Websites have now become the most popular channel for communication among the online community around the world. It is considered as a repository of information for meeting the increasing customer queries. Also there are limitations for providing readable contents through the electronic medium. Studies have proved that reading from a computer screen is more tiring to the eyes and is 25% slower than reading a printed matter.
Usability can be referred as the ease with which the intended audience uses an interface to achieve the defined goals. It comprises of many factors such as design, structure, information architecture etc. Web usability is all about structuring and designing your website for the easy and effective use of visitors. Both your website and business can reap benefits from a usable website. Every penny invested for the improvement of usability in your website guarantees great returns in terms of business effectiveness. There are some basic principles which determines the usability of your website.
Website should facilitate easy navigation: In order to give your website a consistent look-and-feel, an excellent navigation system must be put to work. Web surfers like a website to be consistent. When a visitor clicks on a link in your web page and is guided to a page which is totally different from the previous page, chances are there for the visitor to get confused. To deliver extra usability to your users, you can create a supplementary navigation system which includes tools like search, table of contents, and site maps.
Pages must download quickly:
Users will not wait long for the pages to download. If your web pages gets downloaded quickly, you can prevent users from moving to other sites. Studies have proved that 8.6 seconds is the maximum time a web user waits for a page to download. Using cascading style sheets for the layout can decrease your page download time.
Information should be easy to retrieve:
Usually web users don’t read the contents of a web page word by word; instead they scan the pages. So facility should be provided for easy retrieval of information. Employing light text is a good solution for this. Keywords should be highlighted, meaningful sub headings and important text in bulleted list can help a lot. Always limit one idea to one paragraph.
Restrictions must not be placed on users:
Always let the user to navigate through the internet in the way hethey want to. General examples for this are; the Back button gets disabled every time when a new window is opened. Remember that majority of users rely on the back button for navigation purpose. Using frames to structure your website can also contributes to this issue.
