Website Usability Basics
 | We're currently reworking this article - feedback from readers made it clear that it was trying to cover too many things. As such, we've seperated some content out in to a new article called Know Your Visitors and will likely repeat this process for another new article on website navigation. |
Preface
For your website to be truly effective it needs to meet not just your needs, but the needs of the people who are visiting it. This article examines some of the basic questions you need to ask yourself and your visitors in order to bring your website to life...
As with all our white papers, we welcome your comments and we'll be making updates to this article based on your feedback and our own ongoing research.
Introduction
This article is not intended to be an exhaustive resource, but instead an introduction to the subject of website usability. Although we'll be covering a fairly broad range of subjects in this article, our overall goal is to improve the visitor's experience of your website by getting the content and Navigation tailored to their needs. Wherever possible, we've avoided the use of any jargon and techno-babble, although there are some concepts that need to be explained in depth if you are reading this for the purpose of tailoring your website to the needs of its visitors.
Why have a website?
In the early days of the "dot-com" boom, organisations wanted websites simply because everyone else had - or was in the process of developing - a website. In these early days, a 'website' was often little more than a few pages of basic content (e.g. company overview and contact details, etc.) and would cost an absolute fortune to setup and maintain. As the Internet has matured, tools (such as Builder) have been developed that make it possible for any organisation to create more interactive websites in less time and at a consderably [lower cost] than ever before.
Most websites are created with the sole intention of getting a particular message across to visitors. You want to give them various key details about your organisation and the products or services it offers as well contact details so that people can get in touch to ask about all the things that were not covered, or that they could not find, on your website. These sites serve their purpose to an extent, yet they feel lifeless - they tend to be very static and unfriendly, probably not the image you want to project for your dynamic business or of your friendly staff!
We hope to convince you that as well as publishing content based on information you want people to see, with products like Builder you should take things several stages further because you can:
- keep your site up-to-date easily and without incurring additional costs
- allow visitors to quickly and easily find content using a variety of automated navigational tools
- strive to get feedback from visitors and act upon that feedback
- forget about lots of fancy graphics, the content is more important
It's time to take control of your online presence and make it really work for not just you, but your clients and other visitors to your site!
It's alive, I tell you!
Where possible, you should try to visualise your website as if it were a person representing your company. It needs to be friendly, informative, well presented and well organised. Visitors to the site should be enjoy conversing with it and quickly find the information they are looking for. If you succeed, your website will become a valued, although underpaid, member of staff!
If you spend a few hours browsing the Internet, you'll be able to differentiate the dead websites from the living websites...
A great example of a living, breathing site is Amazon - not only does it address you by your own name, it also reccommends products to you based on what you've purchased. This allows the website to connect with visitors on a number of levels - it's not just some static online store aimed at the masses, it adapts itself to keep in tune with the individual's specific needs.
One of the main reasons why so few sites are "living" is the cost involved in making them come to life. The technology has been around for ages but it's generally too expensive to implement.
Page Layout
There are vast numbers or research papers on the internet discussing all aspects of page layout ranging from a designer's point of view to a psychologist's point of view. Rather than overwhelm you with endless requirements, we've compiled a simple list of the main things you need to do when adding content to your website:
- Keep it simple and avoid the use of jargon wherever possible
- Keep it concise
- Use bulleted and numbered lists where possible
- Let the website software do all the fonts, typefaces, colours, etc., for you - this will save you time and result in everything looking consistent
- Split large volumes of text in to smaller sections by using section and topic headings
- Provide an excerpt (or summary) for each page that can be used in search results, etc.
- Use graphics sparingly - only where they aid understanding of the content or are required to draw attention to part of the page
- Use text formatting (bold, italics, etc.) sparingly and where possible use a sans-serif (plain looking) font
Website Navigation
If people can't find their way around your website, or they feel "lost" in various parts of it, they will quickly loose interest and will likely never return.
Whether you have just a few pages or many thousands of pages of content on your website, good Navigation is critical if you want to improve visitor satisfaction. Although you will probably know exactly where everything is, you can't assume that visitors will (in fact, you can guarantee that they won't know where anything is) so you have to make it easy for them to move around your website and, wherever possible, provide different methods of navigation to cater for different personal preferences.
Search Facility
A good search facility is by far the best way to find information on a website because it minimises the effort required by the visitor to find informaiton. Search facilities are very self-gratifying - the visitor tells the website what they are looking for and it does the searching for them and comes back with a list of matching pages. Furthermore, it's safe to say that all visitors to your website will have used a search engine before and as such it's a feature they already understand and enjoy using.
Wherever possible, your search facility should provide a simple "search and go" box near the top right of every page - this accommodates the vast majority of visitor requirements as they usually just want to enter a single word or phrase and click a button to search the website.
Menus
Almost every website will have key places that most people will want to visit and a [menu] is the ideal way to provide access to them.
The key challenge with navigation menus is to keep them simple! You should ideally have fewer than 10 menu headings, each having fewer than 10 items. Otherwise they may start to become too cumbersome to use.
Breadcrumb Trails
[Breadcrumb trails] are a good way to improve visitor orientation within your site. Just as Hansel and Gretel created a breadcrumb trail to find their path back home, visitors to your website can also benefit from such a feature. There are two main types of breadcrumb trail - a path and/or a location:
- Path - This type of trail acts as a short term history of the pages viewed by the visitor since arriving at the site. Unfortunately, it can become confusing because there are usually many paths to each page on your website.
- Location - The type of trail starts with your home page and then lists the places along the shortest route to the currently displayed page, regardless of how you arrived at that page.
Based on our own research, the "path" variety can get confusing and it's better to use a "Recent History" page (see later) for this sort of information.
The "location" trail, however, is far more suited to visitor needs as it shows exactly where they are at any given time:
By showing the location of the current page, visitors are more likely to keep track of their location in your website and if the various "crumbs" are clickable, the visitor can easily jump to related places within your website, effectively "zooming out" to a broader section of the site.
Site Map
Most modern sites organise their content in a hierarchical manner. The easiest way to think of this is in terms of a family tree - any page can have children that are related to it and so on...
At the top of every site's family tree is the Home Page. By categorising pages into parents and children, you can easily build chapters and sections into your site, grouping together similar pages.
The site map should allow the user to browse the structure of your site, starting from the home page and then "zooming in" to the various parts of the site structure.
A similar navigation mechanism should also be used for large pages - the text should be broken up in to related headings and a table of contents should appear at the top of the page (as seen in this very article).
Alphabetical Index
Just like the index at the back of a book, an [alphabetical index] lists all the content in your site in alphabetical order. Instead of having page numbers, the page titles can be clicked for instant access to the page.
Most modern indexes allow the visitor to filter the list to page titles starting with a particular letter, number or other character - e.g. all pages starting with "B".
Consistent Naming
Keeping page and section names consistent throughout your website is vital to visitor satisfaction. With all the different navigation methods that can be used, it's critical to keep the naming consistent so that visitors recognise references to key locations on your site. Probably the best way to convey our point is with an example of what not to do...
Let's say you have a page called "Company Overview". Visitors would likely get confused if:
- The menu item to access the page was called "About Us"
- The breadcrumb trail listed the page as "Our Company"
- The site map listed the page as "Company Introduction"
- The alphabetical index listed the page as "History of the Company"
Summary
You need to know where your visitors are coming from and what they are looking for in order to tailor your website to their needs. When they get to your site, it needs to be easy to navigate and easy to understand. You need to quickly deal with their feedback and modify your site and possibly other areas of your business should a shortfall be identified.
If you would like more information, or have any comments on this article, please Contact Us.
