Four Crucial Aspects of Website Usability

Having a beautiful website may be a huge component of earning your audience’s attention, but a website is only as great as its usability. If a potential customer isn’t interacting with your site properly, then it’s not accomplishing its goals! Why work hard and spend money on a website if it’s not working for you and your business? A website’s usability is crucial, but understanding what makes what may be a pretty website more usable may not be as clear. So, let us give you a run-down! Here are four key parts of a usable website design.

1 – Easy-to-use navigation – When a potential customer comes to your site, it’s important that they know how to use it and where to find what they’re looking for! For this reason, it’s important that you keep your navigation clear and familiar to them. Keeping a site navigation tab within easy reach and linking to each of your website’s main pages can work wonders with accomplishing this, giving them the ability to select what sort of information they want to see. Make sure your page links have titles that are clear and easy to read and try to keep this navigation area near the top of your pages so they don’t have to search for it.

2 – Mobile-friendliness – Failing to take advantage of mobile-friendly design can not only lose you mobile traffic and customers trying to reach you on smartphones, but it can hurt your rankings with search engines as well! Mobile-friendliness is now an industry standard, so it’s expected that your website can translate well across all platforms– computers, smartphones, tablets, or otherwise.

3 – Aesthetic appeal and easy-to-read content – A website isn’t just about how it looks, but about how the pages feel to a reader! Seeing a wall of words just isn’t helpful when it comes to helping your audience read through your information, so it’s important to spread the content in a meaningful and easy-to-understand way. Aim to keep your text in paragraph chunks that are broken up by images, bullet points, sub-titles, and other design elements, to draw your audience’s eye and keep their attention. Font and color choice is also crucial! Stick to what makes it easy for the average person to read.

4 – Free of technical issues – A website that actually works is key! Ensuring there are no page errors, avoiding broken links, and other technical issues of the sort are of huge importance. After all, if your audience can’t see your content, they can’t get anything out of it! Another crucial aspect to watch is your page-loading time, especially your website’s landing page. Website viewers aren’t likely to stick around long if your page is taking longer than usual to load, and sometimes web browsers will stop even trying to load the page, if it’s taking too long. Aim for a quicker time by getting rid of any unnecessary elements that could be costing you valuable time loading.

Overall, website usability is something that users can feel when they visit your page and is often the main component in whether they enjoy your website’s experience! While a beautiful website is a goal for many, ensuring that it’s usable should actually be a high priority. What is a website doing if not fulfilling its purpose? If you’re curious about your website’s usability or you’d like a new website to accomplish these goals, give i3 a call!