the pages more usable. But make sure your titles are descriptive and not just a copy of what your link text is.
Image ALTs
Images are one of the elements of the web pages which can not be read by the screen readers, robots and often not self explanatory for their description to the users. Image ALTs are one great way of describing the image and its purpose. Images are normally used for two major purposes. Describing something or decorating it.
Registrations and Emails
I personally hate when I have to enter my email or get registered to access a webpage and I'm sure majority of users do the same. Do not require unnecessary entries from the users. Make their experience as friendly as possible, make the information as easily available to them as possible and avoid excessive questioning and surveys, unless they willingly want to do so.
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Web Design Tips
XML style self closing tags like <br/> and <hr/> are not recognised by older browsers like Netscape 4. By putting a space just before the closing slash e.g. <br /> will make them ignore the new syntax and still interpret the tag correctly. ( Posted by nick )
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