Good usability is like good customer service: you only really notice it when it’s not there. We have all encountered sites that have a low standard of usability. Assuming you can find them in the first place (search engines are affected by usability too), sites with poor usability are usually unintuitive to use, have poor navigation, take you down blind alleys, are slow to download and have a knack of ensuring that the one piece of information you need is so well hidden that only the most tenacious visitor will uncover it. Thankfully many such websites are being consigned to history, but there is still no shortage of examples. We reveal a few in our latest report: ‘Intendance Fast Fifty Solicitors’ Websites 2007: Who is Winning and Why?’.
This short article outlines ten tips for good website usability: a formula for a user-centred website. Many of these tips are substantial subjects in their own right, so please contact us should you wish to learn more.
1. Ensure your website has been optimised for search engines
A significant proportion of your website visitors will use a search engine to find you, even if they know your website address already. A website that has been fully optimised for search engines will have a better chance of achieving a prominent listing in search engine results.
2. Navigation must be intuitive
A website visitor will decide in a matter of seconds if they feel ‘at home’ on your website or not, and an intuitive layout will help reinforce this feeling. Good practice dictates that principle menu bars are not spread across too many parts of the screen, menu positioning is consistent between pages and dropdown and sub-menus are used where appropriate.
3. Help website visitors maintain their orientation
Always indicate the visitor’s position on the website: where they are and where they have come from.
Use ‘breadcrumb’ navigation to indicate their location and include a home page link via a dedicated button and your logo. Colour-coded menus and templates also aid orientation.
4. Ensure your website is accessible to all visitors
Accessibility is a legal requirement in the UK, so a website owner is at risk if they don’t achieve at least the minimum level of compliance. Although principally associated with ensuring that those with disabilities can access a website, accessibility good practice will help all visitors. Accessibility indicators include the ability to resize text, ‘alt tags’ behind images and good contrast between text and background.
5. Design must not obstruct the path to content
Although graphic design awards are commendable in their own right, commercial websites are all about the efficient dissemination of information. To help your visitors access information, avoid using heavy graphics and excessive Flash animation. Although visually impressive, such features can slow website download and detract from the visitor’s experience. Welcome pages are also disruptive and exaggerate the number of clicks to other pages. Most pages should be no more that 3 clicks away.
6. Make sure information is easy to find and take away
Don’t rely just on the principal navigation to direct your visitors to the information they seek, especially on larger websites. Hyperlinks in text and a hyperlinked site map enable visitors to shortcut to information, as well as to direct search engine crawler software. An effective keyword search facility – and the ability to refine a search – allows a visitor to trawl for information across your site quickly. Include a ‘print page’ button on each page so that pre-formatted copies of content can be made, especially on office location pages.
7. Minimise the need to scroll pages
Left/right scrolling should be avoided; up/down scrolling should be minimised. The former is determined by screen-sizing settings during website build, the latter principally by the volume of copy per page. It is harder to read text on a screen than in print, so avoid over-loading single web pages by sub-dividing and continuing on secondary pages where possible.
8. Keep plenty of ‘white space’ around text – and think about the copy
Page layout is essential to encourage a natural flow of information and text density plays a key part in maintaining this flow. Pages that text heavy – and hence lack surrounding clear space – are more difficult to read and could deter visitors. Related to this, there is an art in striking the right balance when writing website copy. As a rule ‘less is more’.
9. Online registration: consider the balance
When asking visitors to part with personal information there is a fine balance between extracting as much useful data from them as possible (for marketing purposes, say) and not deterring them from completing the registration process. For example, if you want to encourage website visitors to register for email updates or a seminar there is a limit to the amount of personal information it is reasonable to ask for. Data Protection issues should be considered too.
10. Consider browser compatibility
Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) dominates the browser market, rival browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Opera are acquiring significant market share. To ensure that visitors using non-IE browsers are able to access your website fully, the site should be built to be compatible. A telltale sign of incompatibility is the failure of navigation bars to construct properly, so that button titles overlap.