Top Usability Blunders
A website is described as being usable when users understand it and find the information they need quickly. When planning your new website or website redesign, it’s important to remember the following key points to ensure good usability of and hence it’s success.
Massive Download Time
You’ve taken amazing pictures of your all of your widgets; you’ve got a great logo and a great banner. Fantastic! It might be fantastic on your machine, but once it’s on the server and accessed by many people at the same time, you might find yourself waiting for excessive amounts of time for your widgets to appear. When preparing your images, make sure that you optimize them for the Web and reduce their size. Images don’t need to cover the entire screen. In fact white space is crucial to any design. If using Photoshop, learn how to use the “Save for the Web” feature!
Download time is not only affected by large images; PDF, videos, flash animation, movies, JavaScript and CSS files are also responsible and need to be prepared with care.
Non scannable text
Reading the Web is different than reading a book. On the Web most people scan pages for information. Thus it’s important to have clear headers, titles and subtitles. If listing items, bulleted lists are much easier to read. Bolding certain keywords will also allow the user to determine if the information you are providing is the right one for them. Bolding your company name won’t help them at all.
Unclear link text
Once again, this is related to scanning. The words “click here†don’t mean much if you are scanning a page. Click here for what? Where does the link go? “Download widget”, or “contact us” are much more meaningful links and don’t leave your users guessing.
Users have grown accustomed to words being underlined as being links. Unless you are compiling a list of links, in which case there would be too many underlined words, leave your links underlined. Display them in a colour that stands out and make sure that the colour changes when you rollover them. You may also want to provide your users with visited links in a different colour. This is very important when dealing with long lists.
Search box
Providing your users with a search function on any website that has an excessive amount of information and where changes are made on a daily basis is invaluable. For example, www.mytelus.com would simply not function without its search box. If your website requires a search function, you may also want to provide your users with search criteria. For example search by category, titles, etc…
And lastly if you do implement a search function, make sure you put it in a prominent place and on every page.
Displaying information using frames
Thankfully less and less Web designers use frames to create websites. And for good reasons. Pages are unprintable when using frames, cannot be bookmarked and are just plain annoying to use.
Using images or flash to display important information
Using images to display content not only increases download time, but also prevents users who may be visually impaired to “hear” the information. That’s right hear. Screen readers like “jaws“ allow user who cannot see Web pages, to hear. Jaws simply reads the text in your source code. When using images, content is simply not available to be read and makes your site unusable. Now the chances of your site being visited by the visually impaired may be slim, but you can count on one. Google. Google visits websites constantly and reads your text. Displaying text in image format is the equivalent of displaying no content at all as far as Google is concerned. The same is true for flash. No matter how much content you put in your flash site, Google and the visually impaired will never be able to read it.
Conclusion
All in all you’ll find many websites that do not follow these simple guidelines. However there are no excuses. These tips are easy to implement in any website and any good Web designer should ensure that usability is top priority. During your next project or re-design phase make sure that you ask the right questions and plan for a usable website.