Usability Tips for Your Website

In any web statistics program or service, you have a report regarding the number of pages a visitor views before leaving your website. I like to call this a measure of the site’s “stickiness”. The more pages they view before leaving, the more interesting your site is to them. And when your visitors are interested, they come back and buy things (if you are selling something). In order to increases the stickiness of your site, it is imperative that maximize the usability of your site.

When a visitor comes across your site, you have just a few seconds to get their attention and sell them on the fact that your site can solve some problem for them. One of the key things here is to design your site such that the visitor’s eye does not scatter when they arrive on your website. If they get to your site and are inundated with data overload, they will not know what to click on. And they are much more likely to leave. That means your site isn’t very sticky.

Instead, figure out those things you WANT your visitor to notice and make those items most prominent on your website. Design it in such a way where those things grab the eye immediately when the visitor arrives. You might have a lot of other information on your site to offer, but structure it in such a way so that it is not distracting from your main message.

Aside from the primary design of your site, let’s look at a few other tips for you this week:

• Avoid Misunderstood Words. One of the quickest and more sure ways to drive away your visitors is to use words which they do not understand. Going past a misunderstood word causes the person to go blank on everything right after that word. They simply won’t understand you and they will usually not realize it is because of a word which they didn’t know. So, try to avoid words which are commonly misunderstood. If you think it could be misunderstood, link the word to it’s definition.
• Keep your link color consistent and noticeable. Many people expect links to be blue. Others expect them to be, at the least, underlined. When you use style sheets to change the link color from default, at least make them noticeable. People need to be able to easily tell the difference between a link and normal text.
• In articles, make good use of headers and bullet points. People like to be able to quickly scan and see if there is something there they are interested in.
• Do not require users to install additional software to view your website unless absolutely necessary. I’ve seem a few sites designed with use of Flash, some even requiring the newest Flash player. Well, not everybody has that installed and barely anybody is going to install it just to view that one website. So, that designer, while maybe very artistic, I actually being quite stupid and is driving away visitors by the boatload.
• Use high contrast between text and background. Black on white is preferred. Never put light text on a dark background. IT can be very difficult on the eyes and hard to read.
• Provide a quick method for users to increase the size of the font. This is great for old users with visual problems.

Hopefully you’ll find this information useful to you.

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