Articles: Web Usability Principles
Web usability is a measure of success on how well the users can accomplish their tasks effectively and quickly on your website. These effective web usability and design principles below can achieve a functional website through the process of testing and getting information from people involved.
1. Getting to know about audience members
You want a site that has personality and quality content based on your audience taste. You have to understand their color preferences, technical skills and any prevalence of special needs.
2. Make the interface simple and obvious
The more obvious the interface is, the less frustration the site visitor has to guess about how your site works. You want the audience to concentrate on the content, not the interface.
3. Readability
Make paragraph easy to read. Don't use small text for font size.
4. Make your page fast loading
Reduce the waiting time is a must if your page over 20KB.
5. Avoid hidden (rollover to reveal) navigation
It makes for a very clean design if all your navigation is hidden, but it may also mean that people won't know where to click to go somewhere.
6. Get user feedback
Find out what works and what doesn't.
7. Study site visitor performance
How long does it take to performance a given task? The time it takes to do thing has got to be reasonable. If it's not reasonable, improve user interaction wherever possible.
8. Help section (Site Map, 404)
When site visitors make a mistake try to provide many ways to help them out of it. A 404 page is excellent for directing spiders to crawl your page if you remove that page from the server.
9. Test early and test often
Test your code for bugs on web browsers. Test the interface for usability. Ask your friends and colleagues for in depth and valuable feedback.
Please don't think that the website usability techniques discussed above are the be all and end all of web usability as they are not.
Web usability is very imperative for a successful website. According to Jakob Nielsen, World-Renowned Usability expert (2006), “On the Web, if a site is difficult to use, most people will leave.”
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