The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number Four: Making Your Web Site “Usable”

How usable is your site? To find out, first you need to know what usability is.

Usability assesses how easy user interfaces are as far as the functionality of your site. But it’s not just about making sure everything on the site works. You also want to be able to determine:

• how quickly visitors can use your site, and
• how easily visitors are able to make use of it

This should be the top priority in design because if a product is not usable, your visitors won’t respond to it. How useful a site is has a direct relationship to how profitable a site is, therefore usability should be top in your list of priorities for your site.

In a recent usability study of 9 top Web sites, most of some 70 test users could not find specific information they were instructed to find a majority of the time.

So how can you make your site usable?

A site will be generally usable if the content is relevant, easy to find, the web page is pleasant to look at and well designed. Web sites should be designed with the customers’ needs in mind - not the Web site owner’s needs. A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one that provides information that is beneficial to users.

Clear and simple navigation that is consistent and does not confuse visitors contributes to making information easy to find. A good navigation system should answer the following questions:
1. Where am I?
2. Where have I been?
3. Where can I go?

Having clear text links on your site also helps in ease of use. We’ll pick up next time with common usability mistakes and ways to avoid them.

Nina

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