Future:Media:Change

blogging the intersection of media, technology and the global good

The Basics of Web Usability

12 November 2009 View Comments

In honor of World Usability Day, officially the second Thursday in November, I thought I’d write about Web usability: What it is and why it matters to the effectiveness of any Web endeavor.

What Usability Is

First the basics. Usability is the ease with which people understand and use a website (or gadget or game or fan page or software, etc.). It is determined by testing:

The time it takes site visitors to achieve their objectives on the site.
The number of errors visitors make in trying to achieve their objectives on the site.
(Often) the amount of frustration visitors experience while trying to achieve their objectives on the site.

Why Usability Matters

Of course, the faster and easier your visitors are able to achieve their objectives on your site, the happier they will be with your site — and, hence, your brand, your cause, what-have-you. Visitors who are frustrated with your site will go elsewhere — and, perhaps more importantly, will form a negative impression of your site, your brand, your cause, what-have-you.

Usability testing can improve site performance significantly (here conducted by Dan Joseph & Associates)

Research and experience confirms the value of usability. Not everyone has Jared Spool’s experience of a single fix that results in $300 million in additional revenue, but anyone who works in the field has examples of small changes in usability that improved site performance: increased page views per visit, increased actions taken. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen calculates that “spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%.” Stanford University research shows that people consider more usable sites to be more credible. Clearly, however you define “conversion” in your organization, it’s worth your while to pay attention to usability.

Usability Rules of Thumb

Following usability best practices enables the visitors to your site to immediately tell what the site is about, what they’re supposed to do on it, and how to get around it to find what they want. There are myriad best practices to achieve that, but for this introduction I’ll limit myself to a topline summary.

Site identity - Should be immediately apparent to visitors when they first arrive, in the form of logo, tagline, and content.
Navigation - Should clearly convey to visitors their current location in the site and how to get to every major site section.
Design and Layout – Should be uncluttered and support comprehension, signaling work flow and levels of importance.
Load time – Should be swift. The most important items on a page should load the fastest.
Search box – Should be obvious to find — people tend to expect it at the top right corner of a site, along with log-in, shopping cart, and check-out links.
Copy - Should be clear and concise, easy to scan.
Links - Should clearly stand out from other copy, in a different color, and communicate what the reader will find when he/she clicks on them.

I will be covering usability best practices in far greater detail in future posts. In the meantime, here are some useful tools and sites on the topic. I’d love to learn about your own usability favorites; please add them in the comment field.

Usability Tools

Usability Websites

Usability Twitterers

(Photo credit: Dan Joseph & Associates, Inc.)

jasonwhat

Great post Julie. I look forward to the rest. We often forget the basics and get lost in our own jargon. I always find these back to basics posts incredibly useful.

I always struggle with the balance of getting the most out of the page real estate, but not getting cluttered. It is obvious with tools, like google, that simplicity is what is most vital. Their goal is to get people OFF the page. I'm noticing that big blogs/online magazines like Huffpo have tons of content all over the page. I'm interested what you findings are in terms of the balance on content sites.
Julie C. Roth

It's a balancing act. A busy page doesn't have to be a crowded, confusing, or chaotic page. Magazine and news sites, for example, display a lot of content per page in order to communicate the idea that a lot is happening. The Huffington Post is a good example of how to keep all that content from getting visually overwhelming by the judicious use of color, white space, and grouping of elements. Your eye takes in the page in manageable chunks.