7 Website Usability principles
Consider these 7 fundamental principles for improving your website’s usability, pivotal for crafting an engaging and efficient user experience for your visitors.
- Accessibility: Ensure your website is universally accessible, including for users with disabilities. Implementing features like screen reader compatibility and alternative text for images
- Clarity: A website must be intuitive, with a straightforward layout. Utilize clear, concise language and logical navigation paths that align with user expectations to prevent confusion.
- Learnability: Incorporate familiar design elements that users can quickly recognize and understand, facilitating easier navigation and interaction with the site from the outset.
- Credibility: Establish trust by presenting accurate, up-to-date content, displaying certifications, and offering clear contact information. A secure and professional appearance reinforces credibility.
- Relevance: Content should be tailored to meet the audience’s needs and intent, providing valuable and pertinent information right when users need it. This keeps the website engaging and useful.
- Efficiency: After becoming familiarised with the product, users should swiftly complete tasks smoothly.
- Memorability: Even after periods of not using the product, users should easily navigate and use it upon return.
Web usability – best practices
Follow WCAG standards
Web usability and accessibility are critical aspects of website design, ensuring that sites are accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world. It provides a standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.
Here’s an overview of key principles and guidelines based on WCAG standards to ensure your website meets these vital criteria:
Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive, for example add text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols, or simpler language.
Operable: Every part of the website must function in a way that users can interact with, remember, there are many people with different disabilities and they may take longer to physically respond or to read things. So you need to provide users enough time to use content.
Understandable: Both the content and the way the site works should be easy for users to understand, e.g. help users avoid and correct mistakes.
Robust: Website content should be available in a variety of technologies and supporting tools, adapting to technological advances, e.g.: maximize compatibility with current and future user tools.
Use consistent design elements
Ensuring uniformity across your website enhances user familiarity and learning. Consistency in branding, typography, colors, and layout is crucial. This involves maintaining a uniform visual hierarchy, where key information stands out through size and color. Consistency in spacing, such as padding and margins, and adherence to a grid layout, ensures that all elements align harmoniously. Functionally, elements like forms and buttons should operate uniformly, providing a good user experience. This level of consistency in design and functionality fosters a cohesive and intuitive user interface.
Create a visual hierarchy
Designing a website demands a strategic approach to visual hierarchy, ensuring that within the first few moments, users grasp the core message. This hierarchy guides the viewer’s focus towards key elements, enhancing usability. Prioritize content effectively, using size, color, and layout to spotlight crucial information, and arrange content to draw attention seamlessly from one element to the next. By doing so, you create an intuitive experience, directing users naturally to important actions and content, making your website not just visually appealing but also functionally superior.To implement a visual hierarchy on your website, consider various techniques:
- Utilize size to differentiate between primary and secondary content, with larger elements capturing attention first.
- Apply color contrasts to highlight important information or calls to action, drawing the eye effectively.
- Incorporate whitespace strategically to separate and emphasize sections of content, improving readability and focus.
- Employ alignment and repetition to create a cohesive and intuitive layout, guiding the user through the content logically.
Streamlining navigation for clarity
The basic principle of website navigation is simplicity and clarity. Navigation should be simple, allowing users to easily find the information they want. This means limiting menus to essential elements, organised logically and hierarchically, ensuring that users are not exposed to unnecessary complexity
Enhance usability with specific labels
Use precise, understandable labels for navigation links, avoiding vague terms. Opt for specific, descriptive titles that accurately guide users and enhance SEO by integrating relevant keywords directly into the navigation structure.
Use visual cues
Incorporating visual elements like icons, photos, or interactive hover effects can streamline website navigation. For instance, a cart icon next to the “Shopping Cart” link instantly clarifies its purpose. Similarly, hover effects that change link colors or add underlines when hovered over can signal to users which elements are interactive.
Use breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs serve as a navigational tool, showing users their current location on the site and the path they took to get there. Particularly useful for visitors who go directly to the site. Breadcrumbs clarify the position of a page within the wider site structure. Typically placed at the top, they outline the route to the current page, with each level of the hierarchy marked with a specific symbol, guiding users through the site architecture.
Maintain your website navigation
Optimising website navigation is key to supporting an easy and intuitive online experience. By following best practice, designers can ensure that users can easily find the information they need. Given the increase in mobile usage, optimising for mobile devices through responsive designs such as hamburger menus and touch-friendly interfaces is crucial. Continuous testing and refinement, guided by user feedback and analytics, are essential to maintaining effective navigation, ensuring that it meets user requirements and enhances their journey through the site.
Optimize for mobile devices
More than 90% of all internet users access the internet via mobile devices. Moreover, many people use their smartphones as their only computer, so it is really crucial to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. Potential customers are unlikely to put up with a poor user experience. They will certainly look for what they want elsewhere. There are many possibilities to make website mobile friendly. Below there are key activities that help you to understand the scope of this process:
- develop a responsive layout
- optimize website speed
- CTAs – make it clearly
- make customer service easily accessible
- remove pop-ups
- compress images
- choose right font
- test the website on mobile devices regularly
Establish credibility
The credibility of a website is crucial to a positive user experience. Credibility should be built through transparency of content, pricing and contact details to prevent user frustration. Websites that do not directly display relevant information, such as product details and prices, can lead to negative perceptions. Emphasising security features e.g. HTTPS, trust badges, reassures visitors, reducing fears of fraud and increasing engagement and conversion potential.
Make sure the content is readable
Readability is an important factor that determines everything from who engages with your content, what value they get from it, and whether they come back to read more.So what is content readability and how can you make it easier to read? Readability refers to how easy it is to understand your message. There are many ways to make your content more readable, such as shortening sentences, breaking up text with headings and subheadings, mixing up word choices, or using lists and bullet points. Your goal should be to select vocabulary and construct sentences that your intended audience can easily and quickly comprehend. Remember – avoid unnecessary complexity.
User Experience (UX) vs. Web Usability
Exploring the nuances between usability and user experience reveals a fascinating dichotomy in web design. Usability focuses on practical aspects like efficiency and learnability, whereas UX encompasses the broader, emotional journey users undergo. These seven points illuminate their distinct but complementary roles in creating a cohesive digital environment.
- Focus Area: Usability emphasizes the product’s functional ease of use; UX encompasses the entire user interaction and emotional experience.
- Goals: Usability aims for efficiency, learnability, and error reduction; UX targets emotional engagement, satisfaction, and overall value.
- Scope: Usability is specific and measurable; UX is broad, considering subjective perceptions and responses.
- Measurements: Usability can be objectively tested; UX assessment includes subjective feedback on emotional resonance.
- Process: Usability examines logical design aspects; UX involves holistic design thinking, including aesthetics impact.
- Outcome: The success of usability is determined by task completion rates; UX success is gauged by the depth of user satisfaction and connection.
- Interrelation: While distinct, both areas are interconnected; great UX incorporates excellent usability as a fundamental component.
What is web usability testing?
Usability testing is crucial for identifying both behavioral and technical issues on a website by observing real users completing tasks. This process involves analyzing user interactions, such as clicks and mouse movements, to pinpoint design flaws and functionality problems. Feedback from participants helps highlight areas for improvement, aiming to enhance the overall user experience. Continual assessment and iteration based on these insights are essential to keep users engaged and satisfied, preventing them from seeking alternatives.