Website Usability

In order to attain a higher listing within search engine results, it is immensely important to optimise your website for search engines.

In the context of websites, usability refers to how easily and quickly your website users can reach their goal on your website, whether it be downloading, subscribing, ordering online, contacting you or obtaining the information they're looking for.

The 'science' of usability of usability has therefore grown up around developing methods, tests processes and employing theories to try and achieve an efficient, effective website. Clarity, ease of use and not forcing the website visitor to use too much active 'thought' in achieving their goal are of great importance. Usability should be considered right from the first conception of a website, and should be a major consideration in all processes within the website. The purpose of the website should be the starting point i.e. what are the main goals? The answer to this should guide the usability decisions in the design of the website and its processes.

In very general terms, a website’s goal may be to make the information that a website provides exceed the 'noise' that is part of the website itself. The study of usability needs to take into account human psychological and physical factors.

Human Factors
Human needs should be at the centre of the development of a website, and there are many different factors at work within us generally, whether we are target users of the website or not, that need to be taken into account. Within our psychology, the effective use of a website to achieve a goal involves aspects of memory (and forgetting) - sensory, short term and long term memory. For example, the implications of this may be the use of standard colours and icons to facilitate recognition, and speedy navigation.

Human perception, and the organising tendencies therein, may lead us to consider attention-grabbing techniques in the web pages, a knowledge of various communications models, and the use of different colours, bold, underline, capital letters, different fonts and formatting. More physiological factors could also be taken into account in usability such as sight and visual limitations, hearing limitations (if sounds are required on the website).

Also, it's important to bear in mind the effects of how people interact with computers and software generally, and the need to create a confidence within the user of the website by making the environment appear uncluttered and uncomplicated with as little residual 'noise' and perceived difficulty as possible.

User Centred Design and Your Website
User Centred Design (UCD) is therefore a highly useful methodology of 'product development' because as the name suggests, it is centred around the user. A 'product' in this case means the website itself. UCD involves studying the interaction of real users with the website right from the beginning of its development, and using the feedback and design foresight to produce the maximum degree of usability in the finished website.

There are a number of tests that need to be carried out involving how target users interact with the website, as well as how the usability is affected by the use of different browsers, operating systems and connections.

Know Your Users
Whether developing the website from scratch, or modifying an existing website to improve the usability, you need to first know the answers to some apparently basic questions:

• What is the purpose of the website?
• What do you hope to provide with the website? i.e. technical support, information, a shop, investor relations.
• Who are the target audience and what are they like? The Stages For Usability Testing Knowing the purpose of the website and the nature of your target market are essential staring points. The next step is to use members of the target market to test the website when developing or modifying it.

The stages of developing the website could therefore be:
• Recruit participants of your target audience, and analyse their needs.
• Apply the users needs in the operational and conceptual design (or re-design) of the website, combined with the knowledge and experience of the design team / website designers.
• Develop and test until the 'best' design is found.
• Check and test this 'best' design before making things go 'live'.

With your target user sample you may need to employ a combination of tools, observation and information gathering to decide their preferences and habits, and their likes and dislikes about a website. The development of a website will also be affected by the basic minimal functionality that is required, and the systems needed to carry out the actions i.e. online forms, online shops, telephone numbers etc. All this needs to be tempered by the reality of your business environment e.g. the restraints of your budget, and resources at the time of development.

It is also worth bearing in mind that although you need to think about 'User centred Design' in developing a website, users don't always know what they want!

Potential Tools For Usability Testing
Website development should never lose sight of the question "what is the purpose of this website?".

The usability testing and measuring involves:
Horizontal testing - testing the top level functionality of the website.
Vertical Testing - testing the actual transactions.

You can employ a number of potential tactics to develop the usability of a website including:
• Interviews
• Questionnaires
• Software e.g. automated, self scoring, modified web browser, or CD-ROM.
• Focus Groups
• Hands-on Exercises
• Thinking Aloud Developing an effective feedback loop into the design and build is important in arriving at the optimum 'best' version of the website.

Rules of Thumb
However complex (or not) your methodology for testing and developing the usability of a website it may be helpful to bear in mind some helpful heuristics for how the best version of your website should be:

• Make sure users know here they are in the website at any one time. For example, this could be aided by obvious headings and labelling, and 'breadcrumb' navigation.
• Make sure users have the freedom to move around the website and are given 'choices' but keep enough control to avoid losing them unnecessarily form the website altogether, and guide them toward the 'goals' of the website, and further into your 'sales funnel'.
• Give a feeling of consistency throughout the website. This will provide less distraction, and aid memory and learning within the website. For example, fonts, formats and icons could be used consistently on all pages of the website.
• Try to find and eliminate errors, 'broken' parts of the navigation process, and areas where actions of the website user could potentially leads to errors.
• Don't make website users think too much - try to achieve recognition rather than recall.
• Allow some flexible or customizable elements.
• Minimize distraction for the actual website design elements.
• Provide a degree of 'help' in the website e.g. provide FAQs, or provide a site map.

Some General Usability Guidelines
It is clear therefore that creating a 'usable' website could involve a large number of complex testing processes, and can be based very much on scientific principles, but has our basic human needs, psychological, physiological emotional factors at the root of it. There are however some general guidelines in improving the usability of websites that have been tried and tested, and have been shown to work in most situations.

At a working, operational level these tactics include:
• Follow recognisable conventions. Most web users expect to see certain familiar visual cues on a website.

The value is that less actual 'thought' about how to operate the website is required by the user, thus they are able to concentrate more on the actual 'message' within your pages.

For example make all links blue and underlined, put the main navigation menu of the left hand side of the page etc.

• Add ALT IMG attributes (alt tags) to all images. These will assist in 'accessibility' and perhaps with optimisation.
• Make the contrast obvious between text and background. Black text on white pages is clearly visible to all, and provides a clear 'foreground' for your, message rather than allowing it to blend into the background.
• Provide a contact page, and / or easily accessible contact details.
• Make the steps to reaching the goal within the website as few, and as uncomplicated as possible. This is particularly important with online shops, to avoid shopping cart 'abandonment'.
• Use clear and obvious 'calls to action' throughout the website that link directly the goals i.e. your sales funnel, whether it be an online shop, a contact form, an online quote etc.
• Make navigation simple, make sure all pages are easily reachable from any page (if possible), don't have 'orphan' (isolated) pages, and make sure all links are working.