Tips For Better Website Usability
Usability for your website is a year-round, everyday campaign – because your customers visit every day. Here are some tips to improve usability:
1. Usability is about your site’s Users – this means the customers you hope to convert.
Ergo, finding out more about what your Users want is a good place to start.
The tools you can make use of to determine the objectives of your Users may be one of Google’s tools:
* Google’s Webmaster tools will help you to define the keywords that potential converts are typing into the search bar to reach your site.
* Google Analytics will help you to get some insight on what your visitors are typing into the search bar onsite.
* If you can make use of a survey tool, you can post a poll on your site asking Users if they have found the answers they needed on your site.
2. This tip continues the theme of Point 1., so it’s about knowing your Users.
To this end creating Profiles of all your more than 1-time visitors can give you a greater understanding of who your users are: this means their age, gender, interests, and their response to your website.
3. Usability Tests that can be taken quickly onsite also produce a lot of useful feedback.
If you create a very brief questionnaire, you may discover in five questions or less whether your site is easy and intuitive to navigate. For example, you can ask Users how they would improve the website of they had the chance.
4. The design and layout of the page are super-important.
Of course, this is probably obvious to you already, but to reiterate: the colours, the images, the banners, the sidebar, the product information, the links and the surveys should all fit onto the page clearly and cleanly. Even space is important. A web page must be easy to navigate, and it must be easy to take action, or for example, take a survey, fill out a profile or add feedback. The rule here is design the web page so it easy on the eye.
5. As most websites are becoming more interactive, especially touchscreen and mobile devices, it’s crucial that Users have a positive response to your site.
Besides finding what they wanted on your site, it’s a good thing if your visitors feel happy, pleased or even excited in response to visiting the site.
Tools such as Feedback Army can assist the Webmaster in requesting feedback and in posting questions to Website Reviewers. This low-cost tool supplies good-quality responses.